I don’t have anything original to say about the Apollo moon landings, but they did influence my life and so this anniversary is an occasion to reflect.
When Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and onto the moon, I had just turned seven. I barely remember watching the great event on TV, and I’m sure its significance didn’t sink in at the time. My parents were more interested in the other big news of the late 60’s: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, political assassinations. My brother and I were more interested in whether the Cardinals would get to the World Series.
But as I got a little older, and the Apollo landings continued, I began to show serious geekish tendencies. I bought and assembled plastic models of spaceships. I checked out all the astronomy books from my grade school library, and learned to identify the stars and constellations. In art class I drew pictures of imagined rockets that would take people to every planet in the Solar System. Eventually I grew up and became a scientist.
The moon landings had little direct impact on science. Sure, we learned more about the moon’s geology, but there were no big surprises. The real impact of the moon landings was cultural. Bob Park said it best:
How can Apollo 11 be described? It was a feat of skill and daring unmatched in history. The Apollo moon landing transcended the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for world domination. It was a source of pride and inspiration for the whole human race, symbolizing the heights that humans are capable of reaching and overshadowing every space mission before or since.
The problem with putting on a great show is that everyone expects an encore. Where shall we go next?
And our Solar System offers no good answer to that question. The next nearest world after the moon is a hundred times farther away. That world is Venus, where the CO2 atmosphere has created a run-away greenhouse effect, scorching the surface with temperatures high enough to melt lead--and with an atmospheric pressure that would crush a nuclear submarine. Humans will never walk on Venus.
How about Mars? It’s only a little farther than Venus, and much more hospitable: very little atmosphere, and about as cold as Antarctica. Astronauts in spacesuits would be no worse off there than on the moon. The problem is the distance.
It took three days for the Apollo astronauts to reach the moon. Traveling at the same speed, it would take about a year to reach Mars. Ah, but that was 40 years ago. Surely rocket technology has improved exponentially since then, so we can travel much faster...?
Actually, no. Rocket technology was already quite mature by 1969, and the laws of physics don’t permit any major, straightforward improvements. Perhaps we could shorten the travel time to a few months, but nobody has any idea how to get to Mars faster than that. We could probably keep a crew alive on such a long flight, but only at tremendous cost.
So human space flight has retreated to low-earth orbit, just above the atmosphere. Since 1972, no human has traveled farther from earth’s surface than Cape Canaveral is from Houston. Most of the scientific research that goes on during these orbital missions is aimed at understanding how the human body deteriorates during long periods of weightlessness.
Besides months of weightlessness, astronauts bound for Mars would be exposed to the serious radiation hazards of interplanetary space. And even if these hazards can be mitigated, the risk in such a journey would be tremendous. If anything goes wrong (think Apollo 13), the chance of a successful bailout is inversely proportional to the distance from earth. A failed mission to Mars would be a tragedy not just for the crew, but for all of humanity.
If the real goal is to inspire our children, I think there are better ways. It’s the robotic spacecraft that do NASA’s scientific work, touring the Solar System and peering at the distant universe from above earth’s obscuring atmosphere. Many of the technologies used by these spacecraft, to see and sense and transmit data, have advanced exponentially since 1969. Instead of watching a fuzzy transmission on TV, today’s children can use the internet to explore the surface of Mars or visualize the patterns in the cosmic background radiation.
Let us therefore celebrate human space flight by giving it a hero’s funeral--and get on with the business of exploring the universe with 21st Century technology.
Dan
ReplyDeleteI found your piece on the Apollo 11 project interesting, although it seemed to drift off that subject pretty quickly.
I was a young and very junior engineer, only a couple years out of Weber College, when I worked on the Apollo project for TRW systems in Redondo Beach. I worked in a 15 man group of engineers (yes man, no women other than secretaries were present). The 15 engineers, of which I was the most jr. were led by 5 Phd guys from Cal Tech & MIT. To this day I stand amazed at how brilliant these guys were. Going to work every day was a real treat, just to be around these guys and doing their scud work was amazing.
Our project was called LEMAGS - that stood for Lunar Excursion Module Abort Guidance System. It was the back up system, with it's own computer - one a dozen or so aboard at take off. The system was designed to get the landing module back to the command module if something went wrong from the moment of separation in moon orbit, to the landing, during time on the surface and during the accent back to the command module. It was mostly about orbital mechanics - something I hadn't even heard of before I went to work at TRW.
Fortunately the system was never called on as the primary systems all worked perfectly. The one time our system was used was during the Apollo 13 mission. It was reprogrammed to handle mid course corrections - something it wasn't designed for. There was a crucial electrical shortage on board and they had to shut down most systems. Ours was chosen because it used the least amount of power and it could control thrusters on the LEM which was used for those corrections.
Our contract ended with the Apollo project and I was re-assigned to Minuteman III guidance. I didn't like the whole MMIIIconcept after I got a load of just what it was we were doing - writing guidance programs for operational missiles targeting Chinese cities for destruction - so I quit. I also quit the whole aerospace industry and went into "show biz" and never looked back.
My five year sojourn in the space biz was the halcyon years on my life however, especially because of the brilliant engineers I got to hang out with and the historical significance of the project which was very much in the air every day at work.
Ozboy,
DeleteMy father worked on the abort guidance system for the LEM. He worked for Litton which was hired by TRW to help with the abort guidance system. When my father passed away , my mother decided to move. When i was visiting one day, i rummaged through a few boxes of dads stuff she was tossing. Buried in a box I found some of his abort guidance system papers along with the front page of the LA times for July 21, 1969. Jackpot! (Unfortunately, she had already tossed boxes and more boxes of old tubes my dad saved to fix things with)
I have very vivid memories of watching the landing on a black and white CRT TV and my dad using a polaroid and an argus to take picture of the screen. Those and working on the sidewinder at knots were the days he looked back on with pride.
My dads name is was Bill Schoenbaum. Was curious if you knew him. He didn't talk much about work or WWII for that mater. Would be interested to get a peers perspective.
If you would like to see the papers i found , contact me through google.
Karl