Reaching for the Moon

by Roger D. Launius

  Apollos 14–17: A Scientific Harvest

  Upon recovering from the failure of Apollo 13, NASA carried out four additional landing missions to the Moon (Table 9). Apollos 14–17 reaped a harvest of scientific knowledge about the Moon’s origin and evolution. The last three missions, beginning with Apollo 15, also used a lunar roving vehicle (LRV) to travel farther and stay longer than ever before. This meant that the most interesting surface features, mountains and rilles (long, narrow depressions in the Moon that resemble channels), were more accessible than if astronauts had to walk there.

  TABLE 9

  APOLLOS 14–17

  Scientists exploited the advancing capabilities of the Apollo missions, asking the astronauts to journey farther from their landing site, placing more than fifty experiments on the surface during various Apollo missions, and training the astronauts as more than amateur geologists. The most important aspect of this was the development of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, a set of instruments deployed by the astronauts on the surface to measure such aspects of the environment as soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismic activity, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields, and solar wind. These science packages deployed on the Moon included experiments that yielded more than ten thousand scientific papers and helped establish a major reinterpretation of the origins and evolution of the Moon.

  The scientific community worked with the Apollo astronauts to prepare them for geological fieldwork on the Moon. Never happy that academically trained geologists were rare in the astronaut corps—the only Moon-walking geologist was Harrison Schmitt who had earned a Ph.D. in science from Harvard University—NASA scientists nonetheless worked hard to ensure that the flight crews had the knowledge necessary to undertake useful work on the lunar surface. To a surprising degree they succeeded. Between 1964 and the times of the various missions, the crews undertook classroom study and fieldwork in a variety of settings to prepare for their time on the lunar surface. The flight crews underwent formal education roughly equivalent to a master’s degree in geology.

  Indicative of the approach taken by some of the astronauts was that of David Scott on Apollo 15. He enthusiastically trained for the mission, and once on the Moon concentrated on the scientific efforts. As he recalled: “Most of my thoughts on the Moon were of the geology involved. Our mission was especially heavy in science, trying to understand the geology of the local site and the Apennines—why things occurred as they did.”

  Scott and crewmate Jim Irwin found the so-called Genesis Rock of anorthosite, more than 4 billion years old, formed in the early stages of the history of the solar system and therefore a window into the origins of the Moon, Earth, and this solar system.

  The astronauts on the six missions that landed on the Moon returned almost nine hundred pounds of lunar samples. Since the Moon landings more than sixty research laboratories around the world have continued studies on the Apollo lunar samples. Many analytical technologies, including some that did not exist in 1969–1972 during the Apollo missions, have been used by later scientists.

  So What?

  In retrospect we can’t help being impressed by the efforts made to reach the Moon in the 1960s and reveling in the success of humankind in achieving this striking accomplishment. A spring 1999 poll of opinion leaders sponsored by major news organizations in the United States, for example, ranked the one hundred most significant news events of the twentieth century. The Moon landing came in a close second to the splitting of the atom and its use during World War II. Some respondents found it difficult to choose between the various events. “It was agonizing,” CNN anchor and senior correspondent Judy Woodruff said of the selection process. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., summarized the position of many opinion leaders: “The one thing for which this century will be remembered 500 years from now was: This was the century when we began the exploration of space,” he commented. Schlesinger said he looked forward toward a positive future and that prompted him to rank the lunar landing first. “I put DNA and penicillin and the computer and the microchip in the first 10 because they’ve transformed civilization. Wars vanish,” Schlesinger said. “Pearl Harbor will be as remote as the War of the Roses,” he said, referring to the English civil wars of the fifteenth century. He added, “The order is essentially very artificial and fictitious. It’s very hard to decide the atomic bomb is more important than getting on the Moon.”

  At the same time, the space race was largely a space spectacular, and enthusiasm for expansive public programs to go beyond Earth was not to be repeated. In such a situation, Apollo appears more as something Americans did once upon a time for reasons that have receded far into the background. While many viewed the astronauts and cosmonauts who undertook space missions as explorers akin to fifteenth-century seafarers like Christopher Columbus, the vanguards of sustained human exploration and migration, regard for their accomplishments seems to diminish with every passing year. Early feats of human exploration were entertaining, but the excitement was rooted in a relative lack of understanding about the nature of the Moon and planets, and a view of colonization outmoded even at that time.

  The success of Apollo, in retrospect, has facilitated a misperception about the space race and its support by the American public at the time. While there may be reasons to accept that Apollo was transcendentally important at some sublime level, assuming a generally rosy public acceptance of it is at best a simplistic and ultimately unsatisfactory conclusion. Indeed, the public’s support for space funding has remained remarkably stable. For example, in the summer of 1965 one-third of the U.S. citizenry favored cutting the space budget, while only 16 percent wanted to increase it. Over the next three and one half years, the number in favor of cutting space spending went up to 40 percent, with those preferring an increase dropping to 14 percent.

  In October 1965, a Harris Poll found that several other public issues were nearly as high public priorities as efforts in outer space (Graph 3). Polls in the 1960s also consistently ranked spaceflight near the top of those programs to be cut in the federal budget. Most Americans seemingly preferred doing something about air and water pollution, job training for unskilled workers, national beautification, and poverty before spending federal funds on human spaceflight. In 1965 Newsweek echoed the Times story, stating: “The U.S. space program is in decline. The Vietnam war and the desperate conditions of the nation’s poor and its cities—which make space flight seem, in comparison, like an embarrassing national self-indulgence—have combined to drag down a program where the sky was no longer the limit.” Moreover, throughout most of the 1960s the American public answered the question “Should the Government Fund Human Trips to the Moon?” with a less than positive response (Graph 4).

  Graph 3. Public Assessment of Costs of Space Exploration Relative to Other Programs Source: Harris Poll, 1965. Question: If you had to choose, do you think it more important or less important to spend $4 billion a year on the space program than to spend it on . . . ?

  These statistics do not demonstrate an unqualified support for NASA’s effort to race the Soviets to the Moon in the 1960s. They suggest, instead, that the political crisis that brought public support to the initial lunar-landing decision was fleeting and that the public was never enthusiastic about human lunar exploration, and especially about the costs associated with it. What enthusiasm it may have enjoyed waned over time, until by the end of the Apollo program in December 1972, the program seemed akin to a limping marathoner straining with every muscle to reach the finish line before collapsing.

  Graph 4. Should the Government Fund Human Trips to the Moon? Sources: Gallup, Harris, NBC/Associated Press, CBS/New York Times Polls; wording of questions differed slightly.

  EIGHT

  Revelations

  A series of important outcomes resulted from the race to the Moon. For example, by sheer serendipity Apollo taught humanity about itself, and in the process altered our perception of the world on which we live. The cosmonauts, while not getting in
to translunar space, expressed similar thoughts about the meaning of the first years of the space age and seeing Earth in a new way. The modern environmental movement was galvanized in part by this new perception of the planet and the need to protect it and the life that it supports. Additionally, while science was not the driver behind the race to the Moon, quite a lot of scientific understanding resulted from it. Both the United States and the USSR contributed to this understanding, with robotic probes to the Moon as well as the Apollo landings. Finally, the management of large-scale technological endeavors was a major result of these efforts in both nations.

  A New Environmentalism

  Every astronaut and cosmonaut commented that seeing Earth from space could not help but change one’s perspective. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin said after returning to Earth in 1961, “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!” The second cosmonaut, Gherman Titov, also commented on the beauty of Earth. “It’s a pity I flew only once,” he commented. “A space flight is like a drug—once you experience it, you can’t think of anything else.” John Glenn flew the first handheld camera into space in 1962, and his pictures of Earth quickly became the most memorable aspect of his flight. Couple this with the emerging awareness of Earth as a fragile habitat that must be preserved, as articulated in such books as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and a global modern environmental movement gained momentum in the 1960s.

  Apollo 8 was critical to this fundamental change, as it treated the world to the first pictures of Earth from afar. Writer Archibald MacLeish summed up the feelings of many people when he wrote at the time of Apollo, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”

  Earthrise certainly made a difference, but so did the image of Earth from Apollo 17. As early as 1966, American environmental activist Stewart Brand had begun a campaign for NASA to release an image of the whole Earth in space. Brand even made up buttons that asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the Whole Earth yet?” He sold them on college campuses and mailed them to prominent scientists, futurists, and legislators. Not until the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, however, did “Whole Earth” become a reality. As Brand recalled:

  I turned on my blanket there on the gravel rooftop and looked clear around, it was indeed a circle, a mandala—a nice, finite, entire, low-altitude view of the Earth. . . . I just sat all afternoon and tried to think of how we could possibly get a photograph of the whole Earth—that is, of the planet from space. I was a big fan of NASA and of then ten years of space exploration that had gone up to that point, and there we were in 1966, having seen a lot of the moon and a lot of hunks of the Earth, but never the complete mandala. . . . It was a bit odd that for ten years, with all the photographic apparatus in the world, we hadn’t turned the cameras that 180 degrees to look back.

  To capture this iconic image the astronauts on Apollo 17 used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera, and no one is quite sure who snapped the iconic image. Many credit Harrison Schmitt with taking the photo, but it cannot be determined for certain. Since no humans have made a lunar trip since Apollo 17, this was the last opportunity. Stewart Brand put the photograph on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968. This image, and the other stunning photographs of Earth taken from space, inspired a reconsideration of our place in the universe. It became the iconic image for environmental activists, politicians, and scientists during the annual Earth Day celebrations. They used it as an object lesson of Earth as a small, vulnerable, lonely, and fragile body teeming with life in a dull, black, lifeless void. The planet was self-regulating and ancient, they observed, but humanity was a threat to this place. Earth now required human protection. Astronaut Joseph P. Allen said it best: “With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the Moon, no one suggested that we should do it to look at the Earth. But that may in fact be the one important reason.”

  Technological Virtuosity

  The space race represented a triumph of engineering and technological virtuosity. For both the Americans, whose successes and failures were on display for all to see, and the Soviets, who hid their failures, it symbolized modernity and forward looking. The message came through loudly around the globe. Astronauts standing on the Moon, cosmonauts engaging in a series of one-upmanship spectaculars, and both nations’ ballyhooing their technological virtuosity served well the Cold War competition between the Americans and the Russians. Moreover, there is no question that the successes in space during the 1960s helped to create a culture of competence for these rivals in the Cold War, swaying various other nations to ally with them in the larger geopolitical struggle. It was, like so much of the engagement of Soviet and American foreign policy during the Cold War, war by another means in which no one would be killed, at least not intentionally.

  This culture of competence rubbed off on NASA and the Soviet space program as well. For NASA it translated into a level of confidence in American capability, and especially in the ability of government to perform effectively, to resolve problems. Recollections of the Apollo program’s technology led many to express wonder at the sophistication of the technical competence that made the Moon landings possible and the genius of those that built the rockets and spacecraft that carried Americans into space. Egyptian-American Farouk El-Baz, a scientist who worked on the program, expressed well this sense of awe at the Moon landings: “Oh, the Apollo program! It was a unique effort all together. When I think about it some 40 years later, I still look at that time with wonder.”

  This is the case in no small measure because of the relative lack of complexity of the technology used to go to the Moon in the 1960s. Many express wonder that there is more computing power in a pocket calculator than in the Apollo guidance computer. Others are surprised that something as simple as writing in space required the development of a new type of pen, with the ink under pressure so that it could write in a weightless environment.

  Figure 15. An artist’s concept of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), the first international docking of the U.S. Apollo spacecraft with the USSR’s Soyuz spacecraft in July 1975. This mission represented a fitting end to the space race.

  American belief in the technical virtuosity of NASA, an agency that could accomplish any task assigned it, can be traced directly to the experience of Apollo and its legacy of success. The success in reaching the Moon established a popular conception that one could make virtually any demand and the space agency would deliver. This has remained a powerful image in American culture.

  Despite tragedies along the way, including the near-disaster of Apollo 13 and the Challenger and Columbia accidents that killed fourteen astronauts after the space race, most of the public remains convinced that NASA has the capability to succeed at whatever it attempts. The Moon landings established that image in the American mind, and it has resisted tarnish despite the space agency’s very public failures great and small.

  Of course, there has also been concern about an undefined sense of decline in so many parts of recent American society. Some have expressed a desire to recapture the confidence and technological virtuosity that helped define the 1960s but has flagged since. Farouk El-Baz bemoaned that “the Apollo spirit of innovation and can-do attitude did not last long.” He concluded: “This is why I believe that my generation has failed the American people in one respect. We considered Apollo as an enormous challenge and a singular goal. To us, it was the end game. We knew that nothing like it ever happened in the past and behaved as if it would have no equal in the future.”

  The technology required to reach the Moon was certainly more complex than anything ever attempted before, but it was firmly understood at the time that the program began. NASA engineers reasoned, first, that they needed a truly powerful rocket wi
th a larger payload capacity than any envisioned before. As a second priority, they recognized the need for a spacecraft that could preserve the life of fragile human beings for at least two weeks; this included both a vehicle akin to a small submarine that could operate in space and a second spacecraft in the form of a space suit that would allow the astronauts to perform tasks outside the larger vehicle. Third, they needed some type of landing craft that would be able to operate in a lunar environment far different from anything found on or near Earth. Finally, they needed to develop the technologies necessary for guidance and control, communication, and navigation to reach the Moon.

  In every case—and this proved critical—planners at NASA understood the nature of the technical challenges before them in reaching for the Moon, so they were able to chart a reasonable and well-defined technological development course for overcoming them.

  Project Apollo was a triumph of management in meeting enormously difficult systems engineering, technological, and organizational integration requirements. For the generation of Americans who grew up during the 1960s watching NASA astronauts fly into space, beginning with fifteen-minute suborbital trajectories and culminating with six landings on the Moon, Project Apollo signaled in a very public manner what the nation could do when it set its mind to it. Television coverage of real space adventures was long and intense, the stakes high, and the risks of life enormous. There were moments of both great danger and high anxiety.