Being of the appropriate vintage, I do remember the moon landing, forty years ago today. You’ll see all the clips played over and over again. NASA has even restored some of them, so you can see more detail. In the day, video was very low-fidelity from small cameras at the best of times and sending the signal from the Moon was an incredible effort just to have moving pictures.
Forty years on, we haven’t done much with the Moon. The two lunar Rovers are still there. Astronaut Gene Cernan (Apollo 17) is of the opinion that we could go back, bring some old skool batteries, power the Rover back up, then skedaddle around just like old times. He’s probably right, but it doesn’t quite answer the question of “Now what?”
There were all kinds of wild speculation that we would have extensive habitation, mining minerals and growing peaches the size of basketballs in mammoth greenhouses. The first generation of space-born children would all be over seven feet tall (no gravity, or very little gravity to push against their bodies) and would view Earth as some quaint blue planet that Grandpa came from.
Of course all that wonderful speculation was just that, speculation. There really wasn’t a way to make money off the Moon. It wasn’t as if there were huge gobs of gold just sitting below the dusty surface, or strange clumps of Unobtainium waiting for the clever engineers to wrought into miraculous machines for our salvation. If you wanted dust, regolith, or powdered basalt, the Moon was the place to go, but the economic model didn’t work. We haven’t been back since Cernan and Apollo 17, in December 1972.
There will always be that percentage of the populace that are absolutely positive that it was all faked. Such things as evidence don’t matter to them and they’re collectively dusting off their black helicopter decoder rings and secret handshakes to ‘prove’ once again that the entire space race was done on a sound stage at Nellis, or Black Lake, or White Sands. We should just them rant, as they’ll run out of air and settle back down in a weeks’ time.
The Moon Landings happened in a time when humans were still capable of doing good, big, important things. If JFK threw down the gauntlet of “Landing a Man on the Moon and returning him safely…” in a speech today, the CIA would have a net over him in a second and whisked off to the loony bin for a long course of electro-convulsive therapy. We, collectively, don’t do heroic anymore.
However, some night, when the Moon is full and the skies clear, take a moment to look at the Moon. Really look at it. People walked up there. We went there.
RoadDave 