Today, we are celebrating one of
the greatest days in human history: The day we stepped foot on the
surface of the Moon. To celebrate with you, I wanted to share some wise
words from my old Astronomy professor, Carl Sagan. He contributed the
following article in 1994 while serving as President of The Planetary
Society. It's a great reflection on the past, with a new perspective to
take with us into the future:
—Bill
"The gates of Heaven are open wide; off I ride..."
Ch'u Tz'u (China, ca. 3rd century B.C.E.)
It's a sultry night in July. You've
fallen asleep in the armchair. Abruptly, you startle awake, disoriented.
The television set is on, but not the sound. You strain to understand
what you're seeing. Two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets
are softly dancing under a pitch-black sky. They make strange little
skipping motions, which propel them upward amid barely perceptible
clouds of dust. But something is wrong. They take too long to come down.
Encumbered as they are, they seem to be flying—a little. You rub your
eyes, but the dreamlike tableau persists.
Of all the events surrounding Apollo
11's landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, my most vivid recollection is
its unreal quality. Yes, it was an astonishing technological
achievement and a triumph for the United States. Yes, the
astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, the last
keeping solitary vigil in lunar orbit—displayed death-defying courage.
Yes, as Armstrong said as he first alighted, this was a historic step
for the human species. But if you turned off the byplay between Mission
Control and the Sea of Tranquility, with its deliberately mundane and
routine chatter, and stared into that black-and-white television
monitor, you could glimpse that we humans had entered the realm of myth
and legend.
We knew the Moon from our earliest
days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the
savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone
tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built
cities and set out to subdue the Earth. Folklore and popular songs
celebrate a mysterious connection between the Moon and love. Especially
when we lived out-of-doors, it was a major—if oddly intangible—presence
in our lives.
The Moon was a metaphor for the
unattainable: "You might as well ask for the Moon," they used to say.
For most of our history, we had no idea what it was. A spirit? A god? A
thing? It didn't look like something big far away, but more like
something small nearby—something the size of a plate, maybe, hanging in
the sky a little above our heads. Walking on the Moon would
have seemed a screwball idea; it made more sense to imagine somehow
climbing up into the sky on a ladder or on the back of a giant bird,
grabbing the Moon and bringing it down to Earth. Nobody ever succeeded,
although there were myths aplenty about heroes who had tried.
Not until a few centuries ago did the idea of the Moon as a place,
a quarter million miles away, gain wide currency. And in that brief
flicker of time, we've gone from the earliest steps in understanding the
Moon's nature to walking and joyriding on its surface. We calculated
how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big
rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance and much
else. Then we sailed out into the sky.
The Moon is no longer unattainable. A
dozen humans, all Americans, have made those odd bounding motions they
called "moonwalks" on the crunchy, cratered, ancient gray lava-
beginning on that July day in 1969. But since 1972, no one from any
nation has ventured back. Indeed, none of us has gone anywhere since the glory days of Apollo
except into low Earth orbit—like a toddler who takes a few tentative
steps outward and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his
mother's skirts.
Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?
The scope and audacity of John
Kennedy's May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on
"Urgent National Needs"—the speech that launched the Apollo
program—dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not
yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order
to send a man to an unknown world—
a world not yet explored, not even in a
preliminary way, not even by robots—and we would bring him safely back,
and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident
pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth
orbit.
As a newly minted PhD, I actually
thought all this had something centrally to do with science. But
President Kennedy did not talk about discovering the origin of the Moon,
or even about bringing samples of it back for study. All he seemed to
be interested in was sending someone there and bringing him home. It was
a kind of gesture. Kennedy's science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, later
told me he had made a deal with the president: if Kennedy would not
claim that Apollo was about science, then he, Wiesner, would support it.
So if not science, what?
The Apollo program is really about
politics, others told me. This sounded more promising. Nonaligned
nations would be tempted to drift toward the Soviet Union if it was
ahead in space exploration, if the U.S. showed insufficient "national
vigor." I didn't follow. Here was the United States, ahead of the Soviet
Union in virtually every area of technology—the world's economic,
military and, on occasion, even moral leader—and Indonesia would go
Communist because Yuri Gagarin beat John Glenn to Earth orbit? What's so
special about space technology? Suddenly I understood.
Sending people to orbit the Earth or
robots to orbit the Sun requires rockets-big, reliable, powerful
rockets. Those same rockets can be used for nuclear war. The same
technology that transports a man to the Moon can carry nuclear warheads
halfway around the world. The same technology that puts an astronomer
and a telescope in Earth orbit can also put up a laser "battle station."
Even back then, there was fanciful talk
in military circles, East and West, about space as the new "high
ground," about the nation that "controlled" space "controlling" the
Earth. Of course strategic rockets were already being tested on Earth.
But heaving a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead into a target zone
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't buy much glory. Sending
people into space captures the attention and imagination of the world.
You wouldn't spend the money to launch astronauts for this reason alone,
but of all the ways of demonstrating rocket potency, this one works
best. It was a rite of national manhood; the shape of the boosters made
this point readily understood without anyone actually having to explain
it. The communication seemed to be transmitted from unconscious mind to
unconscious mind without the higher mental faculties catching a whiff of
what was going on.
When President Kennedy formulated the
Apollo program, the Defense Department had a slew of space projects
under development—ways of carrying military personnel up into space,
ways of conveying them around the Earth, robot weapons on orbiting
platforms intended to shoot down satellites and ballistic missiles of
other nations. Apollo supplanted these programs. They never reached
operational status. A case can be made then that Apollo served another
purpose—to move the US-Soviet space competition from a military to a
civilian arena. There are some who believe that Kennedy intended Apollo
as a substitute for an arms race in space. Maybe.
Six more missions followed Apollo 11,
all but one of which successfully landed on the lunar surface. Apollo 17
was the first to carry a scientist. As soon as he got there, the
program was canceled. The first scientist and the last human to land on
the Moon were the same person. The program had already served its
purpose that July night in 1969. The half-dozen subsequent missions were
just momentum.
Apollo was not mainly about science. It
was not even mainly about space. Apollo was about ideological
confrontation and nuclear war—often described by such euphemisms as
world "leadership" and national "prestige." Nevertheless, good space
science was done. We now know much more about the composition, age and
history of the Moon and the origin of the lunar landforms. We have made
progress in understanding where the Moon came from. Some of us have used
lunar cratering statistics to better understand the Earth at the time
of the origin of life. But more important than any of this, Apollo
provided an aegis, an umbrella under which brilliantly engineered robot
spacecraft were dispatched throughout the solar system, making that
preliminary reconnaissance of dozens of new worlds. The offspring of
Apollo have now reached the planetary frontiers.
If not for Apollo—and, therefore, if
not for the political purpose it served—I doubt whether the historic
American expeditions of exploration and discovery throughout the solar
system would have occurred. The Mariners, Vikings, Voyagers, Magellan,
Galileo and Cassini are among the gifts of Apollo. Something similar is
true for the pioneering Soviet efforts in solar system exploration,
including the first soft landings of robot spacecraft—Luna 9, Mars 3,
Venera 8—on other worlds.
Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy
and breadth of vision that did capture the imagination of the world.
That too was part of its purpose. It inspired an optimism about
technology, an enthusiasm for the future. If we could go to the Moon,
what else was now possible? Even those who were not admirers of the
United States readily acknowledged that—whatever the underlying reason
for the program—the nation had, with Apollo, achieved greatness.
When you pack your bags for a big trip,
you never know what's in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their
way to and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a
natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw. For the
first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see their world from
above—the whole Earth, Earth in color, Earth as an exquisite spinning
white and blue ball set against the vast darkness of space. Those images
helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness. They provide
incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet.
They remind us of what is important and what is not.
We may have found that perspective just
in time, just as our technology threatens the habitability of our
world. Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however
mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the
inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of Earth is its clear
and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo. What began
in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is
the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening.
It's time to hit the road again.
- Carl Sagan
Founder and First President for The Planetary Society
This article was adapted from a chapter Carl Sagan's book,
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. It was originally featured in the May/June 1994 issue of the Planetary Society member magazine,
The Planetary Report.
