Reflections on the 55th Anniversary of Apollo 11

Reflections on the 55th Anniversary of Apollo 11

Larry Faltz

This article was originally published in the July 2019 SkyWAAtch, the newsletter of Westchester Amateur Astronomers. The issue was dedicated to the 50^th anniversary of the first Moon landing. It included several members’ reminiscences and the complete text of President Kennedy’s address at Rice University in 1963, best known for the lines “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Recently, I was reading about the slow pace of progress NASA’s Artemis program and the difficulties with Boeing’s Starliner at the ISS. I thought about the rapid progress of the manned space program leading up to Apollo 11, in comparison with what has happened in the 5-year interval between 2019 and 2024.

The first Saturn V rocket was launched in November 1967, just 13 months before Apollo 8 and 19 months before Apollo 11. When first proposed in 2005, the Space Launch System was to fly in 2016. Artemis 1 wasn’t launched until November 2022. A crewed mission to circle the Moon, just like Apollo 8, isn’t scheduled until September 2025, a hiatus of 34 months, and who knows if NASA will keep to that schedule. Artemis 3, to land humans on Luna for the first time since 1972, isn’t scheduled to fly until 2026. With our more advanced technology and half a century of experience in space (the many solar system missions, Mars landers, Hubble, and JWST come to mind), the slow pace of human exploration is frustrating.

In any case, when I re-read my essay, I thought the personal perspective might be of interest to CloudyNights members, especially those who were born after the Apollo program and didn’t experience the early days of the space race. I just retitled it so as not to confuse potential readers.

I am a retired physician and an active member of Westchester Amateur Astronomers, our local club. I was President from 2013-2018 and edit SkyWAAtch.

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There’s one obvious, unavoidable, terrifying thought about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing: I’m old!

Although as amateur astronomers we think about and look at the Moon all the time, this special anniversary made memories flow, like the taste of Proust’s madeleines. I was 21 in that glorious year of 1969, old enough to feel capable, young enough to retain flashes of invulnerability. The year started with Joe Namath and the underdog NY Jets winning Superbowl III and was climaxed by a free ticket (for a really good seat) to the Thanksgiving night concert of the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden. In between, there was the great pennant run and World Series win of the Mets, rock concerts at the Fillmore East and Woodstock, which I attended with my then-girlfriend Michelle, who lived in the apartment across the airshaft from that summer’s tenement abode on West 104th Street. We lasted from the opening until about 11 am the next morning, when, soaked, tired, hungry and dirty we made the long trek to the car and headed back to the city for a shower and food. But we had been there.

That summer, after my first year at the NYU School of Medicine I got a job working as a lab assistant for a biochemistry professor. His research interest was the structure of a particular enzyme involved in photosynthesis. Once a week I walked over to a greengrocer on Second Avenue and 32^nd Street and carried a bushel of fresh spinach leaves back to a sub-basement laboratory. Some of NYU Medical Center, on First Avenue between 30th and 34th Streets, was built on landfill that replaced the original Kip’s Bay, where 4,000 British troops had landed on September 15, 1776, a tactical move that forced Washington’s army to retreat to Harlem. The lab was in the most subterranean part of the research building, isolated and damp. It was used by Severo Ochoa, from whom I learned molecular genetics. He won the 1959 Nobel Prize for elucidating the synthesis of RNA. The great man wasn’t around that summer, but I had the company of a tribe of unnaturally gigantic cockroaches, some of them four or five inches long. They made a loud thud when they hit the floor after I swept them off the lab bench. They looked more like lobsters than insects, and I harbored the somewhat paranoid thought that the brilliant Dr. Ochoa may have created them to guard the lab in his absence, Golem insects to do his bidding.

The lab had a special “cold room.” Most cold rooms, and I had worked in several by that time, were kept at refrigerator temperature, usually 4 degrees Centigrade (37° Fahrenheit) in order to inhibit chemical reactions that degrade proteins. This cold room had a second cold room inside of it that was kept at -10° C (14° F). This would freeze the spinach so that any natural proteolytic digestion would stop completely. The inner cold room had a giant 4-liter stainless steel spark-proof Waring blender. Large batches of highly flammable acetone were required as the solvent for the first step of the enzyme extraction. I was given a tattered, minimally insulated coat that offered little relief from the cold during the hours I spent grinding the leaves into a thick, combustible soup. When I emerged I was covered with a fine green, frosty mist and smelled, naturally, like spinach salad. Fortunately, Michelle seemed to like spinach.

Flash Gordon’s spaceship (1936)

That summer, the news was all abuzz about the coming moonshot, and even though I had more direct age-related interests and budding professional commitments to distract me, I still paid attention.  How could I not? I think I was a typical child of the 1950’s pre-space age, watching Captain Video and Flash Gordon reruns (originally a serial for movie theaters) on our black-and-white vacuum tube television. I went to movies about flying saucers and aliens with gigantic brains. I was home with the measles the week that Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie” showed Forbidden Planet five times a day every day, and I got very familiar with the Krell and Monsters from the Id (although when I asked for more information about what the Id was, my parents didn’t give me a straight answer). I was taken to the Hayden Planetarium a few times a year for live star shows, which I enjoyed immensely. I started diligently following America’s space program after the shock of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The educational curriculum at P.S. 96 in the Bronx got an enormous science kick following the Soviet success, and my 5th and 6th grade classes were filled with batteries, buzzers, lights, lenses and more math in what was already a fairly rigorous math curriculum. Two months after Sputnik, most of the school watched on television as the Navy’s Vanguard I, our first attempt at a satellite, blew up on the launch pad after rising a total of four feet (dubbed “Kaputnik” by wags in the press). Fortunately, eight weeks later on January 31, 1958 Wernher von Braun’s Juno rocket, an Army project, successfully placed JPL’s Explorer 1 into Earth orbit. Von Braun claimed he had been ready to launch in 1956, but the Nazi military past of the Juno’s creators was deemed by President Eisenhower to be too provocative for what was supposed to be a peaceful program during the Cold War.

Kaputnik, the Vanguard 1 launch, December 6, 1957

Even the science curriculum in junior high school was amplified, my success in class spurred no doubt by wanting to impress our young, blonde, buxom 9th grade science teacher, hormones raging as they do in junior high. At the Bronx High School of Science, great science education and strong math were the core, and I even learned computer programming. Science was at that time (1961-1964) the only high school in the country that had its own computer. We were on the cutting edge, but it’s revealing that in comparison terms, the cell phones that students carry in their pockets today are over a billion times more powerful than the room-sized, punch-card eating, 10 characters-per-second typewriter outputting but seemingly miraculous IBM 1620.

All over the world, America’s global preeminence was being challenged. The national sense of invulnerability and historical righteousness that followed the end of the Second World War began to fade. A variety of international crises challenged our fragile omnipotence: the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the U-2 incident, Khrushchev’s shoe-banging and threats at the U.N., Castro’s victory in Cuba followed quickly by the Bay of Pigs fiasco and then the missile crisis that brought us to within 30 seconds of nuclear war, and then the slowly unfolding disaster of Vietnam. Our allies met similar defeats: Dien Bien Phu and Algeria for the French, the independence of India and Pakistan and the Suez fiasco for the British, decolonialization of Africa and the Mideast for both. We lost another round in the space race when the Soviets placed Yuri Gagarin in orbit on April 12, 1961. But we stayed in the fight. President John Kennedy told Congress a month later that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth…. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation.”

Mercury, Gemini and then Apollo proceeded with public interest waxing when a breakthrough occurred and waning when events more relevant to one’s personal life took over. Of course Alan Shepherd’s suborbital flight on May 5, 1961 and John Glenn’s 3-orbit mission on February 20, 1962 were widely covered and Ed White’s 23-minute spacewalk from Gemini 4 on June 3, 1965 got a lot of play as I recall. The flights became a bit routine, their success expected and the drama less intense. By 1967 the news most relevant to people my age was about Vietnam. The public’s attachment to the concept of men in space did increase a bit when Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in mid-1968. We flocked to see it, often under the influence of controlled substances, and basked in its meticulous wide-screen vision of a future in space. Even though the psychedelic ending was confusing to many, if you could figure it out it held the promise of transformation and transcendence, core hippie values.

Then, just before Christmas 1968 and one month after a truly earthshaking event—the release of the Beatles’ White Album—Apollo 8 was launched, the first manned spaceflight out of the Earth’s gravitational field. It was a confident conclusion to a year that began with the disastrous Tet Offensive in Vietnam, continued with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Columbia uprising (as a senior there I was an eyewitness), the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the election of Richard Nixon. I watched the live Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast, with the Earth rising over the Moon’s limb and the astronauts reciting Genesis. As exalting as it was, I was a bit uneasy, since I’m not one who thinks that science and religion can mix. I figured though that it was just a traditional American incantation. After all, “In God We Trust” is still on our dollar bills, and even non-believers like dollar bills. I wasn’t as upset as the well-known militant atheist Madeline Murray O’Hair, who sued NASA in an attempt to ensure that further Apollo missions would be explicitly prohibited from transmitting readings of scripture. O'Hair v. Paine, 397 U.S. 531 was thrown out for “lack of jurisdiction” (did it need to be filed in a lunar court?). As an aside, Murray, her son and granddaughter were murdered in 1995 and their bodies dismembered and buried, a rather biblical martyrdom-style ending, you might think.

Apollo 11 was a more concentrated experience. The publicity buildup was effective in spite of continued bad news from Vietnam and ever-accelerating anti-war protests at home. Everyone realized this was a risky and momentous step. It was an opportunity for America to win at last. Kennedy’s ghost was frequently evoked. Everyone in my generation remembers the exact moment that they heard about John Kennedy’s assassination, as everyone in my parents’ generation remembered where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor. I am sure fewer remember exactly where they were when they heard “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” at 4:17 P.M. EDT on July 20th, but I recall it distinctly. I was in my somewhat beat-up but very cool 1964 Alfa Romeo Giulia convertible, on the Meadowbrook Parkway in Long Island heading to a friend’s house. I was listening to WINS, the AM news station. Since I had to pay attention to the road, I wasn’t really keyed into the drama of the approach, but I distinctly recall the astronauts’ radio transmission of “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Later we watched the live feed from the surface. I followed the rest of the mission until the return to Earth on the 24th.

Armstrong and Aldrin planting the American flag on the Moon. This is a frame from a 16mm movie camera mounted in the window of the Lunar Excursion Module that was run at a slow frame rate to capture events on the surface.
NASA image ID #S69-40308.

Although Apollo 11 held the attention of America and the world (NASA estimates 20% of the world’s population watched Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the lunar surface), the glow of triumph in the space race was short-lived. Americans are like cats: they are attracted by bright shiny things, but only temporarily. It didn’t take long to start hearing “If we can send a man to the Moon, why can’t we….” [build senior center over here or a school over there, feed starving children, provide housing for the homeless, cure cancer, etc.]. To much of the public the Moon landing began to be more of a trope than an actual technological and scientific achievement. It was something that made other wishes and even fantasies that much more achievable, reality notwithstanding. Issues with greater impact on Americans’ lives took precedence, as one might expect. Will my child get a good education? Will I die of a disease that could have been cured if only the research had been done? Will I be drafted and killed in a swamp fighting a useless, clearly lost war? Americans’ expectations for social progress and economic comfort were inevitably amplified by President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. There had been initiatives in voting rights, health care for the elderly and poor, education funding and many projects in the so called “War on Poverty.” President Richard Nixon’s 1971 “War on Cancer” is another example. Cancer’s still around. But the funds were headed in those directions.

Apollo 20, the final mission in the series, had been canceled after Apollo 12’s successful landing in November 1969. Apollo 18 and 19 were canceled after the failed Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Nixon tried to cancel Apollos 16 and 17 in 1971, but was rebuffed by then Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (and later Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense) Caspar Weinberger. By 1972, Apollo was “been there, done that” and there seemed to be little public outcry at its demise. Apollo 18’s Lunar Module is displayed at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, NY. About the only sign of continued public interest in space travel was the flowering popularity of Star Trek reruns. The program didn’t fare that well during its three years (1966-69) of network production, but by 1972 it was sprouting all over the country in syndication, eventually generating a whole franchise of TV shows and movies, not to mention whetting the public’s appetite for Star Wars and its sequels, prequels and spin-offs.

Only to a smaller and less vocal constituency did it appear critical that we continue to explore the Moon’s formation and geologic history with manned spacecraft. But the daunting technological challenges and enormous costs to continue lunar missions or maintain a presence on the Moon couldn’t be justified absent the kind of competition with our Soviet Union enemy that propelled the space program from Mercury to Apollo. It’s interesting to look at our current perceptions of Chinese space programs. We do our thing, and we let them do theirs. It doesn’t seem like a competition, at least from our side.

NASA shifted to Skylab and then the ISS in order to examine the effects of prolonged (longer than Apollo 17’s twelve days) space travel on human beings and to perform experiments in zero gravity. To make good on President Kennedy’s claim that America’s intentions in space were peaceful, the low-Earth orbiting space station became an international project, presaged by the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. American rocket development turned to the Space Shuttle, which never lived up to its one-launch-a-week promise. The last Saturn V was launched in 1973, and since then no rocket has come anywhere near its thrust and payload-carrying capacity. Most of the ISS was brought up in small pieces. The Saturn V could place 140,000 kg into low Earth orbit; the Space Shuttle managed just 27,000 kg.

NASA’s got very good at orbiting telescopes and ever more capable robotic Solar System probes. For the Moon that meant primarily orbiting survey instruments like Clementine or Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. For Mars, where erudite opinion held that the greater prize could be found, orbiting spacecraft, landers and rovers all made scientific breakthroughs. The two Voyagers, with their spectacular images of the outer planets and their moons, impressed even the average scientifically disinterested citizen. Mysteries of all of the planets, as well as Ceres, Vesta, Pluto, Apophis and a bunch of comets and smaller asteroids have been probed by a plethora of cleverly designed and managed missions. We learned much and encountered new mysteries that beckoned further exploration.

There is increasing appeal to return to the Moon as a prelude for human spaceflight to Mars. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have developed privately funded space exploration, with Musk’s SpaceX successfully launching its own rockets including the formidable Falcon-9 Heavy, capable of placing up to 57,000 kg of payload in low Earth orbit. Bezos showed his “Blue Moon” lander, but to me it’s not transformational, just a modern riff on the Apollo Lunar Module.

In December 2017 President Trump announced “Space Policy Directive 1,” which told NASA to develop a plan to return to the Moon and then to Mars. The details were released in mid-May.[1] It’s based on a public-private partnership. Eleven companies are to supply the hardware for a mission to the Moon’s South Pole by 2024 and for a “sustainable” presence beginning in 2028. Some 37 launches would be required just to get going. The cost? Not stated, and for a good reason: no one knows, but it’s likely to be over $100 billion and I suspect substantially more. The Trump administration asked to fund the initial phase out of money intended for Pell education grants, something that Democrats in the House wouldn’t allow. An excellent analysis of the technical and political aspects of the program was published in May 2019 by the tech web site ArsTechnica.[2] The technical challenges in NASA’s plan are formidable, but they are insignificant compared to the political and economic obstacles.

Musk’s long-term goal is human habitation of Mars and economic development of space, which means mining for valuable minerals on planets or asteroids or harvesting helium-3 from the Moon or Jupiter. Bezos’s vision is for “millions” of human beings to live in space in artificial space colonies. Reality has a way of crushing fantasy. Astronaut Scott Kelly’s genome was altered (and not for the better…he wasn’t turned into The Hulk or Spiderman, which might have been useful transformations) by spending a year in space. This provides a serious but hardly unexpected warning about the deleterious health consequences of prolonged space travel. As for gigantic colonies in space, like those seen at the end of Interstellar and the massive space city Yorktown in Star Trek: Beyond, there are some daunting issues that seem unresolvable by current or even foreseeable technology. Basic biology and physics constrain solutions to many problems. How do you make steel in space, or smelt aluminum? Where do you put the waste that can’t be recycled? How are our fellow-travelling microorganisms going to react or perhaps evolve, and what new public health threats will arise in closed environments? How can we have transparent domes when thick lead is needed to intercept cosmic rays and particles of the solar wind? If the solution to radiation protection is a magnetic field, how can we make one equivalent to the Earth’s without scrambling every electronic device that’s anywhere near it? And perhaps underlying everything: what is the economic structure that makes such a society functional? To riff on Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 campaign slogan: “It’s rocket science, but it’s also the economy, stupid.”

Absent an astonishing breakthrough in energy technology, such as broadcast power, portable fusion reactors, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Quantum Improbability Drive, real space exploration, 1950’s or Star Trek style, is inconceivable. Computers are perhaps the only technology in which we’ve made truly transformational strides, and frankly much of that progress seems to have recently been used to make us stupider and more subject to surveillance. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t go back to the Moon for scientific purposes, or even travel to Mars to determine whether life once (or still) existed there, although the likelihood of us bringing terrestrial life and contaminating the planet is probably greater than that of finding indigenous life. The Moon is an ideal place to site research telescopes that could be operated robotically with a skeleton maintenance crew, who would live in shielded domiciles. Even small telescopes would have real value for discovery, as was explained at a WAA lecture in 2016 by Jon Morse, former White House space advisor and head of BoldlyGo, the private space research organization. China has a small ultraviolet telescope on its Chang'e 3 lander, which has been operating since 2013. It is sensitive to magnitude 13.

M33 by Chang'e 3’s 5.9” RC ultraviolet telescope on the Moon.

There is much to be said for continuing and enhancing the robotic exploration of the Solar System and the deployment of ever more capable space observatories, missions whose funding would undoubtedly be parasitized by hyperexpensive lunar colonization. Progress in robotic astronomy has been exhilarating, and although it lacks the drama and passion of human exploration, to the educated mind it claims equal or greater value if the goal is to understand the universe. About the only bit of space exploration humans can do better than robots is dig, and I’m not sure that’s going to be true in the future. Occasional short-term manned missions to the Moon and Mars are reasonable for scientific purposes. It may really be just a sales pitch to say they are a prelude to the mass transformation of Homo sapiens to Homo cosmos. In any case, the way things are going down on Earth, mass colonization of space can’t possibly come soon enough to save us from ourselves as we continue to make the world uninhabitable through climate change and species extinction.

And yet…

NASA’s new lunar effort, known as Artemis (the Greek goddess of the Moon), was introduced with these words:

NASA’s Apollo Program was a stunning demonstration of the United States’ strength of will and its economic, political and technological power – a feat that inspired generations of young people. It was fuel to the fire of the American consciousness that brought on a revolution, not only in science and technology, but also in our passion for exploration and discovery.

Just as Apollo inspired a generation 50 years ago, NASA continues to inspire with feats of science and exploration today. If we bring together the capabilities and resources of our international and commercial partners to take us forward to the Moon and on to Mars, we will demonstrate to people around the world the power of a unified purpose. It will serve as an unparalleled and inspiring example of what humanity can do when it comes together to achieve a common goal for the common good.

When I look at a wonderful image of the Martian landscape taken by a rover, I don’t quite get the same feeling that I get from looking at a photo taken from the surface of the Moon by an Apollo astronaut. Although I won’t ever be in either place, I feel far more “there” with Armstrong and Aldrin, or Cernan and Schmitt, than I do with Opportunity or Curiosity. When one person does it, we all do it. As the memory of our visit to the Moon fades, we may need to go there if only to prove to ourselves that we are not merely degenerate shades of our forefathers.

Tennyson wrote,

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Who isn’t inspired by Ulysses? Who wants to admit our best years and deeds are behind us? Who doesn’t want to “demonstrate to people around the world the power of a unified purpose?” We’re certainly not demonstrating it in our political system right now. Just switch back and forth between MSNBC and Fox News and that will be obvious. It may have been cheap and easy for Ulysses to gather a few mates and sail off to plunder somewhere in the Mediterranean. A trip back to the Moon, absent an economic miracle that erases the Federal deficit and floods the Treasury with huge amounts of cash, means not funding a myriad of other projects and benefits that most people and their representatives think are more important. As it was said in The Right Stuff: “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

The author and his wife Elyse with Buzz Aldrin at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in 2009.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-taps-11-american-companies-to-advance-human-lunar-landers/

Also take a look at NASA’s video “We are Going” narrated by, who else?, William Shatner, at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl6jn-DdafM.

[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/nasas-full-artemis-plan-revealed-37-launches-and-a-lunar-outpost/