This day, July 20th, is a milestone. Two milestones, really. One still blows me away. The other, not so much.
The lesser milestone is, for the second time in just over a week, we are seeing private citizens launching toward space. First they went up nine days ago on Richard Branson’s “SpaceShipTwo Unity.” Today, it’s Jeff Bezos’s “New Shepard”— fittingly named after Alan Shepard, the first American to break the bonds of earth.
It has required great innovation, to be sure, but unlike the quantum leaps that sent Alan Shepard to space, then John Glenn into orbit, then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon— with a nod in the case of SpaceShipTwo Unity to the 1960s-era hypersonic rocket-powered X-15, which also went aloft attached to a mothership— today’s private flights are built upon the breakthroughs that NASA and the space industry engineered.
— The X-15 —
What’s more, those flying now just beyond the edge of our atmosphere aren’t really astronauts. They are not trained to travel in space— they are only minimally trained at all. Having covered the U.S. space program for six years, I saw what it means to be trained as a NASA astronaut, and, making a documentary in Russia about the space program there, what cosmonauts go through too, which is just as long and just as rigorous.
— Dobbs at Yuri Gagarin Space Flight Center in Russia —
Being a real astronaut— the physical criterion, the technical competencies, the scientific comprehension— is years in the making.
These flights are still stunning— don’t get me wrong— and some day, evolved versions of these ships might move man to other planets. But unlike rockets from yet another private venture, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, these spaceships’ seats are not filled with scientists and engineers aiming to advance our understanding and exploration of the universe.
They are filled with space tourists, nothing more. Not that that’s an altogether bad thing. They enable private citizens to briefly taste the sensation of space. The views, the weightlessness, the curvature of the earth. For that alone, more power to them. If I had the money, I’d be up there myself.
But the greater milestone that July 20th marks can never be dismissed, for on this day 52 years ago, the first humans— Armstrong and Aldrin— set foot on the moon. It was, as Armstrong famously told the world, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
— Apollo 11 lifts off —
On that day, I was a young producer with ABC News, supervising a segment of live coverage in an Ohio town called Wapakoneta. We were there because it was Neil Armstrong’s hometown. If you think every nation on the planet was excited that day about America’s once-unimaginable achievement, none was more excited than ours, and within the boundaries of this nation, no community was more excited than Wapakoneta.
Never in my lifetime, before or since, have I seen Americans so proud. We were the unrivaled pioneers of the 20th Century.
And it didn’t end there.
8-½ years after the sixth and final Apollo mission to the moon, Americans reached space again, this time in another magnificent vehicle, the Space Shuttle. All told, there were 135 missions. I had the privilege of anchoring a 90-minute television broadcast from the Kennedy Space Center for each of its final 28 flights.
It never got old. Every launch was unique. Different weather, different time of day, different trajectory toward the target. A different crew, a different payload, a different mission.
With every launch, watching from my anchor desk 3.1 miles from the launch pad (considered the “blast radius,” as close as anyone could safely watch, save for a handful of emergency rescue personnel in a bunker), I was infused, sometimes emotionally overwhelmed, with a sense of awe: awe for the power of the ship, awe for the brilliance of the engineering, awe for the precision of the flight plan, awe for the courage of the astronauts.
And with two hauntingly tragic exceptions, awe for the success of the enterprise. It was against all odds. The shuttle had so many moving parts, so many risks, so many forbidding forces, so many unknowns. The head of NASA’s manned space program once squeezed his thumb and forefinger together about a foot from my face and said, “We’re always this close to disaster.”
But, like the Apollo, the Gemini, and the Mercury missions before it, the shuttle flew anyway.
During those years, I asked NASA’s then-Administrator Charlie Bolden, himself a four-time shuttle astronaut, whether we’ll ever go back to the moon. “Yes,” he said, “but we’re in no hurry. Maybe someone will even beat us there. But do you know what they’ll find when they land on the lunar surface? Six flags. And they’re all ours.”
That was then. This is now. The ships keep flying but the excitement has dwindled. And the pride has dimmed.
No one factor, no one war, no one president is singlehandedly responsible. But that improbable feat on this date 52 years ago, achieved with a combination of innovation and initiative and intrepid courage, probably was the first and the last time we all really came together, citizens in every state and on every continent struck with a single sense of awe.
But that can’t diminish this fact: as comparatively commonplace as space travel seems to have become, there are far-reaching goals in future exploration, as there are far-reaching benefits from exploration we’ve already seen— from robotics to satellite telecommunications, from cardiac tools to cancer therapies, from home insulation to fire retardants, from water purifiers to solar panels, from polarized sunglasses to freeze-dried foods, and last but not least, to the Dustbuster. As our population continues to expand, we might some day depend on what’s now being learned about growing food in space. As we continue to age, we might some day depend on what’s now being learned about developing medicines in space.
And equally important, in my mind anyway, is that space stirs up qualities that distinguish man from every other species on earth: profound intellect, boundless invention, insatiable curiosity, bold exploration. I don’t ignore the adverse implications for native peoples, but where would we be today without the inquisitive adventurers of centuries past, who crossed into the unknown in their sailing ships and found new worlds?
Man was meant to explore.
“One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Those words, and the deed they defined, have stuck with me, and will forever.
More than half a century back, we were shooting for the stars. In ways large and small, with missions manned and unmanned, we still are. We still must.
That is the meaning of the 20th of July.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
I quite enjoyed this, and your writing. I will look for more of your posts
Well done, Greg!