Apollo 11 takes us back to the future

Why did man go to the Moon? Because it was there. Given that we haven’t been back since 1972, an observer from another world might conclude that it was a victory but not a game changer – even an anti-climax. Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined that by 2001, man would have colonised the Moon and be on his way to Jupiter. Instead we are earthbound, concerned less with how to leave our planet than how to conserve it. The enormous interest in today’s anniversary of the 1969 Moon landing, and the conquest of space that it promised, points to a paradox: we are nostalgic about the future.

No wonder, for the Apollo 11 mission really was astonishing. The controlled combustion needed to push the 6.5 million-pound Saturn V rocket away from Earth’s gravity was an engineering achievement unequalled 50 years later (the Soviet N1, intended to go to the Moon, blew up when they tried to launch it). The US mission travelled a total of 953,054 miles in eight days, and Neil Armstrong gave the crew a 90 per cent chance of getting back home alive but only a 50/50 shot at a successful lunar landing. To get there, to walk on the surface, to film it – a broadcast watched by an estimated 600 million people – both expanded man’s universe and, as President Richard Nixon told the astronauts in a very long-distance phone call, pulled it closer. “As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility,” said Nixon, “it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth.”

In fact, exploration of the Moon was the product of a dangerous competition between two systems – democracy v communism – and Nixon was determined to pursue detente, which went handin-glove with rethinking ambitions. The Moon had been conquered. Wasn’t that enough? Many earthlings felt it was.

The lunar adventure came in for a lot of criticism from those who argued that America ought to focus on its problems down here, particularly the poverty in its ghettos. By the early Seventies the reputation of the US government had nosedived. It went from encouraging risk to trampling on it – weighty, bureaucratic and, thanks to Nixon’s Watergate scandal, slightly sinister. The 1978 movie Capricorn

One imagined a cash-strapped space programme faking a trip to Mars and then plotting to kill the astronauts so that they wouldn’t spill the beans.

A small number of Americans reached the conclusion that if the government was too incompetent to have got to the Moon, it was just about sneaky enough to have filmed it on a sound stage (maybe directed by Mr Kubrick), a claim that was deeply insulting to the men who had risked their lives for the glory of humanity. When a conspiracy theorist demanded that Buzz Aldrin swear on a Bible that he had been to the Moon, the retired astronaut punched him (Mr Aldrin said he merely struck out to defend himself).

Today, America ought to be supremely selfconfident. It won the fight with Soviet communism and, on its watch as the last superpower, the world has enjoyed astonishing leaps in health and technology. Yet the United States feels closer now to the divided, self-doubting age of Nixon than it does to that of John F Kennedy, who, in 1962, said America must choose to go to the Moon because it was hard and therefore “that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills”. Kennedy’s rhetoric worked its magic because it was met by a receptive audience. By contrast, when Donald Trump proposed a “space force” and said Americans would aim for Mars, many ridiculed him. The notion of space as a test of national competence has declined in the West.

Not so in the developing world. It’s fascinating to note that when countries get richer, they reach for the stars: China is doing it, India too. Nigeria has sent up satellites. Now that entrepreneurs have made their billions from the internet, they too want to conquer the heavens – and the space programme of the future will be a mix of major power competition and private business, perhaps even tourism, blasting off from space ports in Scotland and Cornwall.

Hopefully, this new economy of space travel will put the future of exploration on a surer footing. It follows the pattern of the colonisation of the New World. First there was discovery; only later, when it was judged viable, was there settlement and industry. As in 17th-century America, the desire to colonise will partly be motored by pessimism, a fear that one’s home – Europe or Planet Earth – is crowded and we need to escape. But always there is the optimism of adventurers and the fearless urge to see the unknown and to expand frontiers, the same spirit that sent Christopher Columbus to sea or George Mallory up Mount Everest.

The Moon was not the end of man’s space odyssey, just the first step – a marker of what he is capable of and where he is going next, which is as far as he dares to imagine.

To get there, to walk on the surface, to film it, both expanded man’s universe and pulled it closer

America ought to be supremely self-confident, yet it feels closer now to the divided age of Nixon