Fifty years ago, human beings walked on the moon, touching another world in our vast Universe for the very first time. I remember watching it unfold on television as a kid, and being tremendously impressed. I still am.
But the moon landing was never as popular with the American public as it is from the perspective of five decades later. The more honest retrospectives remind us of this. I remember the protests as well as the expressions of triumph and awe. All shared the theme that the money spent going to the moon could have funded (take your pick) public housing, medical care, relief from hunger, better public transportation, and so on. As if it were an either-or choice.
These objections have always seemed disproportionately aimed at space exploration and space science. People seldom decry sports stadiums, the interstate highway system, or colossal shopping mall parking lots, let alone the huge sums spent on military equipment and interventions in other countries, as wastes of money that could be better spent somewhere else. But space is often seen as esoteric and unnecessary, outside of ordinary, earthbound human experience.
Race played a role, as it does in most American debates. The poet Gil Scott-Heron penned a critical piece entitled “Whitey’s on the Moon.” (It was featured in the 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man.”) Twelve white male Americans have walked on the lunar surface – no one else. And while many people of color – men and women – did crucial work behind the scenes to get them there, the television images from Mission Control showed a sea of white male faces.
There was also Vietnam, which was beginning to erode the international goodwill the United States had earned in the Second World War. At a time when young Americans were killing and dying in the jungles of a poor and distant country for no coherent purpose, it seemed overly self-congratulatory to leave a spacecraft on the moon bearing the message: “We came in peace for all mankind.”
But we did. Fifty years later, we have not weaponized the moon, nor turned it into a penal colony, both of which took place in Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. We haven’t, in fact, done much of anything with the moon. The last footprint in the lunar soil was made in 1972.
The author James Michener has a Norwegian character articulate this in his novel The Drifters, which takes place in 1969: “I think your men will get to the moon next month. But it won’t mean very much, because Americans are the Vikings of this age. Brave but stupid. You lack ideas… and there goes the moon. A hundred years from now, somebody like the Japanese will follow you and take with them a tremendous vision, and they’ll be the ones who really discover the moon.”*
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But another thing I remember about the moon landing is that it transcended national boundaries. More than a billion people, in countries friendly, hostile, and neutral toward the United States, watched the moon landing on public and private television screens around the world, and almost all of them cheered.
Every astronaut who saw the world whole returned to Earth with a newly-honed environmental and international consciousness. The famous photo that graced the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue(and countless classroom walls) brought home to us all that our planet is a single and singular place.
Decades later, Carl Sagan conceived another photograph, taken by the Voyager spacecraft, that showed Earth as a “pale blue dot” against an almost infinite background of stars. Like Apollo, the unmanned Voyager missions were made in America. And yet, one of the first things I learned when I went to teach in Bulgaria was that a traditional song by Bulgarian singer Valya Balkanska is on the gold record that was included on Voyagers 1 and 2 as greetings to any extraterrestrials who might discover them. The Bulgarians are quite proud of this. It’s their mission, too.
In these days when xenophobic governments are tightening their borders and repressing their own citizens in a last stand for a mindset that humanity must soon outgrow, I’m heartened that the moon landing is now mostly seen in a positive light. I’m pleased that generations born after the event seem to be interested in space. If the lasting legacy of the moon landing is the beginning of the end of nationalism, it was worth every dime.
*Michener, James: The Drifters, ©1971 by Random House Inc.
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