First, Mankind

Last Sunday, I saw “First Man”,  a film about NASA’s run-up to the Apollo 11 moon landing. It’s told primarily through the eyes of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his family.

I was just over a year old when the “Eagle” module landed in the Sea of Tranquility, where Armstrong broadcast his immortal words. By the time I started school in the early ’70s, the U.S. space program was in full swing, and as the last of the Apollo missions returned, we were already looking forward to the Pioneer and Voyager probes. I followed the news that accompanied each image of the outer planets, the ageless probes silently beaming their work home as I progressed into adulthood.

I was fascinated with space exploration, obsessed with what we might find and where we might go in my lifetime. I felt wonder at every bit of information we gathered about the known universe.

In the movie theater this weekend, I realized that as a species, as “mankind”, we had not set foot anywhere else since the final Apollo crew (Apollo 17) came home. Even before the film ended, I was wondering, “What the hell happened? Why did we never progress beyond this?”

The film touches on the nationwide debates about the costs, in dollars and in human lives, of the NASA missions. There is a real clip of author Kurt Vonnegut considering aloud whether the money used for space exploration was not absurd in the face of human suffering on our own planet. Indeed, after the fiery deaths of Chaffee, Grissom, and White in the Apollo 1 command module as it sat on the launch pad, it’s easy to imagine that the objective of reaching the moon seemed both impossible and senseless to many people.

There is no doubt that we had two driving forces to overcome those doubts. One was President Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to achieve “the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth”.  Kennedy didn’t live to see that achievement, and perhaps his memory helped bring it to fruition.

The second and arguably more important factor was that we needed to be “first”. We had to beat the Soviet Union to the moon as a matter of national pride. The Space Race, as it came to be known, had been won by the Soviets at almost every turn. Yet putting a human on another celestial body was still up for grabs — a Holy Grail of exploration. If we were to meet Kennedy’s challenge, it would have to be as a nation. A nation willing to pay for it through tax dollars. A nation with men and women smart enough to engineer such a feat. A nation with leaders who would take the heat when brave men died in the pursuit of glory. It had to be a nation that was better than any other.

Armstrong’s famous statement, though, was about how in the end, that accomplishment was bigger than any single nation. “One giant leap for mankind” didn’t refer only to himself or his mission. Rather, it evokes the myriad accomplishments of all of humanity, from the first stone tool to the successful implementation of rocket science itself. The pride I felt thinking about that moment was pride in America, sure. But there was a much deeper pride in human achievement, in the accumulated accomplishments of millenniums of mortals, culminating in that single step of nearly unimaginable importance. Gazing from 240,000 miles away at what Carl Sagan would later describe as a “pale blue dot”, Neil Armstrong had the exceedingly rare perspective to understand that his “leap” onto another world was for every person on Earth.

Sitting in a movie theater, a half-century later, I was watching a reenactment of that moment and still thought with wonder: My god. We actually did it.

And then came those questions: What the hell happened? Why did we never progress beyond this?

With the benefit of a few days’ thought, this is what I’ve decided. We’ve lost what it took to do it, all of it — the visionary leadership, the goal, and the drive.

President George W. Bush laid out a mission plan in January of 2004 to return to the moon by 2020. That’s right: the idea laid out thirty-five years after Apollo XI was to do the same thing again in sixteen years. President Obama’s vision in 2010 was for a U.S.-led orbital Mars mission by the 2030s. It’s easy to understand why these plans are all but forgotten. Where’s the urgency? Where are the challenges? With dates set several decades into the future, an existing politician leaves it to others to do. Kennedy required it “before the decade is out”. That visionary leadership is missing.

Furthermore, there is no longer a clear and inspired goal: colonizing Mars; manned explorations of Jupiter or Saturn; developing faster vessels or warp technology; traveling to other star systems.

Saddest to me is the lack of drive. With the combined deaths of fourteen crew members in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters (seventeen years and many successful missions apart, mind you), the public’s appetite for manned missions waned. Just as bad is the fact that those deaths, unlike those of Chaffee, Grissom, and White, didn’t serve to move us forward in any meaningful way. The Space Shuttle program never lived up to its expectations. It never took us to new worlds, or even laid meaningful groundwork for that goal. While I have no doubt that the employees of NASA are every bit as dedicated today as they were in the 1960s, it’s clear that no one is driving them. In all fairness, the International Space Station, the Mars rovers, the Hubble telescope, and myriad solar and planetary probes have all returned valuable photos and data about worlds beyond what John Gillespie Magee called “the surly bonds of earth”. But probes can’t tell us anything that’s not purely scientific. They offer data without interpretation in the moment. There is no emotion to them, no humanity.

At roughly the same time that NASA was running the Apollo program, another government organization known as DARPA (Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) was creating a very important set of protocols that became the the technological foundation for the internet. In the five decades since then, the “small step” that created a simple wide area network has evolved into the global beast we know today. Yet in that same time period, humans have remained decidedly Earthbound.

It’s astounding that we achieved successful manned missions to the moon in under ten years. It’s unconscionable that for the next fifty, we did little else to build on that. 

Here’s a lesser-known quote of Arrmstrong’s: “I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.”

So did I.

At a time of vicious division in the world, I long to see a project – and any country –  that would put mankind first.