Twenty-five years ago, the world held its breath as Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong made that “giant leap for mankind.”
His hesitant first steps on the lunar surface July 20, 1969, won the race to the moon that had pitted the American spirit, technology and political system against the Soviets.
This week a very different America will celebrate those halcyon days, but many people wonder what Apollo really proved.
“The real legacy of Apollo 11 is not the technology or the pictures,” said former astronaut Eugene Cernan, who in 1972 became the last of 12 astronauts to trek through lunar dust.
“It was the spirit of thousands of people who believed it could be done,” he said. “Unfortunately I don’t know if Americans are enchanted enough today to do anything like it.”
Gone are the grandiose missions. After seven people died in the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and after a federal budget deficit forced cutbacks in space funds, NASA’s mantra is smaller, faster, cheaper.
“We’re now doing business much differently than during the days of Apollo,” said Alan Ladwig, senior policy adviser and spokesman for NASA. “The goal is to do smaller missions more frequently and keep the data coming in constantly. That way, if something goes wrong, we won’t lose all the instruments and experiments everyone had piled onto one large mission.”
NASA critics such as Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, say the agency’s budget has shrunk (from 4 percent to 1 percent of the federal budget) because Congress privately views its main project, the controversial space station, as an entitlement program for aerospace engineers who would be hard-pressed to find other jobs.
“In no way do the scientific experiments justify the overall cost,” he said.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the Russian space program is faring even worse. According to a recent article in the journal Science, the Russian Space Agency still maintains a Mir space station and carries out frequent launches.
However, with economic chaos and the demise of the formerly bloated military establishment, the Russian program is kept in orbit only by collaborating with Western agencies such as NASA, the report said.
Last month, the U.S. and Russia signed an agreement to work toward an international station in space. The plan calls for Americans to work aboard Mir and for Russian cosmonauts to join American crews on space shuttle missions.
Cernan, among other space pioneers, had hoped NASA would have done more since the days of Apollo. “I really thought that we’d be back on the moon before the turn of the century,” he said. “And here we are today without the capability to even do what we did 25 years ago.
“That is a disappointment.”
America officially entered the space race May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy vowed to send a man to the moon and return him safely “before the decade is out.”
“While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will find us last,” Kennedy said before a joint session of Congress.
Just a month earlier, the world had watched as the Soviets sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit. On the heels of Sputnik, the first satellite lofted October 1957, Gagarin’s mission exacerbated American fears that the Russians could dominate the Cold War.
Not easily intimidated, Kennedy proposed a fanciful mission filled with peril and promise-a saga that culminated in the lunar voyage of Apollo 11.
“It was unreal,” said former astronaut Alan Bean, recalling his lunar voyage aboard Apollo 12, four months after Apollo 11. “It wasn’t like a walk through the country or a trip to Paris, it was an adventure so unlike any on Earth.”
Bean, now 62, was the fourth and youngest man (37) to set foot on the moon. An avid painter who resides in his home state of Texas, Bean still works to recapture his experiences on canvas.
Cernan, a Bellwood, Ill., native who works in private industry in Houston, described what it was like to look back at Earth from the moon.
“You stand in the brightest sunlight, surrounded by the blackest black-the infinity of space,” recalled Cernan, who later became a part-time space correspondent for ABC News.
“The only color comes from Earth-the multicolor blues of the oceans and the whites of the clouds. You come to the conclusion that it is just all too beautiful to have happened by accident.”
The Soviets never had the chance to admire the view. Until recently, Moscow claimed it never intended to send a man to the moon. But documents declassified during Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost showed that such a plan had existed.
By 1965 the Soviets’ master space planner, Sergei Korolev, had designed a huge heavy-lift launcher with 30 engines and the power to propel a 75-ton spacecraft into orbit. But the project faltered in 1966 when Korolev died during surgery. The next year, a cosmonaut was killed during a landing, further setting back the program.
The U.S. suffered its own tragedy in 1967, when an electrical fire broke out on the Apollo 1 capsule during a launch rehearsal at Cape Kennedy, trapping the three crewmen inside. Astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White II and Roger Chaffee became the space program’s first casualties.
After revamping some of the vehicle’s systems, NASA plunged ahead by sending astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr. and William Anders into lunar orbit on Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve, 1968.
The Soviets, attempting to counter, tried five successive lunar launches between 1968 and 1972, all of which failed. In 1974, embarrassed officials destroyed all rockets and technology that hinted at their attempt to send a man to the moon, records show.
The 1969 journey of astronauts Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. and Michael Collins to the moon marked the heyday of NASA-the pinnacle of a “mission impossible” approach. However, public interest began to wane after Apollo 11.
The sixth mission to the moon in December 1972, carrying Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt became the last.
“They say there is only one first and many lasts,” Cernan noted. “Still, it’s sad that my reign has had to last so long.”
After Apollo, NASA attempted to infuse new vigor into the space program. Plans were formulated for a docking station that would stay in space, a platform that might serve as a stop-off point for astronauts on their way to Mars.
Hans Mark, professor of aerospace and engineering at the University of Texas and former deputy director of NASA, said space agency officials persuaded the Nixon administration and Congress to build the platform, known as Skylab, out of Apollo hardware leftovers in 1971.
The space shuttle was initiated the following year to ferry Skylab into a safer orbit, Mark said, because the drifting platform could not forever resist the pull of Earth’s gravity. Skylab plummeted to Earth in 1979, ending immediate hopes for a permanent space station and subsequent journey to Mars.
The shuttle might have been NASA’a biggest mistake, observed NASA critic Park. “We can no longer launch unmanned probes except from the shuttle, and the cost of these launches is more than the cost of the probe.”
Experts say each shuttle launch costs $1 billion, while a probe costs $250 million.
Meanwhile, the Soviets built their first space station, the Soyuz-Salyut, and placed it in orbit in 1971. Then came the historic handshake between astronauts and cosmonauts when an Apollo module linked up with the Soyuz in 1975.
With the onset of the Reagan administration, NASA invested itself in the shuttle program, with the eventual goal of using them to assemble a permanent space station in orbit.
But politics doomed the space station. “We had four prime contractors at four different centers,” explained NASA’s Ladwig. “Congressmen wanted to make sure their districts’ center had a big piece of the station.”
Huge cost overruns ensued. Then NASA collapsed from within Jan. 28, 1986, with the Challenger disaster. As NASA’s greatest triumph, the moonwalk, had been televised, so was its hour of greatest misery as seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, plunged to their deaths 73 seconds into the launch.
NASA returned to space 2 1/2 years later after major management reforms. The shuttle had performed capably, but design flaws in the Hubble Space Telescope again caused critics to question the credibility and purpose of the space program.
In addition, NASA is beginning to contract with private companies, which already have demonstrated that they can build and launch satellites cheaper than NASA.
Last year the budget for a much less ambitious space station passed in Congress by only one vote.
“The public has always been supportive of space,” said former NASA deputy director Mark. “But people don’t care about it on a deep level anymore. No politician gets elected on the issue.”
Even critics, such as Park, believe there is a need for space exploration, but not with people. Robots could do the job just fine, he said, and the wonders they discover might galvanize the world, just as the Apollo astronauts once did.
“We would see through their eyes and touch with their hands-in a sense we’d all be aboard,” Park said.
