Adumbration

Neil Armstrong died recently.  I am old enough to have watched the first moon landing take place, so must have been among the (hundreds of) millions of people who watched that event take place with only the cislunar time delay.  It seems like I was in the basement with the family, crowded around the tiny B/W set that Dad used to regularly watch the evening news during those years.  Or maybe the local grade school had some sort of large screen TV that we all watched from a greater distance.  In either case, human memory is faulty enough for me to think I might have been somewhere else completely, with the neighbors, for example, and my recollections are all mixed up with the other manned space missions that took place in that period.

Time has a good obituary on the man, recounting years leading up to and after those famous steps were taken, and I am very willing to believe that his was one of the bravest and most cool heads on the planet.  And while I can't draw the direct connection in my memories, I am also willing to aver that his was one of the influences that led to my learning to fly, and to a carreer learning about and contributing to airplanes, spacecraft, and the various systems that make up and interact with them.

The death of a historic personage gives rise to many prisms created to view the past and future - Martin Robbins in The Guardian takes the opportunity to bemoan how his present world does not align with what he imagined as a child the future might hold.

"I'm angry though, I really am. The science fiction books and TV shows I devoured in the 1980s promised me a world – no, worlds – of exploration: spaceships and aliens whizzing around a galaxy of possibilities where anything could happen in the next half hour. Now, in 2012, I have to face the possibility that I could live to be an old man in a world where the only memories our civilization has of planetary exploration are a few grainy, black and white images, carefully preserved from a century before; dusty footprints and scraps of metal abandoned in a place we never go."

We might tell ourselves that the moon landing was about exploration and science, but perspectives of time and profession show the years of the space race in the context of the cold war.   Those Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions were footnotes to the main story, that the United States could launch the biggest god-damn bomb in the history of the universe and land it in the middle of the Kremlin.  The US was spending untold billions on nuclear bombs and missiles, positioned all over the planet and aimed almost completely at what was then the Soviet empire.  Those moon rockets and their guidance systems were showing the world that nothing could be made safe.  The USSR saw the way the winds were blowing and gave up on a moon landing before they hardly got started, which was arguably the beginning of the end for the vaunted socialist economic powerhouse - they had looted all they could and were heading toward the dustbin of history. 

"I don't give a damn if robotic probes make more sense. I don't give a damn about the views of academic committees or health and safety. I don't give a damn about the supposed costs – money spent on space exploration is invested in science and technology right here on Earth, and has paid for itself many times over. There's no point having a great civilization if all we do is sit on our little rock and just survive."

When I think now of the accomplishment of the lunar landing, it is often to consider what else might have been done with those billions of dollars.  Suppose that instead of building bombs, rockets and guidance systems, we were able to devote our spare time and energy to understanding cell biology and genetics, and wonder if so how much farther we would be down the path of understanding sickness and disease.

I tend to think that Mr. Robbins and others who make such claims do so because they don't admit how such proposals require other people pay the bills for their vision of the future, with the currency of those bills paid in terms of the other goals people hold, forcing them to give up on their alternative visions of what makes for the good life.