July 20, 1969, and All That
First, nuclear weapons really threw a wrench in the violent, conquest-oriented patterns of behavior so beloved by patriarchal leaders across the centuries. How much extra dental work was required in the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, how much grinding of teeth occurred there because the U.S. had the weapons to simply erase the "enemy," but couldn’t, didn’t dare use them? Second, the little problem of global warming, so minor according to ExxonMobil ads, so worthy of inattention by harumphing presidents, prime ministers, and premiers, just keeps on coming. Even now, as we await the slide into the ocean of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and who knows what other surprises Gaia-in-pain may have in store for us, we just keep on moseying happily down the yellow brick road of Late Capitalism in our comfy, roomy, gas-guzzling, polluting SUVs and pickups. Third is the fact of July 20, 1969, the landing on the moon of Apollo 11. What? A stumbling block? Au contraire, say the unreconstructed technophiles. Rather a cause for celebration, commemorative coins, anniversary remembrances, and the like. Indeed. Hold on. Let’s re-wind and take another look at how the Apollo program played out. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s couple of hours on the moon, Apollo 12 went back for a longer stay. Then Apollo 13 not only didn’t get there but almost didn’t get back to earth. But 14, 15, 16, and 17 went off hitchless. Impressively hitchless, doing all sorts of experiments, taking countless photographs, returning hundreds of pounds of moon rocks to fill a sterile vault at the Johnson Space Center. And then? And then? Nothing. We stopped. Why? Money? Sure, that was part of it. But there was more, trauma so deep that we hardly talked about it, hardly thought about the effect it had on us. Consider perhaps the most famous picture to come out of the entire Apollo moon-landing program:
A picture with a double whammy. One very positive, and one very negative. The positive effect was anticipated by Arthur C. Clarke, who, years before, had predicted that the first extraterrestrial photograph of the earth, the blue and white ball hanging in black space, would have a powerful, long-range impact on human consciousness, that it would bring us together as nothing in human history had done. Maybe it has, maybe not. It's too soon to tell. You don't change the direction of a violence-oriented juggernaut like human history in a few decades. But evidence is accumulating (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of China to the world, the continuing avoidance of really big wars) that our view of ourselves and our place in the universe may be achieving a certain modest maturity. The other effect of that photo, and the thousands that came after, and the hours and hours of live TV from the surface of the moon, has not been widely acknowledged and hardly discussed at all, having to do with what you see below the lovely, blue little Earth. July 20 was preceded by years of incessant, bi-partisan, super-patriotic rhetoric (the Russians beat us with Sputnik, we couldn't let that happen again), and a Congress ready to pay whatever it took to get to the moon first. All NASA had to do was ask, and the money was there. So NASA laid out a plan which would culminate in not just one moon landing but a whole series (six, as it turned out), all funded up-front. The plan worked, better than anyone had a right to expect. Sub-orbital missions, earth-orbital missions, lunar-orbital missions. With an astonishingly small number of disasters, NASA took us step-by-step off the planet. Astronauts became heroes, and politicians basked in the reflected glory. Then one day in July, 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off, circled the moon a few times (taking the above photograph in the process) and sent its little pod containing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down. They landed, and we saw the moon up close and personal for the first time:
Of course there was talk about the barrenness, the utterly unearthly blackness of shadows, the black vacuum of a "sky". But the excitement of the feat--people walking on the moon!-- overshadowed such details. Armstrong and Aldrin stayed only a couple of hours and returned as the heroes they were. Over the next three and a half years, the remaining pre-paid missions followed. Apart from the near-catastrophe of Apollo 13 (see the movie), the trips came off according to NASA's carefully considered plans. And then, after Apollo 17, in November, 1972, we stopped. The Russians made no attempt to go. And nobody else had the technology to even think about it. Now, 30 years later, we're still not thinking about. Oh, there's talk, and there are sketches of missions, and you know that after the space station is up and functioning, the talk we'll increase and we will go back to the moon, and farther. But the point here is this. Up to that moment on July 20, 1969, there was enormous momentum behind the lunar exploration program: today, the moon, tomorrow, Mars, etc. And in 1968 Kubrick and Clarke had filmed a vision of highly developed interplanetary humanity by 2001. It was not to be. The 20th century had its traumas (two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the Cultural Revolution, AIDS and other plagues, the beginning of global warming). Surely high on that list, we must place the unacknowledged, repressed trauma of the awful, terrifying, colder-than-ice-cold, bleak gray emptiness of our first encounter with the moonscape. The later Apollo missions took color TV cameras along. That didn't help. There was no color. No air. No warmth. Just a vast, monochrome field of frigid rocks under a black, black sky. We retreated as fast as we decently could (we did have to complete the pre-paid missions). Finally, we came back, pulled the tent flaps closed, and hunkered down on our little warm, blue marble. History since July 20, 1969, has to be seen at least in part as the behavior of a trauma victim slowly, slowly recovering from an experience so frightening, so shattering, that for a long time it couldn't be accepted. The bleak-beyond-bleak moonscape scared us more than we have admitted to ourselves. Clearly, a slow recovery is underway. We have continued to send out unmanned planetary probes and discovered that the cosmic news was not quite as bad as the lunar pictures indicated. We have found unusual, unexpected, even colorful places in the solar system. Various planets and moons showed themselves to be, if not exactly hospitable, at least eye-catching and intriguing, stimulating to our insatiable curiosity. Then Pathfinder went to Mars and let the little Rover loose for a few months on the Martian surface. And we finally got pictures of a place that looked at least sort of familiar, a place with color, and a sun, and a sky, and some heat. A place we could begin to think about going to:
Perhaps the long night is almost over and the patient is well enough to go exploring again. |
END
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