The wrong stuff - manned space exploration

Progressive, The, July, 1994 by William Hines

I am of a generation that still distinguished between intellect and reason. Intellect separates the possible from the impossible, reason the sensible from the senseless. Space travel is a triumph of intellect but a tragic failure of reason. --Max Born (1882-1970)

July 20, 1994, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, would be as good a time as any to can a halt to that vainglorious exercise in hubris known as manned space flight--at least until problems more relevant to the human condition have been solved and money is again available for institutionalized silliness. As Max Born, a 1954 Nobel Prize winner in physics, said not long before Eagle landed on the Sea of Tranquillity on July 20, 1969, somewhere en route to the moon we lost our way in the maze that separates intellect from reason.

An early end to our persistent man-in-space lunacy will not happen, of course; too many vested interests are working to keep the Space Shuttle flying. But there are signs that the end could be in sight as tight budgets constrict discretionary Federal spending and tax-shy legislators cast about for ways to avoid angering voters. Even one of the space program's most loyal defenders in Congress, George E. Brown Jr., the California Democrat who heads the House Space Committee, has decided it is time to shelve the next National Aeronautics and Space Administration super spectacle.

The project in question is what Ronald Reagan dubbed Space Station Freedom, which, over years of design revisions that made the orbiting platform ever smaller, came to be called "the incredible shrinking space station." If it should shrink out of sight in the fiscal 1996 budget, no one but the aerospace industry would suffer much, and space science might be a lot better off.

To understand the space effort whose apogee we celebrate in July, we must go back to the early 1950s, when the military-industrial complex was casting about for something lasting, lucrative, and spectacular to do with idle bomber and fighter assembly lines. The idea of space travel (dear to the hearts of sci-fi fans who had gone through the acne era reading Amazing Stories) was fostered in a series of articles in Collier's magazine that was later expanded into a lavishly illustrated book entitled Across the Space Frontier (Viking Press) in 1952. One of the authors was Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi V-2 engineer whom songsmith Tom Lehrer later lampooned as the person to whom "the widows and cripples of old London town/Owe their large pensions...."

Von Braun and his colleagues laid it all out with beautiful pictures--a multistage rocket with features that foreshadowed both the Satum-Apollo moon ship and today's Shuttle, and a space station surpassing Reagan's Freedom in both size and beauty, to which the spaceship would travel from Earth hauling goods and personnel.

President Eisenhower, no fan of foolish notions like man-in-space, allowed himself, in 1955, to be talked into announcing American plans for a few "small unmanned Earth satellites" as part of a U.S. contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1956-1957. Prescribing a nonmilitary role for this project, he handed it to the Navy, which perceiving it correctly as a "civilian" undertaking) gave it such low priority that it missed its IGY deadline altogether. Meanwhile, von Braun and his buddies were lying low at an army arsenal in northern Alabama waiting for der Tag. It arrived in December 1957, when the Navy's rocket crumpled ignominiously on the launching pad and its four-pound payload forfeited a chance to be more than just a footnote in history.

By this time, the United States had lost the first heat in the space race to the Soviets, who in October and November of 1957 had orbited a 186-pound instrumented sphere called Sputnik 1, followed by a larger Sputnik weighing more than half a ton and carrying a dog named Laika--both craft vastly more massive than anything the United States could hope to launch for years to come.

The flight of Laika was, additionally, a tipoff to long-range Soviet intentions because of its biomedical implications. All this added up to embarrassment and consternation for Americans, who had laughed derisively in 1955 when the Russians said they planned to do satellites for the IGY, too. Imagine, a country that couldn't even build iceboxes and cars for its citizens!

America got into space to stay on February 1, 1958, when Explorer 1 went into orbit to the gleeful, heavily accented jubilation of Wernher von Braun: "A great day for American rocketry!" Explorer's not-quite-accidental discovery of a radiation belt around the Earth--predicted in theory a half-century earlier by a European physicist--stands in the record books as the first significant discovery of the Space Age. It was also the last American "first" of major consequence until Eagle set down on the moon more than a decade later.

It was precisely because the United States was so far behind the Soviet Union that Project Apollo was born. An ignominious geopolitical event--the Bay of Pigs debacle of mid-April 1961--added to a desire on the part of the new Kennedy Administration to put something upbeat before the American people and the world. The sixth and final section of a message to Congress on "Urgent National Needs"--a 1,065-word call to action in space--set the stage for the Apollo moon program on May 25,1961.