Few acronyms ever achieve the iconic status of NASA. On Sunday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration turned 65.
Life was different when NASA was activated as a civilian agency on Oct. 1, 1958, in response to the Soviets’ unexpected success with Sputnik 1, earth’s first artificial satellite, in 1957. It replaced the military-based National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
Thanks to my father’s quick efforts, I and a few siblings watched Sputnik slide silently overhead one clear night from the shore near Jones Beach. Perhaps he understood the value I would later place on witnessing this profound change in the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence.
The Soviets string of successes included making cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human in space, and first to orbit Earth. NASA’s struggle to match these early Soviet achievements prompted technological innovations that lead to some of the most dramatic, age-defining moments so far in Earth’s history.
The Mercury and Gemini programs developed most of the technology for the Apollo moon program, and NASA was just a decade old when it sent the first three men to the moon and back aboard Apollo 8 in December 1968. The crew did not land, and their story is often overlooked, so I’ll share some of that in my December Skywatch.
Apollo 9 tested new hardware in low earth orbit so that Apollo 10 could take it to the moon for a dress rehearsal that stopped just shy of landing. Finally, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked their way into history on another world.
In the end, nine Apollo missions — including the “successful failure” of Apollo 13 — carried a total of 24 astronauts to the moon. Six Apollos landed, and 12 humans walked on the moon. (A couple of decades ago, my wife Clara and I met Apollo 12′s Alan Bean, the fourth moon-walker, in a small room in Springfield’s Tower Square as shoppers filed by just feet away outside the door.)
With Apollo’s success, Mars seemed like the logical next step, yet here we are half a century later, still stuck in low-earth orbit. The International Space Station, a joint venture of the United States, Russia, and several other countries, circles Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles — low enough so that the station must regularly fire thrusters to counter the de-orbiting forces of atmospheric drag. It is a monumental achievement that has been continuously occupied for almost 23 years.
Officially, NASA’s new Artemis moon program aims to carry a crew out of low-Earth orbit and past the moon for the first time in half a century next year, with a moon landing slated for 2025. These schedules are ideals, so the real dates could be anyone’s guess.
The Apollo program was supercharged by this country’s fear that the Soviet Union could pull ahead of us technologically. The United States was in no mood to concede, so shortcuts and risks were allowed that would never be accepted today. NASA’s famous “can do” attitude reflected the commitment of thousands of engineers and scientists with popular backing, and had everything to do with why we did not loose a single astronaut on the moon missions.
Credit is also due to the three astronauts that died during ground testing in 1967 when fire quickly spread through the capsule’s high pressure atmosphere of pure oxygen. Tragically, rescuers could not open the hatch against the internal pressure of the cabin. After the fire, NASA officially named the ship Apollo 1 in honor of the crew, switched to a less-combustible mixture, and made other changes that may well have prevented future tragedies in space.
The will and funding that got us to the moon began disappearing as soon as we got there, so going farther was out of the question. The Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003 taught us that “safe-enough” space travel could be harder than we thought.
And Mars is turning out to be much harder than the moon. The Perseverance Rover has been busy stashing Mars soil samples, but NASA’s plans to retrieve them may be flawed, pushing that mission into the 2030s. Just a decade ago, reasonable people thought humans might be there by then.
I admit to some disappointment that the U.S., China, or anyone will not likely get us there before the 2040s. Perhaps NASA spoiled us by getting to the moon less than eight years after President Kennedy declared that this nation commit itself to the task “before the decade is out”? The Apollo moonshots created an optimism for the future of spaceflight that couldn’t anticipate the complications that civilization would face.
I was born into a world of 2.5 billion people, and now share this planet with nearly 8 billion. This knowledge helps put spaceflight into perspective, and makes me wonder what a future we can all share might look like. My birth year is when humanity became capable of causing its own extinction with the detonation of the first true fusion bomb.
As I later became aware, the nuclear threat encouraged a cultural fantasy involving benevolent aliens swooping in to save us from ourselves before it was too late. I never bought in, but the idea found its way into a deep corner of my mind where it remains.
When we discovered the first planet around another star in 1995, NASA had already sent probes to every planet in our Solar System, except Pluto which New Horizon visited in 2015. Now, thanks to NASA’s Kepler space telescope, we know of at least 5,523 exoplanets orbiting 4,112 stars. More than 900 of those have more than one planet.
Adapting our hunter-gatherer brains to life in a cosmos that appears more complicated every day requires that we embrace scientific knowledge even when it exposes earlier visions as naïve.
More people think about the Fermi Paradox (where are all the aliens) even as a lack of evidence continues to plague once fanciful visions of “flying saucers,” and years of searching have not answered the question “are we alone.” We still do not know if universe outside of Earth is teeming with life or essentially dead, and a new humility seems to have tempered hopes that we will recognize signs of civilization among the stars anytime soon.
In 1976, American physicist Albert Bartlett wrote that “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” This might help explain why so many smart people still fail to grasp the threat posed by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which may come sooner than once expected. The possible outcomes of an intelligence explosion are beyond unfathomable.
If all civilizations ultimately face this dilemma, all bets about aliens are off. At this point, I’d be happy to see proof of extraterrestrial life in my lifetime, even if just microbes, and keep hope that our grandchildren will know great things that we do not.
Find rise and set times for the sun and moon, and follow ever-changing celestial highlights in the Skywatch section of the Weather Almanac in The Republican and Sunday Republican.
Patrick Rowan has written Skywatch for The Republican since 1987 and has been a Weather Almanac contributor since the mid 1990s. Rowan lives in the Florence section of Northampton with his wife, Clara, and their cats, Eli and Milo.
