A Trip to the Moon

By Alan Caruba

Sometime in the 1980s I found myself on assignment at Cape Kennedy visiting the launch site for all the trips to the moon and the various shuttle voyages to the International Space Station. The shuttle was the size of a small building and the notion that it could be lifted beyond the pull of gravity, flown about in outer space, and return, staggers the imagination.

I was already in my early 30s by the time the United States of America put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969. I can recall when President John F. Kennedy spoke of sending men to the moon in 1961.

The subject was primarily the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States that already involved building an arsenal of missiles. That rivalry had sparked the Cold War that began at the end of World War Two in 1945. It was the focus of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. In 1957, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, a small device that circled the Earth emitting a beeping noise. It confirmed that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. The space program was a cover for the acceleration of missile technology.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, with the last launch of the shuttle program, the U.S. no longer has the means to put humans in space and must, in fact, secure the assistance of the Russian Federation to send or return its astronauts from the International Space Station.

The Apollo program was an extraordinary achievement in many ways, but the reason the U.S. sent men to the moon was to demonstrate it could also launch a devastating response to the Soviet Union in the event of a missile attack or even a preemptive attack of our own. The message was not lost on the Russians.

So, we put men on the moon, collected a bunch of moon rocks, confirmed it is entirely inhospitable to habitation, and have not returned since December 1972.

Indeed, all of space is inhospitable to mankind. We are Earth-bound creatures and can exist in space only in obscenely expensive vehicles. Meanwhile, unmanned satellites of every description perform a myriad of services including the exploration of lifeless planets far, far away.

On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy, speaking at Rice University, said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

“Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This was a quintessentially American attitude and explains how in those years and earlier, Americans achieved so much. It explains why Americans pushed beyond the western borders of the original Thirteen States until they reached the Pacific Ocean. It explains how and why they built a vast system of railroads, turned fertile plains into a breadbasket for the nation and vast engine of export. It is why we developed so many technologies we and the rest of the world now take for granted.

Capitalism built this nation. Socialism is destroying it.

The generation of the 1960s and since has also managed to spend themselves into horrendous debt. President Johnson who replaced an assassinated JFK not only expanded a war in Vietnam, but instituted a “Great Society” program in “a war on poverty.” It was a precursor of recent “stimulus” programs. In the process, the nation wasted billions, along with more than 50,000 lives of a generation of young men. President Reagan restored the economy to balance in the 1980s, but since then the profligate spending has not ceased.

The trip to the moon was an exciting adventure, but its purpose was to deter the Soviet Union from gaining too great an advantage over our national security. Today, the present administration stands by idly as Iran develops its own missile and nuclear weapons programs. The Iranians have done so with assistance from the Russians.

Our financial crisis has left Americans feeling defeated in our own eyes and looking weak in the eyes of our allies and our enemies. We have done this to ourselves with “entitlement” programs that began in the 1930s and by allowing an “environmental” movement to strangle domestic development and thwart access to our own vast reserves of energy.

The people whose parents and grandparents put men on the moon stand by as the present national leadership fails and refuses to come to grips with the present challenges. They stand by as their schools turn out new generations that cannot spell, don’t like to read, have little grasp of their nation’s history or values, and rank lower and lower among other nations as educated people.

A tea party in Boston helped launch a war that established our sovereignty and our ascendance among all other nations. A Tea Party today, a movement of patriotic Americans, is all that stands between a nation that sent men to the moon and one that is headed hell-bent to the poorhouse.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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The Winter Solstice

By Alan Caruba

On December 22, 1554 AD, someone took note of a celestial phenomenon during which a full lunar eclipse occurred. It will occur again on Tuesday, the day that marks the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Today’s astronomers will tell you it is just a coincidence and, indeed, that is all it is.

1554 had not been a good year for Lady Jane Gray who was beheaded after having spent just nine days as queen of England. The Privy Council had someone else in mind for the job. There were the usual battles in England and France where such skirmishes were what passed for politics in that era, but it was not otherwise a particularly memorable year.

For centuries, however, men had been paying close attention to the skies. In Ireland, there is a huge circular stone structure estimated to be 5,000 years old. On solstice, a single shaft of sunlight reaches deep into its central chamber at dawn. It predates the pyramids and Stonehenge, the latter of which was constructed to mark the winter and summer solstices.

Solstice celebrations clearly go back thousands of years in mankind’s history. The Neolithic peoples around the world, from about 10,000 to 3,000 BC, were the first farmers and, as a result, knowledge of the seasons and the cycles of harvest was critical.

The Moon that appeared to diminish and disappear only to reappear was of great interest as it proved an excellent way of marking time. It was, however, the solstice that was regarded as the day on which the Sun was reborn. Rebirth is a common theme in myths dating far back in history.

An excellent telling of the solstice story can be found here. “Ironically, the Earth is actually nearer to the Sun in January than it is in June—by three million miles. The Earth leans slightly on its axis like a spinning top frozen in one off-kilter position. Astronomers have even pinpointed the price angle of the tilt. It is 23 degrees and 27 minutes off the perpendicular to the plane of orbit.”

Clearly, someone was paying attention in ancient times because hundreds of megalithic structures have been found throughout Europe, each oriented to the solstices and the equinoxes. Sacred sites have been found in the Americas, Asia, Indonesia, and the Middle East.

In time, both Christmas and Hanukkah would be incorporated into the winter solstice, but the event was widely celebrated well before these holidays even existed and it was regarded as a time of magic. For the ancient Romans, of course, it was a time of feasting and, reportedly, debauchery, but just about any time of the year seemed to signal “party!” for them.

What lesson can we draw from the solstice of 2010? It is, I think, that the Earth is very old, 4.5 billion years old in fact, and what passes for human civilization is rather new by comparison. For a very long time, men peered into the sky and marveled at the Sun, Moon and stars. In time they began to make some sense of the cyclical change of seasons and apply it to agriculture and other activities.

Now consider the timeline. In 1554 someone recorded the lunar eclipse that occurred on the winter solstice, but it was not until October 1608, over fifty years later, that a device called a telescope was unveiled in the Netherlands. It made Jacob Metius of Alkmaar a tidy sum of money, but it was the genius, Galileo, who would grasp the power of the telescope. He made his first one in June or July 1609.

As this winter solstice dawns, the United States of America, the greatest pioneer of outer space, no longer has a vehicle to continue manned exploration. The Russians, with whom we were locked in conflict throughout the Cold War, now provide our astronauts a ride to the Space Station. There is something profoundly wrong about that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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No More Trips to the Moon

By Alan Caruba

I turn 73 on October 9th and, to be honest, I feel sorry for anyone who has not lived during much of the last century. In a very real way, America’s Apollo program that put men on the Moon on July 20, 1969 was as an exciting a moment in history as anyone could ask to experience.

On Friday, October 1, a total of 1,100 employees at Cape Canaveral reported to work for the last time. No more space shuttles. No more trips to the Moon. Not even trips to the International Space Station.

In February President Obama called for an end to NASA’s Moon program. In fairness, the U.S. hadn’t put a man there since December 1972, the fifth of the Apollo missions. The spacecraft and Saturn launch vehicles were later used for the Skylab program and the joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz test project.

I can remember John F. Kennedy’s speech to Congress in 1961. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…”

In the 1980s I visited Cape Canaveral on assignment for a magazine and had the opportunity to go out to the launch pad. You cannot imagine how big those Saturn launch vehicles were unless you stood there and looked up at the huge structure, realizing that launching a Moon mission or any other is comparable to putting a skyscraper into outer space.

I confess that I always suspected that our space program was actually a cover for our development of ballistic missiles. The idea of going to the Moon was conceived during the Eisenhower administration in 1960 when many of the early decisions about the development of a missile program took shape.

At the time, the Russians had put Sputnik into space in 1957 and had scored a huge propaganda victory. What it said to Eisenhower and others was that the same missiles that lifted it into outer space could be used against any of our cities. By April 1961 Yuri Gargarin, a Russian, became the first person to fly in space. Americans took notice.

Now the only way to get to the space station is aboard a Russian vehicle. How’s that for irony? There’s a lot of talk about developing a new generation of space vehicles and, since we’ve been using technology developed in the 1950s and 60s, that’s probably a good idea.

Or maybe not? Despite all the Star Wars films and Star Trek television shows, I have my doubts about the wisdom of putting humans in space for any reason. Probably the best space project we have undertaken involving humans was the Hubble Telescope, but it has been other unmanned projects, the Mariner, Voyager, and Cassini flights that have told as just as much or more about the planetary system we’re in.

What we know for sure is that humans are not designed to live in outer space because we are creatures of our extraordinary and singular atmosphere, not the black vacuum of space.

Us old codgers must tip our hats to Kennedy and his predecessor in the White House. We must marvel at the engineering and other scientific genius of those who worked for NASA and gave us reason to take pride in being Americans.

We will not make any more trips to the Moon, but we were the first and last to do so. That speaks to the American exceptionalism that today is in doubt because we have a President more likely to apologize for America than to praise it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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