Screaming Penguin

The moon landing took place a half decade before I was born, so I can't share in the personal nostalgia. Still, I can't help but feel a loose connection to the events forty years ago. I was a NASA junky as a kid. My mother and I used to write to NASA's PR office for pictures of astronauts, stickers of mission patches, the ever present (in my house, anyway) "Spinoff" publication from NASA -- a combination glossy photobook and press kit for the science NASA was doing at the time focused on the earth-based applications. It was all fantastical to me. Going from Childhood to Adolescence in the period between Star Trek and TNG, and during the heyday of Skylab, the Space Shuttle and the always about to happen space station, NASA was better than any Sci Fi on TV. I read and re-read copies of Odyssey magazine (an astronomy magazine for kids), and spent my week home with the chicken pox in fourth grade tracing the lines of a solar eclipse shone through my telescope onto a sheet of paper every 20 seconds. The moon landings were something of legend: tales of great men in great times doing great things.

Today the moon landings have a somewhat different meaning to me. They represent and apex in our nation's growth. The Singularitists might argue that we never slowed down, but the effort has never seen more national in effort. The sadness that it was born of the red scares of the 50s lingers, along with the fear that it is only in the face of militarism that we can reach the stars. It is also an appreciation for President Kennedy, who shared President Eisenhower's fear of the military-industrial complex in the wake of World War II and the rise of the Cold War. I seen in my old age that efforts like NASA and the Peace Corps that were born of the Kennedy administration were efforts to channel that national mobilization into non-military areas. Sadly, today, we can't even cancel an ill performing and unnecessary fighter jet program because of the power of "the complex." If only NASA programs had gleaned the political insight to spread their operations to a third of the congressional districts in the country, rather than focus on a few small locations.

I also believe, as Stephen Hawking has discussed at length, that we need to leave this world. We know our cosmic-time horizon survival depends on it, but also I think it is simply the genetic imperative to be fruitful. We obviously don't have the technology now, but we won't get it without specifically working on it. While many technologies might rise up from work at home, space travel isn't going to be one of them. As Carl Sagan noted, we waded ankle deep into the ocean of space, then retreated back to the beach for years. Perhaps this is the way it has always been with man. Early peoples set out on mighty adventures in what we would call a souped-up canoe today, crossing seas and oceans to populate the Pacific and Americas thousands of years before humans had "proper" Ocean-going vessels. Certainly power generation, materials science and propulsion systems could be advanced greatly before we will be able to move from outriggers to flyboats in the exploration of space. But I have a hard time imagining something more powerful, more meaningful, more captivating for us as a society to spend our efforts towards. At the risk of invoking the racists nature of the past, it is time for a Third Manifest Destiny. We don't choose to go to the planets and on to the stars, it is our birthright and our burden.

Four decades ago our nation did something. Something that captivated the entire world and made us all realize how great humanity really is. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins are names that will live in the history books, but it was not a feat of individual prowess, ingenuity, or courage. It was an effort undertaken by a nation. Surely we can do it again.