To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

By Hank Silverberg

         “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

It was 10:56 p.m., July 20, 1969, a Sunday night on the east coast of the U.S.A. when Neil Armstrong put the first human foot onto the surface of the moon and uttered those words. Billions of people watched the fuzzy black and white images on television. It was the greatest scientific achievement of the human race, and it was supposed to change the world. 

I was 14 years old at the time. The space program, steeped more in the cold war than in the spirit of discovery, had grown up with me. My generation had watched the early Mercury missions on TV, often brought into our elementary school classrooms as a “teachable moment," though I don’t think educators had come up with that term yet. We had watched the Gemini missions with the knowledge that they were all practice runs, getting ready for the ultimate goal.  

(Armstrong snapped this color picture of Buzz Aldrin stepping
onto the moon. NASA photo)

I was with my family, gathered around the TV when Armstrong stepped on the moon. My Grandma Frances, who was born five years before the Wright brothers achieved the first powered airplane flight, sat there in disbelief. She could just not comprehend that two human beings were walking on the moon. But I knew it was going to happen. John F. Kennedy had told us so. 

“We choose to go to the moon, in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”  

Kennedy didn’t say it, but we all knew it. The space program was also another skirmish in the Cold War. It was imperative that we beat the Soviet Union to the moon for the security of Democracy. The Russians would spend billions of rubles trying to keep up, a cost that would ultimately help in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Empire.  

Gene Roddenberry had also told us it would happen. The original Star Trek series, with its hopeful view of a united planet in the future, had finished its first run just a month before the moon mission. Though unconnected to NASA, it had been the best public relations campaign the space program could have asked for. The media thought the landing was so important that Walter Cronkite and the crew at CBS were on the air live for 31 hours straight as the landing approached and developed.  

As we watched men walk on the moon, many in my generation believed by the time we reached our 50^th birthday, humans would be living on the lunar surface and have traveled to Mars.

It didn’t happen, because 1969 had come after 1968. The unifying spirit of the moon landing could not wipe out the division which had spread across the country, a division that has resurfaced now for some of the same reasons.  

   

In 1968, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago had spawned rioting in the streets, and thousands of American boys were dying in Vietnam.

By the time Apollo 17, the final moon mission, came along in 1972, space travel and moon landings had given us some major technological advances, everything from Velcro to GPS, but it had not done much to fix what was broken on earth. Fifty-eight thousand Americans had died in Vietnam, and the United States was about to be engulfed in a major Constitutional crisis called Watergate. Three additional planned moon missions were cancelled because of the cost.   

My grandmother, who had lived through the two World Wars and the Great Depression, also died that year.

The Sky Lab and Space Shuttle program, which followed Apollo, were good for science and technology and kept us in the space game, but the world was not reaching for the stars anymore. Americans lost our real motivation when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. The cost had been high. Thirty-one astronauts and cosmonauts had been killed either in space or in training accidents. The destruction of the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) were particularly devastating to the American space effort. The United States had spent an estimated $196 billion on the space program by 2011. 

      

(The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, 1986, courtesy of NASA.gov)

The Star Trek franchise continued with five more series and 13 feature films, and remains popular today, perhaps because the world is still looking for that promised future. Fiction often diverts us from reality. 

Ask people today, and you will find many who are unaware that the United States still has an active space program. Many still think the whole moon landing was a fake. But just this past week, on the same day of the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a multi-national crew lifted off for the 60^th mission to the International Space Station. It included NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov. Very few people noticed. 

There are new plans for returning to the moon and beyond, but despite the creation of the so called "Space Force," it's questionable whether the nation has the will or the money.

I’m still hoping we reach Mars in time for me to see it. 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/20/world/astronauts-space-station-launch-apollo-anniversary-scn-trnd/index.html

 News Notes:

While much of the focus this week has been on outer space, it’s some parking spaces which have produced some new hope here on earth.

San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country, has been dealing with an increase in homelessness. The city says about a third of the homeless people have been living in vehicles because they can’t afford rent, even though they have jobs. The R-V’s and other vehicles have shown up on neighborhood streets, in front of businesses or elsewhere in increasing numbers, making them vulnerable to crime and the predictable harassment from angry residents and merchants.  

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Officials-Propose-RV-Pilot-Program-to-Address-Homelessness--512996731.html

So the city has now set aside a lot that used be parking for transit employees, where some of those living in vehicles can now park for as long as 30 days. It will have security, bathrooms and showers, but more importantly, it will enable social service workers to find the homeless and assist them with other services that could eventually get families and others out of their vehicles and into more permanent housing. It’s only a pilot project because the parking lot is designated for the construction of badly needed housing in a year.

San Jose, California, is trying something similar, designating parks and other public areas for those living in vehicles.

This is a far better solution to a growing problem than what has happened elsewhere. Last year, Prince William County, Virginia, disbanded a homeless camp that had been on wooded land behind a shopping center for 15 years. Many of those people had nowhere else to go.

www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-news/theyve-lived-in-tents-in-the-woods-for-15-years-on-wednesday-they-will-be-gone/2018/02/27/0dadc554-1b26-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4e1036af6e46

Most of the homeless today includes families with children. Their lack of a permanent home has more to do with the price of housing than anything else. People working part-time or at minimum wage simply can’t afford the higher rents. It is more evidence that the economy is not as good as those in power would have us believe.  It’s one of the reasons the push for a $15 federal minimum wage has been so strong. 

               (Your suggestions and comments are welcome )

Ripped from the headlines. An embattled President seeking re-election deals with a threat from possible nuclear weapons in Iran.  I wrote this book two years ago. Copies are available at retail prices at Amazon.com, BN.Com or at a reduced rate with a signature by contacting me at hanksilverberg@gmail.com.