50 Years since Apollo 11
The Space Program Gave Humanity a Different Perspective. We Could Use It Again.
It has been fifty years since human beings first set foot on another world. And, it has been nearly ten years since Americans ceased to launch manned space missions of our own with the final launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2011.
In the space between the dawn of the Space Age and its sunset, we gained and then lost something. It can tell us something about where we find ourselves today. And, while human beings writhe in cages along our southern border in the custody of the same people who once took a “giant leap for mankind,” it is worth reflecting over for a bit.
First, let’s start with that word “mankind.” Little leaps out at us today about the Space Age more than its Mad Men look and sensibilities. Mission Control in Houston filled with white men in ties and sharp haircuts, it looked very much like the world inhabited by Don Draper and Roger Sterling. The world of 1969, no one needs me to say, had less tolerance for diversity than we have today.
As much as I am in sympathy with women and underrepresented minorities in today’s world, however, I do want suggest that it misses a lot to insist that is the only lens through which to read a photo of Mission Control. And, that is very much my purpose in writing today.
Whether all of those engineers in Houston felt that way or not, the prevailing political and cultural winds of the late 1960’s were blowing in the direction of where our attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality are today. As true as it is that no one would write “for all mankind” on that plaque anymore, we still would want to note how our changed attitude has its roots in the world of 1969. As much as that world was filled with a kind of casual misogyny, racism, and homophobia we would find unacceptable today, people living in that time were beginning to think of themselves as intending human freedom and human progress for everyone.
I’m not trying to paper over Montgomery, Mississippi, Vietnam, or Kent State. I simply mean to suggest that a spirit of hope lived in those days, and it began peeking through the cracks to burst forth into a women’s movement, the progress of civil rights, the gay liberation movement, and many other things about which we feel pride today. Rather than only see a room full of white men in ties and sharp haricuts, we need also to see that spirit alive in that room as much as it was alive in the United States: both can be true. And, we need to understand why. Those people of that time were shaped by the cataclysm of World War II and the attempt to exterminate Jews, gypsies, gay people, the disabled, and others. That midcentury generation had seen those crimes up close, they knew the horror of it. And, for the first time in human history, real social change began to take place because, deep in their hearts, most people who had lived through World War II knew it had to happen. The dangers are too great when we de-humanize one another.
It’s no coincidence that a conservative movement and the Nixon presidency were born in those days, either. Those who wanted no social change began to organize because they sensed the real possibility that, as Sam Cooke sang, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” To stop it, they would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” Or, at least, try.
The Space Age represented the apex, the peak moment of this mid-century hopefulness for all of humanity and our prospects in the world together. The optimistic vision of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek was born at this time, too, and it showed us a future without conflicts about nation, race, gender, or any of the other things that divide us. People were rational, motivated by curiosity and reason.
We saw ourselves and our future that way in those days because, for the first time in the long history of our species, we had seen our tiny, fragile planet from a distance.
Apollo astronaut Jack Swigert said it better than I can —
Everything that I know…my family and my possessions,my friends, my country. It’s all down there on that little thing, and it’s so insignificant in this great big vastness of space.
Try to imagine the impact. You probably can’t. For you and for me, this all is history. We’ve seen it a thousand times, even hung it on the walls of our dorm rooms and failed to glance at it on most days. We can’t re-experience this. And, there is our problem.
From out of the darkness of World War II and all the terrible possiblities in human behavior it made real for us, for a brief moment, for every living person, everything we ever had fought over from Genghis Khan to Charlemagne to the Congo Crisis was reduced to that blue ping pong ball. Were any of those struggles for land or power really important at all? Did anything matter more than the people who live on that little blue dot and all they could achieve together, even to land on another world? It was a potent moment when it seemed possible to reach not only for the stars but also for something better in ourselves. Even amid the violence and conflict of the late 1960’s, this moment happened.
Then we moved on. Like we do.
Soon, we lost interest as space travel became as routine as air travel has become. Our conflicts overtook us slowly in the five decades since, and we have lost the perspective of that blue ping pong ball we left “for all mankind.”
Our future has not added up to what the Space Age seemed to promise. Young children no longer dream of going to space. They dream of 5G. And, we never have been more committed to the struggles we have for land or power or tribe or identity than we are now. Not only have we lost sight of that blue ball we have tunneled deeper and deeper into it almost as though we want to forget what we saw in 1969.
I give Donald Trump some credit. A child of this era, he understands intuitively the power of what I’m talking about. Wanting some of that power for his own use, I suspect, he talks a lot about returning to space and planting an American flag on Mars…in his own incomprehensible way.
Yet, the power of Defense and Science! or any Space Force really is a pale imitation of what I am talking about here. Donald Trump doesn’t get it. He can’t understand it because what we mean is something beyond self-interest and national interest.
For a moment in 1969, we became fully human in all of the best senses of possibility and potential that we possess. An ego trip to Mars or even back to the moon will not recover it, no amount of zero-G flag-waving will capture it.
Finally, our best understanding of who we are and who we might become reaches us from our own imagination, our intuitions about what is possible when we let our curiosity, our reason, and our creativity lead us, and when we indulge the hopeful whisper of altruism to build a better world because it would be better for all humankind. Literature calls this out from us. So does art, and poetry, and music. Our religious traditions summon this from us, too. Women and men found it for millennia before Apollo 11, and we still can do it today.
But never again, I think, will it be so inescapable as it was fifty years ago. It is difficult to imagine another way that our best nature can seem so natural all at once to all of us at the same time as it did in those days of the Apollo missions. That is a terrible loss to live with.
Still, another Apollo astronaut, Jim Lovell, tells us…
The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you’ve ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.
Maybe finally, that is our problem. Sensing our insignificance against the backdrop of the universe is too terrible to deal with. To avoid it, perhaps we cannot help blowing our little squabbles up to cosmic proportions and finding new ways to divide against one another.
I almost could understand that reaction, if we had not already seen a better way.
