40 years is a long time even in biblical terms, but it seems even longer since Apollo 11 made its journey to Tranquility. Many of us who were already in the missile business at that time felt that it was a mistake to go to the moon before we were ready, but even we had no ideal that it would turn out to be as bad as it did.
The great alternative of course was to build space stations. Not just one but several. One basic pattern called for six. Four of them would be spaced evenly around the earth more or less equatorially and two others in a general polar orbit, one north, one south. Another plan called for placing a collection of stations together in one area of the sky to be used as a storage/repair/construction/command location. From these staging stations, journeys to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system would be much easier since they would be free of the heavy lift required to escape the earth’s gravity and also free of the earth’s weather. A true Space Command would become an integral part of the United States Air Force available for both defense and humanitarian missions, and accidents like those which destroyed the Columbia could have been easily avoided.
How much money would this have cost? Not that much - considering what we did spend elsewhere. The total cost of the Apollo space program itself is commonly given as $25 billion, adjusted to 2005 dollars this would approximate $135 billion. Meanwhile, the American war against Vietnam cost $686 billion in 2008 dollars, and the American war against Iraq has cost over $900 billion in 2008 dollars. We could have several permanent stations on the moon and explored Mars for those outlays alone. And of course, the money spent on the space stations would have had positive results for our national economy, education system, military defense and opportunities for international leadership and cooperation.
But when Project Apollo reached the end of its road with number 17, the ships and rockets were taken apart, the facilities were stripped down, the engineers and scientists let go to get a “real” job, and that incredible capacity for space flight was blown into the void. Now, 40 years later, we’re still trying to build one space station. And we currently have no space ships left to even reach that one station. Russia, China, India are moving on. America is fighting needless wars and celebrating footprints in the dust.
Monday, July 20, 2009
To the Moon
When I entered the Air Force missile program back in 1962, the biggest ICBM we had was the Atlas D. It had a thrust of 150,000 pounds and when it lifted off it shook the entire earth. It was awesome. When I first visited Vandenberg AFB in California in 1963, the Titan I had arrived. It generated 300,000 pounds of thrust and people there said “it doesn’t ‘lift off’, it just sits there and pushes the earth away”. The Apollo 11 moon rocket had 25 times THAT much power at 7,640,000 pounds of thrust.
Apollo's very name seemed strange - Apollo -Why would the god of the sun be selected to visit the earth’s moon? And the orbit of the moon, turned out to be a rough, bouncing ride, surprising everyone.
Then there was the sight of a human being walking on the moon. He kicked dust and it flew. Wow . What a sight! Only gods are supposed to do or see things like that!
Finally, when they came back. I wondered why no one on any of the TV networks played excerpts from the largo of the second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony #9, but no one did. So that’s really why I tried to write this poem.
TO THE MOON
With a stunning explosion of thunder and fire
The swooning Earth is shoved away;
Apollo now stands alone in space,
And reaches to grasp the moon.
Three quiet days through a strange new world,
Across a sea with no bottom; through a sky with no light;
Man’s hand holds the tiller’s helm tight,
But Apollo leads the way.
A rendezvous with destiny in deep dark space.
As the God of the Sun becomes a moon of the Moon.
Then Apollo lofts Eagle to carry Earth’s child
From bouncing orbit to Tranquility.
Oh Moon look! See thy dust fly high -
Kicked far and wide by dancing man!
The pulse thou stirred in ancient seas
Now comes to thee to stir thine own.
Then Eagle flies with a mighty leap
And returns to perch on Apollo’s glove.
with a prize so great that Eagle is freed -
and Apollo and man take moon dust home.
Going Home, Going home! Yes, we’re going Home!
At least, we are returning to where we left;
But home can never be the same -
As before Apollo left.
© John Womack, 2006. All rights reserved.
Apollo's very name seemed strange - Apollo -Why would the god of the sun be selected to visit the earth’s moon? And the orbit of the moon, turned out to be a rough, bouncing ride, surprising everyone.
Then there was the sight of a human being walking on the moon. He kicked dust and it flew. Wow . What a sight! Only gods are supposed to do or see things like that!
Finally, when they came back. I wondered why no one on any of the TV networks played excerpts from the largo of the second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony #9, but no one did. So that’s really why I tried to write this poem.
TO THE MOON
With a stunning explosion of thunder and fire
The swooning Earth is shoved away;
Apollo now stands alone in space,
And reaches to grasp the moon.
Three quiet days through a strange new world,
Across a sea with no bottom; through a sky with no light;
Man’s hand holds the tiller’s helm tight,
But Apollo leads the way.
A rendezvous with destiny in deep dark space.
As the God of the Sun becomes a moon of the Moon.
Then Apollo lofts Eagle to carry Earth’s child
From bouncing orbit to Tranquility.
Oh Moon look! See thy dust fly high -
Kicked far and wide by dancing man!
The pulse thou stirred in ancient seas
Now comes to thee to stir thine own.
Then Eagle flies with a mighty leap
And returns to perch on Apollo’s glove.
with a prize so great that Eagle is freed -
and Apollo and man take moon dust home.
Going Home, Going home! Yes, we’re going Home!
At least, we are returning to where we left;
But home can never be the same -
As before Apollo left.
© John Womack, 2006. All rights reserved.
Moon Landing
Forty years ago I was sitting in front of a little black and white TV set in North Dakota watching the impossible happen. Of course I had my camera and these are the pictures I got. Pictures are grainy? Well, my camera was a lot better than our TV was then. We could only pick up two TV stations, fortunately we could see the moon landing.
It is all different now. Back then - on July 20, 1969 - NOBODY knew what was going to happen in the next five minutes. All the way there, everybody knew that it might end up with them making a low pass at the moon and coming back home. The were going to TRY to land, but they didn’t know what was going to happen. NObody knew. During the descent of the Lunar Module to the Moon’s surface, we all knew the astronauts might have to abort and return.
Now at 1,000 feet above the surface of the moon and about a minute of descent fuel remaining we know we are committed. We're obviously going down. Will we land or crash? At this point nobody knows. . . stay tuned.
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The module has landed. For a long time it seems quiet. Nobody in the entire world is breathing
It worked! The module actually did land on the moon! And they are alive! And talking! Wow. What had seemed virtually impossible now quickly becomes more normal.
We can hear the communications between crew and ground control, and we are updated with overlays. Man has now been on the moon for 9 minutes and 9 seconds.
Later Buzz Aldrin comes on to the moon surface.
Planting the Flag.
It is all different now. Back then - on July 20, 1969 - NOBODY knew what was going to happen in the next five minutes. All the way there, everybody knew that it might end up with them making a low pass at the moon and coming back home. The were going to TRY to land, but they didn’t know what was going to happen. NObody knew. During the descent of the Lunar Module to the Moon’s surface, we all knew the astronauts might have to abort and return.
Now at 1,000 feet above the surface of the moon and about a minute of descent fuel remaining we know we are committed. We're obviously going down. Will we land or crash? At this point nobody knows. . . stay tuned.
The module has landed. For a long time it seems quiet. Nobody in the entire world is breathing
It worked! The module actually did land on the moon! And they are alive! And talking! Wow. What had seemed virtually impossible now quickly becomes more normal.
We can hear the communications between crew and ground control, and we are updated with overlays. Man has now been on the moon for 9 minutes and 9 seconds.
Later Buzz Aldrin comes on to the moon surface.
Planting the Flag.
Requiem for Apollo
When Kennedy made his audacious commitment to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely home on May 25, 1961, I was preparing to enter the missile part of the Air Force, into what we were already beginning to call the “Space Program”.
I was stationed at Langley AFB, VA, which was the headquarters of the agency still called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA which had already been renamed in 1958, but most of the signs had still not been changed.
Some of the initial “astronauts” were already on Langley in the early 1960s, and were slowly becoming reasonably well known, although there was a considerable air of uncertainty back then - were they actually going to fly in space or not? Nobody really knew for sure. It would probably happen sometime, but maybe not for many, many years. Sputnik had already made its trip, and Gagarin had flown his orbit in April of 61, though so this air of uncertainty was balanced by the strange feeling that there were great forces already in process that ultimately could not be controlled.
The Mercury astronauts had a different mission than the rest of us but they spent as much time away from Langley as we flight crew members. From time to time we met them and would encounter them on the base. Once I remember letting my wife out of the car on a rainy afternoon at the Officer’s Club and she walked under a canopy to the main door, where it was opened for her by John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Alan Sheppard. They exchanged a word or two, waved at me, and she entered. Big deal? Not nearly as big as it seems today.
I met Gus Grissom on several occasions, once at the BX while buying a birthday card for my sister-in-law. I got a card with a picture of the moon and a statement about it. I asked Gus if he would also sign it, and he did so with great enjoyment.
After Kennedy’s commitment though, everything began to change. Everything. NASA was now crushed under the flow of money falling into and upon its projects. More and more work was transferred from Langley and Wallops Island to Canaveral, a spot picked out for NASA the year the Civil War ended, by one of their first "pioneers", Jules Verne.
Then Kennedy was assassinated. Right after that I was assigned to the Titan II missile program. Space was now the coming attraction for both military and commercial activities, and I was getting in on the ground floor. There was only one little cloud in my sky and it was far, far away, off in one of the most beautiful places on any planet, Vietnam. It was still officially at peace, but the French had been defeated in the re-imposition of their colonial rule after W.W.II, and now we were nosing around there with "advisors". The deaths of Earthquake McGoon and, nineteen days later, Robert Capa in Vietnam were ominous warnings that it could really turn out to be very, very bad. Both Apollo and Vietnam would continue to grow, eventually competing for the same dollar.
There is no way to prove that Vietnam spending had any effect upon the Apollo program or any follow-on space related projects, but there was a continual competition for money. A new unease with the American government developed because of problems with both the war and the civil rights movements and that remains with us today. One of the stories totally lost in all of this competition for money and talent was the American Space Program. Vietnam came first, Civil Rights also came first. Then came Apollo. Once man walked on the moon, the importance of the space program ended. Any hope for a continuing American presence in space would have to be deferred for many, many years. America was engrossed in short-term objectives, another war it couldn’t escape from, and long neglected obligations here at home.
I was stationed at Langley AFB, VA, which was the headquarters of the agency still called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA which had already been renamed in 1958, but most of the signs had still not been changed.
Some of the initial “astronauts” were already on Langley in the early 1960s, and were slowly becoming reasonably well known, although there was a considerable air of uncertainty back then - were they actually going to fly in space or not? Nobody really knew for sure. It would probably happen sometime, but maybe not for many, many years. Sputnik had already made its trip, and Gagarin had flown his orbit in April of 61, though so this air of uncertainty was balanced by the strange feeling that there were great forces already in process that ultimately could not be controlled.
The Mercury astronauts had a different mission than the rest of us but they spent as much time away from Langley as we flight crew members. From time to time we met them and would encounter them on the base. Once I remember letting my wife out of the car on a rainy afternoon at the Officer’s Club and she walked under a canopy to the main door, where it was opened for her by John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Alan Sheppard. They exchanged a word or two, waved at me, and she entered. Big deal? Not nearly as big as it seems today.
I met Gus Grissom on several occasions, once at the BX while buying a birthday card for my sister-in-law. I got a card with a picture of the moon and a statement about it. I asked Gus if he would also sign it, and he did so with great enjoyment.
After Kennedy’s commitment though, everything began to change. Everything. NASA was now crushed under the flow of money falling into and upon its projects. More and more work was transferred from Langley and Wallops Island to Canaveral, a spot picked out for NASA the year the Civil War ended, by one of their first "pioneers", Jules Verne.
Then Kennedy was assassinated. Right after that I was assigned to the Titan II missile program. Space was now the coming attraction for both military and commercial activities, and I was getting in on the ground floor. There was only one little cloud in my sky and it was far, far away, off in one of the most beautiful places on any planet, Vietnam. It was still officially at peace, but the French had been defeated in the re-imposition of their colonial rule after W.W.II, and now we were nosing around there with "advisors". The deaths of Earthquake McGoon and, nineteen days later, Robert Capa in Vietnam were ominous warnings that it could really turn out to be very, very bad. Both Apollo and Vietnam would continue to grow, eventually competing for the same dollar.
There is no way to prove that Vietnam spending had any effect upon the Apollo program or any follow-on space related projects, but there was a continual competition for money. A new unease with the American government developed because of problems with both the war and the civil rights movements and that remains with us today. One of the stories totally lost in all of this competition for money and talent was the American Space Program. Vietnam came first, Civil Rights also came first. Then came Apollo. Once man walked on the moon, the importance of the space program ended. Any hope for a continuing American presence in space would have to be deferred for many, many years. America was engrossed in short-term objectives, another war it couldn’t escape from, and long neglected obligations here at home.
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