Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147)

by William E. Burrows

  First quickly became the buzzword in the United States and elsewhere in the West as Korolev and his compatriots racked up one after another. The unstated but widely accepted implication was that a nation that was first in performing all of those feats had an energetic and robust space program with skilled personnel and excellent facilities. R-7s and other giant lifters were not fired from slingshots. The infrastructure, let alone the science and engineering, that was required to get people to space was formidable and reflected a basic strength that necessarily had to be extensive. Being able to stage such spectacular performances, in other words, was the sure mark of strength that extended to relations with the rest of the world. It made the difference between being a mere power and being a superpower.

  John F. Kennedy, who was so notoriously competitive that he even hated losing at touch football, knew that. The consecutive, daring Soviet achievements got the rapt attention of the American news media and briefly seemed to cast doubt on his country's leading the world in science and technology. It seemed to betray Edison, Morse, Ford, Lindbergh, Perry, Byrd, and the other inventors, adventurers, and explorers. It rankled. Space, as the Caltech geologist and space scientist Bruce Murray has said, is a reflection of Earth.8 The prospect of the “greatest nation on Earth” (as the United States called itself) being repeatedly beaten in space and therefore seeming to be a second-rate power, at least in that realm, was not acceptable to JFK. Nor were things much better on terra firma. The civil-rights situation in the south had turned explosive; the Communist Pathet Lao were dangerously close to toppling the pro-American government in Laos; the Communist-led Vietcong, aided by North Vietnam, was waging a war against the pro–West South Vietnamese government; and the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba to remove Fidel Castro from power turned into a fiasco when the invading force of Cuban exiles, lacking the air cover they expected, was almost massacred at the Bay of Pigs. Then space began to turn red, or so it seemed in the White House, with an impressionable Third World watching. The Underdeveloped World, as it had been called until recently, was taken—incorrectly—to be up for grabs in terms of Eastern or Western “influence.” Its leaders tended to play both sides against each other while steadfastly maintaining their independence.

  “The President was more convinced than any of his advisers that a second-rate, second-place space effort was inconsistent with the country's security, with its role as world leader and with the New Frontier spirit of discovery,” Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy's special counsel, recalled years later.9

  On the basis of advice Kennedy got from his inner circle, including Sorensen, he therefore made what he later called one of the most important decisions of his presidency: “to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear.”

  On May 25, 1961, in a speech to Congress that addressed “urgent national needs,” Kennedy mentioned several dangers that faced the United States, including Communist subversion. He then used the Sputnik and Gagarin flights, and their impact on “the minds of men everywhere,” to call for the United States to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. “While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first,” he warned, “we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will find us last.” He repeated the plan in an address at Rice University in Texas on September 12, 1962, and that was the one that got the news media's attention and put him all over page one.

  We choose to go to the Moon. 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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.10

  Announcing only that Americans were going to go to the Moon would have been very good strategy. It would have been a fine foreign-policy ploy, something of a morale booster for the American people, and an encouraging signal to the space agency and the science and industrial sectors. But putting a time limit on it—within the decade, meaning within eight years—was brilliant. The finite time period was a virtual guarantee that, unlike so many promising programs in Washington that evaporate after they are announced, landing men on the Moon was really going to happen because an actual, stated, on-the-record deadline made it definite. The world had the president's word on it, and no president would volitionally lie, particularly about a subject of such importance whose failure was guaranteed to diminish his image in the history books. Furthermore, deadlines are inherently dramatic because they create the pressure that comes with competition, and there is a penalty of some sort when they are not met. That is why sports events are played in finite periods of time that are extended only if the competitors are tied. “Third and goal with less than a minute on the clock” generally gets football fans on their feet. A tie score that would extend the game to the next day would not.

  With that announcement, John M. Logsdon, a leading space expert and author of The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest, has rightly explained, Kennedy not only set a single, overarching goal for the space program, but he also fundamentally changed the nature of the program itself. “He challenged the assertion that a ‘single civil-military program…is unattainable’ by approving the initial plan for just such a program, aimed at establishing American preeminence in every aspect of space activity, civilian and military, scientific and commercial, prestige-oriented and unspectacular.” He thereby abruptly and dramatically reversed Eisenhower's decentralized and lackluster space program.11 JFK, in other words, finally got a fractured and unfocused operation pointing in a single direction with a dramatic goal that would require heroism and dignify the whole human race (the Russians, the Chinese, and other Cold War foes, plus the Third World).

  Kennedy mandated NASA to plan and carry out no less than the single greatest and most dramatic feat of exploration in human history: to send men to another world. The space agency managed to do that not once but seven times, with six crews landing on the Moon in a program that was adroitly christened Apollo, after the god of light and the Sun in Greek mythology, an omnipotent oracle who bestowed truth and culture on the world. The Russians were decisively routed, and bragging rights were decisively and dramatically won by the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  All of the free world cheered when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin alighted on the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins cruised overhead in the Apollo 11 command module. The landing captured the imagination of the world, with untold millions watching it on television, listening to it on radios, and reading about it in their newspapers (including Pravda and Izvestia in Russia, and Jen-Min Jih-Pao in China). Their fellow men had landed on another world. That was taken to mean that, given the resolve, anything was possible. It was literally the high point in human history—a transcendental moment when humanity expanded its domain as never before.

  It was also a masterpiece of subtle public relations. “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong famously proclaimed as he set foot on the lunar surface to begin a romp that lasted almost three hours. That meant the landing was on behalf of all humanity; that Americans had ventured to another world as representatives of all humankind, a distinctly noble gesture. But the flag that Aldrin planted in the lunar soil as he was being photographed in color was not the United Nation's. It was the stars and stripes; Old Glory.

  The newspaper of record (as the Times called itself) devoted all of page one to the story, as did every other reputable paper in the country:

  MEN WALK ON MOON

  ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN;

  COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG

  “Men have landed and walked on the moon,” John Noble Wi
lford, the reporter who covered the space program for the Times, wrote with eloquent simplicity at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Mission Control controlled the mission.

  Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.

  Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old commander, radioed to earth and the mission control room here:

  “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”12

  The space establishment was of course ecstatic, and so, for the most part, were the Pentagon, the news media, the industrial sector, highly educated professionals, Joe Six Pack, and ordinary Americans everywhere.

  The intellectual establishment had three perspectives: that there were higher priorities on the home planet, such as disease and poverty; that the Moon ought to be untouched by humans and left in its pristine condition; and that landing on it would not only be scientifically important but would be the greatest adventure of all time, and one that helped unify the world.

  Arnold J. Toynbee, the venerable British historian, thought that landing on the Moon symbolized a large gap between technology and morals. “In a sense,” he said, “going to the Moon is like building the pyramids or Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. It's rather scandalous, when human beings are going short of necessities, to do this. If we're clever enough to reach the Moon, don't we feel rather foolish in our mismanagement of human affairs?” Mark Van Doren, the Columbia University poet and professor of English, thought that the Moon was majestic and a symbol of nature and the universe because it was unsullied by humans and ought to remain that way. “I wish we would leave the Moon alone. I have great respect for the Moon. The arrogance of men landing on the Moon is, to me, very shocking and painful,” he told a journalist.13 Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading theologian, agreed.

  Predictably, scientists strongly disagreed. “The Roman Empire decayed when it ceased to be progressive in this kind of sense, and there are other examples,” Sir Bernard Lovell, the director of Britain's Jodrell Bank Observatory, contended. “To a certain extent, you see the beginnings of it in the United Kingdom today, but fortunately not in the United States and certainly not in the Soviet Union.”

  Margaret Mead, an animated anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, heartily agreed. “People have always said that it would be better to stay at home and till your own cabbage patch. I think that if people don't follow the potentialities of movement and change, they're likely to wither and die,” she said, adding that we would “hate ourselves” if we did not go there.14

  And Isaac Asimov, who had a degree in biochemistry that he applied to science fiction and who was then publishing his hundredth-or-so book, saw Earthlings going to the Moon as a unifying factor. “Once we reach the Moon,” he said, “I think we will have made our point and should stop fooling around. The trip to Mars will be too expensive for either the United States or the Soviet Union to do alone. This is an age of global problems. By combining for the conquest of space, we can cooperate where it bothers our prejudices the least because none of us has a vested interest in space. During the International Geophysical Year, for example, everyone agreed on the manner in which they would investigate Antarctica. It was an empty land which belonged to nobody and they could agree on it without loss of face. Similarly, we can agree on space.”15 The exploration of the Moon, then, should be an international operation that would help unify nations—and, by implication, promote peace—and would lead the way to Mars.

  The Times enthusiastically supported the Apollo program and a presence in space in general. But, to its chagrin, that had not always been the case. On January 13, 1920, “Topics of the Times” ran a short, smug editorial-page feature that basically said that space travel was impossible. It dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum, where there was nothing to push against, and ridiculed Robert H. Goddard, the American rocket pioneer, for having the temerity to believe otherwise. “That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” The newspaper's editorial board saw fit to run a correction on July 17, 1969, almost a half century later, as Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins headed for the Moon, that was cleverly self-mocking. Under a headline that read “A Correction,” the story recounted the mistake and concluded with dry humor that “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as in the atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”16

  That first Moon landing was NASA's finest moment. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins returned from the Sea of Tranquility to a ticker-tape parade in New York and parades in Chicago and Los Angeles. They were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and had a forty-five-day Giant Leap tour of twenty-five countries that included an audience with Queen Elizabeth II. All of America cheered them, and, implicitly, the space agency that got them to the Moon and back. Many proclaimed almost deliriously that they felt privileged to live at a time when their race first went to another world; it was a moment unique in all of history and they were deeply happy to witness it. But the exhilaration and enthusiasm quickly lessened because of a natural falling off of interest in repeat performances, and also because of détente with the Evil Empire, as President Reagan would call the USSR. And the counterculture was taking hold, and with it, a restructuring of many Americans’ priorities. The nation's collective mind was convulsing over the war in Vietnam; the civil-rights movement was fighting for racial equality and an end to bigotry (in the north as well as in the south); and self-proclaimed public-interest groups were demanding a reversal of urban decay, improved public education, and an end to crippling inflation that was severely hurting the poor and the middle class. Campus unrest, mostly because of Vietnam, but also because of the racial situation, was rampant.

  No wonder public interest in the Apollo missions had fallen off substantially by the time Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. and Alan L. Bean spent more than a day on the Sea of Storms while Richard F. Gordon Jr. orbited in the command module in November 1969 on the Apollo 12 mission. And if the distractions were not enough, an oxygen tank exploded in Apollo 13's service module on April 13, 1970, two days after launch, forcing it to return home without landing on the Moon. The accident brought to mind the Apollo 1 fire at Cape Canaveral on January 27, 1967, that killed Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Edward H. White. The Apollo 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions were duly flown, with the last landing in the Taurus-Littrow valley and spending a record three days there, including a record twenty-two hours on extravehicular activity, as being outside a spacecraft in space or on luna firma is called, collecting a record 110.5 kilograms of rocks and other material and leaving scientific instruments. Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt (a geologist and the only scientist to land on the Moon) set a record for the longest time on the Moon before they came home on December 7, 1972. By then, the planned Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions had been scrubbed for a lack of both funding and public interest.

  Alan Bean told John Noble Wilford, the New York Times's space reporter, that the Apollo astronauts had taken it for granted that the program they started would continue with the construction of a lunar base and space stations (plural) as part of humanity's logical expansion to space for a permanent presence there. “At that time in our culture's history, we were doing the most that was possible to be done. We naively assumed that's what would continue, but it didn't,” a disappointed Bean reflected. “It's the normal thing for a culture, in history, that we respond to emergencies.”17

  They are looming. The lita
ny of dangers, from high-velocity boulders peppering the neighborhood to resource depletion, to continuing terrorism, to global warming and the multiple problems it is causing, to overpopulation. Yet humanity is caught in a dangerous predicament. Unlike the other creatures on this planet, humans—at least some of them—have the intellectual capacity to understand the precariousness of the situation. But there is no inclination to respond to it with a long-term plan because, like the other creatures, humans are fundamentally—perhaps because of their evolution—incapable of projecting threats to the distant future and coming up with ways to reduce or avert them. It is the ultimate chess game, and we are playing it like wood-pushers.

  E. O. Wilson, the naturalist, has his own theory, which he shared in a speech he gave to the members of the Foundation for the Future in August 2002, when he was presented with an award. “The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limiting band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination, however promising, or menacing.” He explained it in Darwinian terms. “For hundreds of millennia, those who worked for short term gains in a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring, even when—and this is the important part—their collective striving put their descendants at risk.”18

  Apollo's end left NASA in a quandary. Although it ran many routine satellite operations that provided weather, communication, and navigation information that had become indispensable to a modern society, Apollo was by far its greatest, most ennobling achievement, and it was now history. Next in order of prestige and public awareness was the exploration of the Solar System, which had started with the Ranger and Surveyor projects scouting the Moon in preparation for Apollo, and then it extended to the Mariner missions to Mercury, Venus, and Mars; the Pioneer missions to Jupiter and Saturn and to investigate solar phenomena; the landing of two Viking spacecraft on Mars; the Voyagers’ sensational Grand Tour; Magellan's mapping of Venus; and Galileo's intense reexamination of the King of the Planets. The “take” from the science missions was phenomenal and ranks with the exploration of Earth itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the accumulation of all the information, together with budget cuts because of priorities at home, eventually brought Solar System exploration to near closure as well. The same for the International Space Station, which, because of the retirement of the shuttles, Americans can reach only by paying Russia—which “lost” the space race (whatever that was)—to transport them in Soyuz spacecraft. And with the days of Chuck Yeager and his X-1, followed by the extraordinary X-15, long gone, aeronautical testing is routinely going on but is negligible. That leaves NASA without a major mission. But there is one: planetary defense.