Apollo 11’s achievement still dazzles
Thirty months after setting the goal of a 239,000-mile mission to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story author Frank O’Connor told of his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O’Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, “They had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space.” Kennedy said this on Nov. 21, 1963, in San Antonio. The next day: Dallas.
To understand America’s euphoria about the moon landing 50 years ago, remember 51 years ago: 1968 was a horrible year – the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated, urban riots. President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, vow to reach the moon before 1970 came 43 days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to enter outer space and orbit the Earth, and 38 days after the Bay of Pigs debacle. When Kennedy audaciously pointed to the moon, America had only sent a single astronaut on a 15-minute suborbital flight.
Kennedy’s goal was reckless, and exhilarating leadership. Given existing knowledge and technologies, it was impossible. But Kennedy said the space program would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” It did.
The “space race” began as a Cold War competition, military and political, when the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit as Earth’s first manmade satellite. By 1969, however, the Soviet Union was out of the race to the moon.
With the successful mission of Apollo 11, people spoke jauntily of “the conquest of space.”
Well. The universe, 99.9 (and about 58 other 9s) percent of which is already outside Earth’s atmosphere, is expanding (into we know not what) at 46 miles per second per megaparsec. (One megaparsec is approximately 3.26 million light-years.)
The estimated number of stars is 100 followed by 22 zeros. The visible universe (which is hardly all of it) contains more than 150 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars. So in spite of Apollo 11’s still-dazzling achievement, these unfathomable distances tell us we are not really going anywhere.