Reaching higher – Moon to Mars
t’s 50 years since astronauts first stepped foot on the Moon. While I was not alive for that first landing, decades later, I was inspired to apply to become an astronaut myself.
At the conclusion of Nasa’s astronaut candidate interviews, most interviewees immediately headed back to their homes. But with limited flights from Houston to Auckland, I had no choice but to spend an extra day exploring the Johnson Space Centre before flying back to New Zealand.
After an intense interview process, I was grateful for the time to reflect on what it might mean to become an astronaut. Strolling through Rocket Park to the massive shed that houses a Saturn V rocket could not have prepared me for the sheer scale of what was inside.
It takes several minutes to walk the length of the rocket from the massive engines at one end of the building all the way to the pointy end where the astronauts sit.
Looking back down the rocket from an astronaut’s perspective gives you a tangible feeling that going to the Moon quite literally involves getting strapped to a giant bomb that will propel you hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from Earth. As an astronaut, you must have complete trust in your training and the teams behind you, or you would never climb aboard.
In JSC’s Astronaut Memorial Grove, I passed by trees honouring the heroes who courageously paved the way to the Moon. At the far end of the grove is a stately live oak that bears a concrete pad with the imprint of a moon boot.
Sitting underneath Neil Armstrong’s tree and looking back at the main buildings of Johnson Space Centre, I reflected on everyone who made the Apollo programme possible, and what it meant for the world.
As Armstrong so simply and eloquently put it, having mankind set foot on the Moon for the first time was so much bigger than the men who actually left their bootprints up there. The first steps on the Moon represented all of us here on Earth.
All of humanity was watching with bated breath as Armstrong climbed down the ladder to make that famous first step on the surface below. His step was indeed a step for all of us.
Those first steps were the result of teamwork between hundreds of thousands of people. The dozens of teams in Mission Control, the global network of ground station staff who tracked the spacecraft, the engineers who calculated the launch trajectories, the physicians who kept the astronauts healthy, the technicians who physically built each component of the rockets, the cleaning staff who made sure the facilities functioned effectively, the politicians who fought to maintain Nasa’s budgets, the families who kept the home fires burning: all of these people were responsible for putting humans on the Moon.
But even then, it was more than just the people directly involved. It was the children watching from their classrooms, writing letters to the spacemen and dreaming of perhaps some day stepping foot on the Moon themselves. It was a collective vision of all of humanity, a transcendence of ego for a greater goal, for something far bigger than any one person.
Nasa has plans to return to the Moon by 2024, this time landing a woman on the lunar surface in a programme called Artemis.
But it is no secret the Moon is not our final destination, but rather a proving ground for putting humans on Mars.
Humans are explorers. Just like our ancestors outgrew the African savannah to colonise the farthest reaches of Earth, in perhaps the not so distant future, we will become a multi-planetary species.
During the Apollo era, many argued that the costs to get us to the Moon were not justified when there were problems at home that needed to be solved first. Today, some may argue that it’s not worth the resources to put humans on Mars.
Humans are the most costly and overly complex machines we sent to the Moon, and the same will be true on Mars. But while humans can’t detect complex molecules through spectroscopic lenses as rovers and robots can, they can view the Moon, and Mars with human eyes and return to tell us stories about what they saw.
And it is the stories that we share that make us human, and connect us to each other. The world is experiencing global problems that can only be solved by coming together, by working together for something greater than ourselves. And the Moon landings proved that if we put our minds together, we can achieve monumental feats that previously seemed impossible.
As we begin to look at Mars with the same fervour as we did the Moon in the 1960s, the global opportunities to play a role in an innovative new space race are nearly as infinite as space itself.
With Rocket Lab forming the foundation of a growing industry in New Zealand, Kiwis all over the country are being inspired and motivated to join in the excitement.
Putting humans on Mars and solving global problems will take more than the efforts of any one person or any one country, and I look forward to the day when these next giant leaps are achieved using Kiwi ingenuity.