Postscript to Apollo: Wasted Years : Need to Explore Space Remains, Regardless of Naysayers

On the evening of July 20, the Arts and Entertainment cable television network ran the complete coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing and walk. It served only to refresh memories that will remain until death. Who can forget that night 20 years ago? Who can forget the pride of nationhood? Who can forget the excitement and the wonder?

Evidently quite a few people have chosen to do so. The media tell us that Woodstock, for example, was far more significant--despite the fact that more Americans traveled to Florida to watch Apollo 11 blast off than to have their ears blasted and their minds altered in that muddy New York pasture.

That false impression lingers to this date. It is a routine matter for hundreds of thousands of Americans to drive their cars and campers to the causeways near Cape Canaveral or the desert flatlands of California to watch the space shuttle launch and land. Yet social critics would tell us that the fact that so many American citizens make those pilgrimages is less significant than a shrill demonstration for some social issue or other--in which, of course, the media has greater interest.

Perhaps this fact demonstrates the nature of criticism, that its function is fundamentally negative, limiting--and blind.

Dr. Johnson’s most devastating and immortal observation is that it is within the capacity of anyone to do nothing, a fact as true of the 18th Century as it is the 20th. How easy it is to speak of the worthlessness of a project, how the money might be spent on some present need, how there must be better ways to do things, how we have more immediate concerns. It is the sort of vision that condemns a society to its present forever instead of leading it to the future within its grasp.

It came home to me, watching A&E; that night, that the do-nothings have almost won. Watching the tapes of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, it came home very powerfully indeed that we had wasted 20 complete years. Scarcely had the astronauts returned when NASA’s funding was slashed, then slashed again. And why? To help the poor, of course. “A nation that could go to the moon,” carped those on the political left who never had any use for Apollo except as a counterpoint for their own arguments, could just as easily take all that money and solve America’s crushing social problems.

Well, they’ve had their 20 years to solve their social problems. Vast mountains of funds have been disposed of, whole new bureaucracies created--and those who made it all happen now say that the problem is worse than ever, that we still cannot afford a space program,that a nation that has gone to the moon can and ought to solve its social problems first.

It was this sort of vision that made Portugal a world power.

Any decent cynic could observe that if the problems are not solved, then the ability of the social reformers to do so is seriously in doubt. An indecent critic might say that the War on Poverty was fought with the same skill as that other war given us by the Johnson Administration. In either case, deducting a few percentage points from 20 years’ worth of programs would manifestly have had no effect on the unsolved problems at all.

But it would have given America something that the Soviet Union has--a permanent space station where real people could do real work. What might have come from such a facility? Who can say? You have to go there to find out.

Exploration is part and parcel of American history. It is said that we ought not to go forward with a major space program without assistance from our allies. Lewis and Clark, the first great American explorers, traveled a land in which our European friends had little interest--the purchase itself had its detractors, of course; one wonders if some of those who opposed the Louisiana Purchase had heard Dr. Johnson’s dictum firsthand--and along the way they discovered about a third of what we now call America. The bread we eat comes from the region that was once called the Great American Desert. Now we call it Kansas.

Doubtless there were pressing social problems at the time, but it is instructive that those problems are now the subject of dry history, while the subject of the purchase and exploration are a living part of our country.

It is a fact of history that those who press outward always bring home discoveries that are useful. In simple business terms, investment in the future pays better than investment in the past. It is similarly true that you go to strange regions not for what you know is there, but for what you do not know. That’s why it’s called exploration. And only people can do that, because only people can look about and truly see things. Machines cannot. Exploration means people.

The one advantage in exploration that did not exist so much in earlier times is that getting there really is half the fun. The space program is the future. It really is that simple. The poor may always be with us. Certainly the naysayers will. And the future will come whether we like it or not. The question is whether or not we will be there to meet and make it. The naysayers have had their 20 years, have spent their mountains of funds and have produced slim results by their own admission. Isn’t it time to give somebody else a chance?