"When the elevator at the Washington Monument caught fire in December and smoke poured out of the building, one drunk staggered by and declared, 'They will never get it off the ground.'"
--John Kennedy, 1958
This past month, in the run-up to the weekend's 50th anniversary of the Moon Walk, it has been amazing to read and hear about the ignorance of mankind as he reached up to the stars.
Not stupidity, mind you. Just ignorance. As in: Man didn't know things. A lot of things.
We rewatched The Right Stuff last week, the movie, which was nearly as good as the book. It was true: Some engineers thought the sound barrier couldn't be broken. Because once you got to that speed, the air couldn't get out of a plane's way. Chuck Yeager proved them wrong. That flight paved the road toward space.
The book American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley tells the long story of Wernher von Braun, a Nazi-era rocket scientist for the Germans during World War II, who was scooped up by the Americans before the Russians could get to him. Dr. Von Braun gave the Americans a large skip ahead in rocket development--maybe as much as eight years we didn't have in the race to space.
But even then, there were questions about whether space flight and a moon landing were possible.
Did Newton's Third Law of Motion apply in space? If there was nothing to push against, how thrust something forward?
Could a person pull a lever in space? Could he move his arm at all? Would zero gravity cause a pilot to become incoherent? The brass might want to train a chimp to do some simple things first. (Which they did.)
Gus Grissom was nearly passed over for space flight because he suffered from hay fever. He explained to the flight surgeon who brought it up: There's no ragweed in space.
Maybe, some engineers suggested, they should design tiny nuclear bombs to go off behind each spacecraft, pushing the ship off into space explosion by explosion, and have some sort of spring mechanism to protect astronauts from the concussions. That plan was wisely abandoned.
Would radio signals travel through space? After all, it's a vacuum out there. Until NACA (NASA's little brother) was able to bounce radio signals off the moon and back, scientists didn't really know. Once they did, communicating with space travelers, and even piloting crafts remotely, became possible.
And exactly how should the moving parts work? Build a gigantic spacecraft to land on the moon and take off later? Such a vehicle would be too big for 1969's rockets to launch. Or shoot several spacecraft "parts" toward the moon and link them in flight before they landed? Or the most bizarre way: Have a lunar module hitch a ride in the rocket, pull it out after launch, send it down to the moon's surface, and have it blast off again to rendezvous with a spacecraft overhead. That seemed much too technical. And that option was chosen.
Some scientists thought the moon was mostly dust anyway. So we had to fly a couple of crafts into it to make sure the craft didn't sink into a mile or so of powdered chalk.
Reporters asked whether the moon walkers should be armed.
On Saturday, Americans celebrated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's successful mission to the moon. And still today, some folks ask: Why go to the moon? What good did it do?
Once, many years ago, Benjamin Franklin watched as the first gas-filled balloon rose over the city of Paris. Somebody remarked: What good is a gas-filled balloon anyway?
Mr. Franklin replied: "What good is a baby?"
Now then, fellow Americans, what should be the ZIP code for Mars?
Editorial on 07/21/2019