The View From Here . . .

By Bob Morgan, Jr.

Forty years ago this week, on July 20, 1969, all of us of a certain age sat transfixed by grainy images on a television screen as Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, and onto the surface of the moon, uttering his famous words, "One small leap for man, one giant leap for mankind". He was soon followed on the moon by another astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, while a third, Michael Collins, remained aboard the command module, Columbia. The lunar module stayed on the moon for 22 hours before the mission began its return to earth.

Apollo 11 was considerably riskier than most people at the time realized. As an interesting article in the June Popular Mechanics magazine reveals, 17 steps had to go right in the mission, and some were close calls. For example, approaching the moon, the lunar module fuel supply was running out, with the craft too high for a crash landing and falling too quickly to abort the mission. It landed in a crater just in time. And, starkly, there was no contingency plan to rescue the astronauts in the event that they were marooned on the moon. It was recently revealed that Richard M. Nixon, the president during the Apollo 11 flight, had prepared a speech in the event that the astronauts were unable to return.

1969 was in many ways a difficult year (though not as hard or eventful as 1968) with the Vietnam War continuing under President Nixon, who was launching his Vietnamization strategy, but the space mission was a source of national unity. The late Walter Cronkite shouted "go, baby, go" on the air as Apollo 11 departed. A giant banner headline in The New York Times, MEN WALK ON MOON, commemorated the occasion and the astronauts were honored in a huge Broadway ticker tape parade on August 13.

Rather strangely, the momentum of the United States space program slowed after the successful Apollo 11 mission. The last manned voyage to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972 and the American space agency, NASA, has been plagued by a number of disasters in recent years, including the destruction of the Challenger mission in 1986 and the Columbia space shuttle in 2003.

Nevertheless, as the considerable interest in the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission demonstrates, space still intrigues us and there is still sentiment for reviving the glory days of the space programs in the 1960's. In 2004, President George W. Bush talked about another manned mission to the moon by 2020, although not much happened after that. For his part, Buzz Aldrin has recently been urging that the focus of exploration be switched to Mars. "It is the only other habitable planet," he has said. "We have sent many rovers there and we have found conditions there that I feel can be made suitable for human existence much easier than the moon can." Mr. Aldrin's solution for the much greater distance to Mars is what he calls the "hop, skip and jump" method, which would involve stopoffs on Phobos, a moon of Mars.

The feasibility of an expanded space program is a difficult issue, balancing potential very useful advances in scientific knowledge against the many competing needs here on earth. But also on the positive side of the ledger is the possibility of another tremendous uplift of human spirit like the one on that distant July day 40 years ago.