Charles Fishman has been reporting on the US space program
since the 1980’s, when we celebrated NASA’s accomplishments, and at the same
time mourned its 1986 failure. He starts the book by giving credit to the
thousands of people involved in the 1969 moon landing, and the scientists were
only a tiny fraction. The space suit was designed by men who worked for an
underwear company, and a team of expert sewers – all of them women – sewed the suits
together. When the moon landing was broadcast on TV, they were the ones who
were afraid. Would the suits take the pressure difference? Would their
stitching hold together? Never mind that ordinary non-scientists had made the
suits, a lot of the products used by those astronauts are considered mundane
today. Velcro, tang, microchips, digital clocks, and high-speed computers, were
invented years earlier, but not widely used until the moon landing.
NASA would be a proving ground for a whole lot of American
technology, and it benefited the US economy. In every state, there were
industries that got NASA contracts, whether it was fuel, rocket engines, TV
screens, telecommunications, cameras, etc. The USA, at least in those days, was
a nation that worshipped science, and NASA was the ultimate citadel of science
and technology. The Soviet Union had gotten to space first, but every time they
did something great, US scientists did it better. What did we do that the
Soviets didn’t?
Aside from the scientific accomplishments, the moon landing
was also a political triumph. We’d started the 60’s with the Bay of Pigs
invasion (a farce for the CIA) and then came the Kennedy assassination (testing
our comfort zone) followed by the violence of the Civil Rights movement and
urban riots (discord and instability). How would the USA restore unity and
credibility, at home and abroad? In Moscow’s Red Square, Kruschev hoisted Uri
Gagarin onto a pedestal, and declared his meager to-hour space ride a triumph
of communism. Would US capitalism be outdone by communism, the Europeans
wondered? But the Soviets never made it to the moon, and their satellites never
worked as well as those in the USA. They did manage to build a space shuttle
like NASA’s, known as the Buran, flew it once by computer and then mothballed
it a year later when the USSR broke up. In 2005, the shuttle, now dust-covered and
abandoned, was destroyed when the decrepit storage hangar collapsed on it. The
Soviets had spent billions on a space program that got them nowhere.
In the end, it was just ordinary American work that made the
moon landing happen. Mathematicians calculated the trajectory, air force airmen
operated the communications, and the astronauts got their start as military
pilots. The lunar vehicle was just a dune buggy, but it took 400 engineers to make
it collapsible, and then they had to design a motor that wouldn’t shut down in
sub-zero weather. Their creation would later become the electric golf cart.
Technologies that are bought cheaply today are thrown away when they wear out,
but 50 years ago they were a triumph of science.
Fishman doesn’t shy away from the controversy over the moon
landing. Was it worth it to got to the moon? Was it worth it to spend all the
money? Gil Scott Heron’s poem Whitey’s On the Moon, is an example of the
distrust in the space program, a massive money-eater when the cities were
crumbling. Then there’s the question of what, if anything, was there left for
us to conquer? Supreme Court justice Earl Warren, in his farewell address, said
that we’d be on the moon in a few months, but “it would be better if our
universities taught us how to live in our great cities.” At least the 1969 moon
landing made microchips cheaper (previously nobody knew what to do with them)
proved new uses for Velcro.
Why do Americans love space? Maybe it’s because our kids
love adventure. Maybe it’s because we’re a nation built on expansion. Wealthy
Americans are known to love big projects, and working-class Americans love the
jobs that they bring. Some big projects bring profit. Others bring prestige. In
the end, NASA brought both.
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