We are closing in on the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, an achievement all the more amazing in retrospect considering the level of technology at the time, and our current inability to escape terrestrial orbit for all but the smallest robotic satellites. When Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder, leaving a foot print on another planet, we seemed to be entering a new era.
Except, rather than signaling the beginning of an era, it was, in actual fact, the end of an era. From the moment the beeping of Sputnik was first heard, America's eyes and minds were turned toward the skies. That the obstacles toward something as relatively simple as getting off the ground safely had yet to be overcome (the newsreel footage of various rocket explosions on the launchpad reminded Americans that, at least at this stage, we hadn't, quite, got it right). With the orbit of Yuri Gragarin and the beginning of human space flight (or, at least, low earth orbit), the challenge was as much political as it was technological.
The captive imaginations of young people is difficult to remember over four decades later. My older brother, born two years after Sputnik, was fascinated by space travel. He even has a little cast iron bank in the shape of the moon with a tiny molded Apollo spacecraft attached. The introduction of the Mercury 7 astronauts, and their careful stage managing by the military and Life Magazine made heroes of test pilots willing to risk their lives in a venture that, as of yet, had not been successful.
Pres. Kennedy's 1961 speech that launched the race to the moon set the goal not as part of a larger endeavor for exploration for resources, but as a goal worthy in and of itself. Had space exploration been offered as part of a larger program of a search for exploitable minerals and other resources, the moon landings would most assuredly have been only the beginning. They were not. Set, rather, in the context of a Cold War alpha male pissing contest, the entire Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs existed for no other reasons than to go to the moon and come back. Period.
The times were also against further exploitation of the technology developed for space travel. From the assassination of Pres. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 to the resignation of Pres. Nixon in 1974 were some of the most socially and politically turbulent times in our history. While it should not have been difficult to transform the space program from seeking a single goal - getting to the moon and back - to many goals - exploration not only for its own sake, but as a larger, practical search for resources for economic exploitation (the real reason for all those ignoble "voyages of discovery" in the 16th-18th centuries) - the various social, cultural, and political upheavals of the times pushed such a discussion further and further from the consciousness of the politicians whose job it was to make such a case. By the time Apollo 11 splashed down, the general feeling was, "Well, that's done, then." The original plan of 20 Apollo missions was trimmed down, funding continued to be cut, and the last human being left the moon in 1972 and we haven't been back.
In a practical sense there's no real reason to go back. While there have been interesting discoveries, such as water ice just below the surface to possible plate tectonics, there is little to attract human beings to the moon. It has no deposits of minerals that are rare on earth, and exploitable for economic gain. Furthermore, the lack of atmosphere restricts the time human beings can safely spend outside the confines of spacecraft. The twin assaults of no breathable air and various cosmic rays make the place uninviting, to say the very least. Lower gravity, combined with the zero-g environment of open space, plays havoc with muscle tone and bone mass, problems that have yet to be overcome.
In talks over the years, I have often heard proponents of a return to the moon use the phrase "terraforming", and I can only cringe. First of all, we have no idea what terraforming the Moon would mean in any practical sense. Second, even if we did, it would only be attempted if there would be a return on such an investment. At present, there are enough iron and nickel mines on the earth to serve our needs; mining on the moon would not exactly be an economic boon. Even the notion, floated a couple years ago by then Pres. George W. Bush that a return to the moon would be part of a larger project of an American Mars mission (why is it always Mars when there are other, far more interesting places humans can go?) was ridiculed by former NASA officials and others who do not see the need for such an extraterrestrial platform.
In the decades since Apollo 17 blasted off the lunar surface, America has become quite adept at the robotic exploration of space. We have orbited Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, sent robots past all the planets except Pluto, and landed on Mercury, Venus, Mars, and sent small information-gathering robots in to the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. When the Mars rovers landed in the 1990's, the entire country was galvanized as the small wandering robots rolled down the ramps of their transports, took a look around, and started their very slow trundling way across the Martian landscape. The cost of the various robotic orbiters and landers is minuscule compared to the cost of sending human beings to these places. Until we discover a reason to go there in person, as it were, we have wonderfully adept remote eyes and ears and even noses (in a sense; both the 1976 Viking landers and the Rovers two decades later had chemical sensors that tested the fatally thin Martian atmosphere) that can check these places out for us, with the risk being only to the reputations of those who are in charge of the various programs.
I see no reason at all to send human beings back to the moon. I have heard, over the past 20 years, that both the Japanese and the Chinese are planning on going. The Russians growl occasionally about doing so. While some people have pointed to these various statements and said, "See? We need to do so, also," my response is, "Why? Let 'em go and discover that, for all the effort, there's just no 'there' there." It should be pointed out that all these plans have come to naught, for a variety of reasons, so none of the arguments matter all that much.
I am not against the human exploration of space, per se. I do think that exploiting robotic exploration is far safer, cost efficient, and has yielded far more information than any trip burdened by the needs of keeping a group of human beings alive and in shape enough to do anything other than crawl out of a lander could have done. While I admire the twelve men who, alone among the billions of human beings who have ever lived, have walked on another planet, as a political and technological project, I just see no reason to go back. Find something worth going for, and I'd be all for it.
Otherwise, not so much.
