[Infowarrior] - The Moon We Left Behind

[Richard Forno]

The Moon We Left Behind

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 17, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071603486.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that  
within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes,  
commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose  
interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you  
mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity  
at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon  
recedes ever further.
Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say  
we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous  
president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to  
George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama's Kennedyesque  
qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy's enthusiasm for human  
space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its  
supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in  
retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing  
and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903.  
Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the  
moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades  
since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying,  
well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with  
the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately,  
hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space  
shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling  
goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the international space  
station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist  
absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can  
sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven  
more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose  
and the Concorde -- into the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and  
Complicated to Survive.

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from  
today, for the first time since 1962, the United States will be  
incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone  
into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride  
from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

So what, you say? Don't we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please.  
Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we'd  
waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we'd still be  
living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one's asking for a crash Manhattan  
Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of  
billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that,  
unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo  
program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our  
consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit  
and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin  
off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is  
a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to  
put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do  
such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they  
are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send  
sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human  
possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages  
would create the most potent impetus to -- and symbol of --  
environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic  
Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility  
of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to  
Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of  
iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it  
are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged,  
abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a  
mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president  
once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most  
hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever  
embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.

How could we?

letters@ charleskrauthammer.com