No matter how much the New York Times and other media outlets desire to belittle the Apollo 11 moon-landing, it will stand as one of the greatest achievements in human history. A feat of collective genius and sublime effort of Americans working together for a shared goal.
10
"The peak of American greatness lies 50 years in the past."
How can the peak of American greatness lie 50 years in the past when we have the Apple Computer invented, more cures for Cancer, and many many other things since 1969. It was only a step to American greatness not the peak. We are still working on reaching that peak.
7
Denial of global warming signaled fading of our greatness...The Marshall Plan, moon landings, a century of US global leadership, may be at an end.
Going to the moon may be the one qualitatively different thing that humanity has done in the last 10,000 years. We have steadily increased our ability to both heal and kill, but human relationships, best we can tell from history and archeology, have remained the same.
Also remaining the same is people's tendency to believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence. And I am not just talking about our current political climate:
"According to a C-SPAN/Ipsos poll released earlier this month, 6 percent of Americans believe the moon landing was staged, including 11 percent of millennials."
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/motorsports/walking-on-the-moon-i-dont-believe-its-true-nascars-ryan-newman-says/ar-AAECoxP?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=mailsignout)
Note to those who believe young people will lead us out of our political/cultural morass if we would follow their advice/opinions/values: to repeat,"6 percent of Americans believe the moon landing was staged, including 11 percent of millennials."
The moon landing united us as Americans as has nothing else in my lifetime. At a time when the country was much more divided by the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights struggle, and a cultural challenge from youth that included strong feminist and gay elements, when Apollo landed on the moon we were all proud, excited Americans, not hierarchically divided, hyphenated Americans defined primarily by the particularistic adjective before the hyphen rather than the collective noun, American.
7
Where did the people in the old photographs go? They died and their gullible children and grandchildren fell for Nixon, Reagan, Bushes and now Trump. Small government race baited myopia fueled by fear which meets every common endeavor with bed wetting cries of socialism.
11
No, it was a big reality show. It really was not a practical or reasonable way to spend our money. It was a reaction to fear about Russia. It has not produced anything but blots of documentries and photos and hero worship. German Nazi scientists, racial prejudice, no real results .
We need to fix our little planet not go roving around the universe. It is used as a distraction to avoid our real earth bound issues. Climate change is 1000X more important to fix then a second moon shot or mars landing.
3
"The peak of American greatness lies 50 years in the past."
Spoken like a true conservative.....
In one way I agree, today the occupant of the white house wants to "send people back......" where as 50 years ago we had a president who wanted to send people to the moon........
By any objective measure, sending people to the moon is a far greater achievement than "sending people back to where they came from....", especially when you are talking about American citizens.
So yes, we were truly a greater country 50 years ago in that regard (By many measures we weren't). It was a time when America was being challenged to be a better country than we were. Today the president challenges us to lower ourselves to the level of children having a playground fight.
5
I can tell you exactly who they were. My grandparents were born US citizens in 1898 of German speaking immigrant parents. My grandfather had a goat drawn cart as a boy and my grandmother rode horses. He fought in WWI, they weathered the depression and WWII, making it at last to stability and prosperity. They named their Dalmatian dog Apollo after the space program such was their enthusiasm. And they would have considered Trump and his supporters pure Dreck. The antithesis of anything great or patriotic.
7
Pleased note that the US space effort, including the moon landing, was led by Wernher von Braun, a major in the SS who had led rocket development in Nazi Germany. Immediately after WW II von Braun and his merry band of a few hundred rocketeers were spirited out of Germany by US intelligence agents, brought to America and magically cleansed of their Nazi backgrounds.
Von Braun and his colleagues also shaped the development of the US ballistic missiles that carry nuclear weapons.
Ironically, the Russkies wanted von Braun and his key people as much as the US did, but ended up being able to “recruit” only from the remaining second-tier German rocket scientists, who were taken to Russia, pumped for what information they had, and ultimately repatriated to Germany.
At least von Braun and his top colleagues ended up working for the US; how might things have turned out if the Russians had got hold of von Braun and his people before we did?
2
I'm a space geek myself and have been enjoying all the commemorations--at moments with awe--but I do think there are different ways to view the Apollo program than the one Ross offers.
One is the funny line in Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode with President Obama. He's talking about the Corvette he picked to meet the President--and that leads him to wax nostalgic about how all the astronauts drove Corvettes. "This was a time when America just did stuff! Let's go to the Moon! Why? We don't know! How? We don't know! We just did stuff!"
The other is an observation made in a science-fiction novel of my childhood, looking back at the 20th century from (I think) the 2500s. The narrator says that the people of their time marvel at the bravery and ingenuity of the astronauts, daring to go into space in their flimsy contraptions--and also marvel at the silly motivations that led them there (e.g. the "space race").
1
You are right to castigate Trump for his conduct but let’s not forget that Kennedy was at least complicit in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and the Bay of Pigs debacle, came thisclose to getting us destroyed during the Cuban Missile Crisis and employed a former SS officer (von Braun) in a key role at NASA. All this, after his father arguably purchased his election in 1960. In his spare time he turned the White House into a frat house and shared a mistress with mafia godfather Sam Giancana while the CIA was conspiring with Giancana to assassinate Castro. Makes Trump look kind of amateurish, no?
3
Douthat has an unfortunate definition of magnificent and sublimity. Perhaps you should go back to Edmund Burke's definition of sublime, which implies something terrible and massive. Apollo was gigantism, and gigantism is a sure sign of decadence. Remember too that nostalgia is the most dangerous of emotions.
2
I think Americans can rightfully be immensely proud of the achievement of Apollo 11 and the first manned landing on the moon. As a 9 year old English boy living in London at the time, I have only a vague recollection of the event. I don't know why that is but I suspect that my parents sent me to bed when the event was unfolding and I must have watched it on the news later in the day. I wish they were still around for me to ask them.
The uniqueness of the achievement says so much about America in the 1960s. If a British Prime Minister stood up (then or now) and said that we were going to the moon "not because it is easy, but because it is hard", his sanity would immediately be brought into question. Britain has become a country where "value for money" needs to be demonstrated before anything happens; a position that I suspect America may be closer to now than it was in the 1960s. The idea, that a substantial part of a country's national output could be spent on an exploration endeavour with nebulous economic benefits is incredible but also uplifting, heroic and, frankly, just magnificent.
4
In 1969, the top marginal tax rate was 77 percent. The capital gains tax was 27.9 percent. The corporate income tax was 53 percent. Public universities were not free, but nearly so, as they were seriously supported by state governments. As a result, we had both the resources and the talent to put men on the moon. That was, indeed, the year of peak American greatness. Then came decades of conservative Republican obsessive tax cutting and disinvestment in the commons, aided, abetted and even furthered by Corporate Democratic me-tooism. And here we are, in the Dark Age of Trump. Now, at this point, I'd ordinarily go for a Game of Thrones reference and say that Winter has come and we're ruled by the Night King. But the horror of global warming makes it less and less likely that we'll ever see winter again.
5
Sublime article Mr. Douthat, Thanks for this.
Indeed, honor to them without qualification.
1
Maybe the USA can go beyond the greatness of Apollo 11. We may, some day, find a way to connect all the computers in an entire city so that they can communicate with each other, and share information, as if they were files of various types. Think of the possible breakthroughs it might lead to! Maybe even expand it to larger groups and even share libraries. Nahhhh.
3
Apollo did not fail. We did. We failed in using our imagination. We failed to understand that Space is the next frontier, and is the only frontier. We failed to understand that progress means sacrifice. We forgot that as civilization moves outward, civilization itself improves with new discoveries. We complained that TV soap operas were interrupted when Viking sent the first pictures from the surface of Mars. We did not follow our better angels. We did not step forward, but instead retreated into low Earth orbit, where we remain. With Donald Trump as president.
4
First, history is not over yet. I expect mankind will colonize the solar system in the next few hundred years.
Second, the space program is still underway, and it has borne fruit in countless ways, both scientifically and technologically. The space station has not yielded much of interest, but robot exploration of Mars and other planets, and space-based telescopes have made enormous contributions to our knowledge. Technologically, the space program probably pays for itself every month just with the GPS and improved weather forecasting. It also boosted progress in computers and integrated circuits, and much else.
4
A fantastic essay. Beautifully written, thank you.
The sublime part of the Apollo mission was the belief that, by supporting this magnificent enterprise, the fruits of that labor would be successful, and not end in failure, or in corruption, or in waste.
The 50-year crusade to convince the American people that government is terrible has been largely successful. If you want to go back to the days of the Apollo moon landing, please think seriously about switching your politics.
6
The two great colossuses of the last half of the 20th century were the interstate highway system and the moonshot. Both were spurred by the Cold War. The highways were justified in defense grounds and so, ultimately, was Apollo.
Since the demise of the USSR, we haven’t undertaken anything ambitious. No high-speed rail, no educational or research project, no makeover of energy production or conversion to sustainable nontoxic agriculture.
The Republican Party, once staunch anticommunist, now plays footsie with Putin. More and more, they adopt the disinformation methods of the KGB.
I do not think the country’s greatness lies behind us. But I do think America has yet to learn how to be ambitious without an enemy.
3
In September of 1969, an English teacher in Caldwell, NJ, created a bulletin board based on the photo taken that summer, of an American astronaut standing on the moon. The text, in the black space above it, was from Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form and meaning how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension like a god. The beauty of the world.”
I have never forgotten that.
4
JFK did another thing, he started the Vietnam War. On July 29, 1969 15 Americans died in Vietnam, 58000 in all. Would you rather have a bag of rocks or those men and women alive.
1
@Rich Murphy I share your sadness at the loss of 58,000 American lives but I don't see how you pose that loss of life as a trade off for lunar exploration. One had nothing to do with the other.
6
I watched the moon landing 50 years ago from the lobby of a hotel room in Italy. My military husband and I were in the process of returning from being stationed in Naples. The moon landing was a thrilling moment. I was sad when the program ended, but now I find myself more sad to think that, given the current state of the world and the fact that we seem to have been taken over by fascists, we are talking about going to other worlds, even though we can't seem to take of our care of our own world here. The most violent greedy people seem to be taking over the planet. We are unwilling to protect our planet here from the ravages of overpopulation, pollution, and climate change. If there proves to be life on other worlds, they would be wise to protect themselves from our arrival.
63
@Georgia, thank you for this comment. As a humanist my whole life, I am heartbreakingly coming round to the fact that this magnificent earth will be far better off without the human species. For all that humankind has accomplished in science, agriculture, medicine; art, literature, music, architecture, thought; the flip side of us is horrifyingly monstrous and cruel. And that monstrosity seems to be in full force, almost gleefully, and taking over all sense and reason. It’s a very sad and frightening age we’re living in right now.
14
my dad was involved in the Apollo program working at Grumman on L.I.
the Apollo program is a pinnacle of human achievement.
but
I believe our best days are still ahead as a self-governing people, here in the USA
Why shouldn't we push forward after celebrating the Apollo program, rather than lament greatness lost?
36
@howard No not the pinnacle of human achievement. It was a distraction form our earthly problems and still is. The pinnacle of our achievements will be a cure for cancer, stop the wars and feed people and reverse climate damage. Sending a few people to Mars to live in a bubble is a waste.
4
I remember watching the moon landing as a 10 year old, as part of a large crowd in a summer camp gathered in front of a small black-and-white television. Despite all the technological advances of the past 50 years, I cannot imagine a 10 year old today being awed to the extent by what I witnessed on July 20, 1969.
47
In September 1969, my English teacher gave my class a writing prompt: “This Really Grabbed Me.” I wrote about the moon landing. The teacher gave me an A—but commented that I was the only one who had written about it. Even then, the wonder of the event was lost on some.
4
Hard for me to see " The peak of American greatness lies 50 years in the past" when 1969 was the year we began the secret bombing of Cambodia and there were 30,000 American casualties in Vietnam, a war we ultimately lost.
3
Space, the final frontier...
I still hope that one day we will live in star trek’s universe, of exploration, scientific curiosity, know-how, and above all beyond the petty divisions of earth, to where infinite diversity in infinite combinations is celebrated and enjoyed as we reach out across the galaxy.
13
I’m very much in agreement with you. I will add that Carl Sagan highlighted our sentiments, especially when he spoke of the Blue Marble and later, the Pale Blue Dot.
7
@Lisa
Discovering and especially interacting with extraterrestrial civilization(s) would of course drive a quantum leap for the human race, probably saving us from a number of possible extinction-level futures. Some would be fearful or envious of these "close encounters", but overall, I think we would be inspired to survive, and better ourselves. (It's a pity that the many concepts of "God", whether we're believers or not, haven't sufficiently done the same.)
The real tick is for us to survive long enough to make these ET contacts.
LOL. I'm confused about NYT's comment timelines: how did Robert's reply to you get an earlier timestamp?
By the way, Ross: great essay - one of your best.
2
@ACBrown
Ha ha, obviously, it's the time zone differential.
And, make that "trick", not "tick".
"We honor them by acknowledging this peak without qualification or cavil. And we will be their heirs in full only when we leap beyond it."
When we leap beyond that great undertaking? Or, when we develop a better, more humane way of cillaborating as they did back then.
1969 may not have been a society as just as ours is now in terms of laws, but it was more civil.
More important, we didn't pick our friends by their voting patterns. Politics was right-sized: important but not all consuming. We weren't compelled to adopt the entire worldview of leaders we followed. There was only one "version" of truth: it was called "reality."
JFK said the moon mission was pursued not because it was easy, but because it was hard. Today, politicians are lazy. We undershoot and call it victory, as if "settling" was the best option of all.
I miss the old America--not the one of the 50's with tidy belief systems and set ways. No, I miss the expectation a president like Kennedy had, where engineers worked side by side no matter their political persuasions. Where African American women mathematicians were called on for their smarts, not the color of their skin.
A common enterprise--how quaint that seems. Ross you wish we could soar again but I'd be content to see the moon landing replicated.
Assuming we could.
4
A year and a half into his Presidency, John F. Kennedy gave his moon speech to 35,000 people at Rice University in Houston, Texas:
"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war..."
"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?"
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon...We choose to go to the moon in this decade not because it is easy, but because it is 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 we intend to win."
Two and half years into his Presidency, the current occupant gave a speech to 8,000 people at East Carolina University demonizing Democrats and saying this:
"Look at her beautiful (MAGA) hat. Looks very good on you, but look at this. Look at those beautiful MAGA hats."
The USA has suffered a GOP-Trumpian collapse of epic proportions.
12
It is now estimated that there are 100 billion GALAXIES in the universe, each with a 100 billion or more stars/suns.
Everything we know, everything we care about, everything we love is right here. We are tied to earth by physiology, social understanding and connections, our functional biology, our families, our shared history, our ability to see and appreciate the beauty of nature around us, our religions, our hopes for our children. Air, water, darkness at night, seasons, all here. What is out there except the howling emptiness of a universe we have barely begun to measure or understand?
Regardless of who or how you think we got here, there are thousands of miracles that have allowed us to live. The envelop of breathable air. The belt that protects us from cosmic radiation. The rain from the skies. The bacteria in the dirt that somehow cleans water passing through so it is safe to drink. The wonder of our sexual beings that permits new generations to be created and rise. The cell defenses in our bodies that fight off multiple diseases.
If we go there, we leave everything behind and have to imagine a new self, a new being unlike anything before. New rules for social beings that conflict with everything. Some way to get air and water where there is none apparent now. Temperatures too hot/too cold.
Wise people have said we need a Plan B, a place to go if we destroy habitability here. We would also need to find a reason to exist outside of everything we've lived and known.
2
While it is sad that as a country we no longer can find shared vision to perform a great feat like this...there are still folks trying...just follow SpaceX and watch a Falcon Heavy liftoff and simultaneous twin booster return...as someone too young to have witnessed Apollo, this is as close as you can get these days to Apollo I would say, and in my view still awe-inspiring. Also, today's remembrances of the Apollo era, typical for nostalgia, don't focus much on what happened afterwards, how the awe faded fairly quickly and within a few years travel to the moon became routine, most stopped paying attention and then it stopped. Partly, just human nature to get used to things, even awe-inspiring things.
So here's to Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell and their crew of several thousand working to try to get to Mars some day...they are the ones who will get us beyond Apollo's horizons as Ross hopes for...the launch of a stainless steel Starship on a Super Heavy booster with 31 engines firing simultaneously is the scientific Wagnerian opera that I'm looking forward to next!
1
Going to the moon may be the one qualitatively different thing that humanity has done in the last 10,000 years. We have steadily increased our ability to both heal and kill, but human relationships, best we can tell from history and archeology, have remained the same.
Also remaining the same is people's tendency to believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence. And I am not just talking about our current political climate:
"According to a C-SPAN/Ipsos poll released earlier this month, 6 percent of Americans believe the moon landing was staged, including 11 percent of millennials."
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/motorsports/walking-on-the-moon-i-dont-believe-its-true-nascars-ryan-newman-says/ar-AAECoxP?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=mailsignout)
Note to those who believe millenials will lead us out of our political/cultural morass if we would only follow their advice/opinions/values: " 6 percent of Americans believe the moon landing was staged, including 11 percent of millennials."
The moon landing united us as Americans as has nothing else in my lifetime. At a time when the country was much more divided by the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights struggle, and a cultural challenge from youth that included strong feminist and gay elements, when Apollo landed on the moon we were all proud, excited Americans, not hierarchically divided, hyphenated Americans.
1
But...but...surely, Mr. Douthat, you’re not championing an accomplishment underwritten by government spending and thus made possible only by the confiscation of OUR MONEY? Such celebration of a governmental agency achieving remarkable success flies directly in the face of GOP orthodoxy. Maybe next time you write such a heretical notion, you could include a note about how this achievement could have been even more impressive if NASA had contracted with private industry, thus transferring public dollars to corporate interests. That always sits better with conservatives. You’re welcome.
3
I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
Maybe the reason why such great accomplishments have been stunted in the last fifty years is because conservative intellectuals have been happy to parrot the idea that government rarely does anything right.
Ironic that this opinion comes from one of those intellectuals, and he thinks that the greatest achievement of the United States in the past fifty years was a socialistic, fully run, federal program that never made a dime.
7
The future of space travel appears to be a corporate project, not a national one.
Nationalism—in spite of Trump, or perhaps because of him—is dead.
The next flag planted on the moon will have a trademark symbol on it.
2
So I am going to be Mr.Sour Grapes here. We (actually all of us thank you) brought these brave
pilots back in one piece, which is a real achievement. Yes, I was VERY joyful we landed safely on the moon (at the time). But why did we have to go back over and over (and over) again? We could have put a few space stations in orbit for the same effort, and more probes to Mars or Venus. Instead of more wars (to update our military capabilities?),
we could have repaired our inner cities, won the war on poverty, had a much more educated population and a more workable system of government. Instead we got a political dichotomy with millions of Americans who lost menial jobs steeped in ignorance and distrust, an epidemic of drug dependence, failing infrastructure, and no efficient mass transportation system. The most selfish opportunists amongst us stole our potential to evolve instead, resulting in (an almost) second economic collapse, promoting one man's interests over thousands of others. Planting an American flag on the moon was rather idiotic; wasn't it said to be "one giant leap for Mankind"? Looks more like we tripped over our own two feet. Let's dust ourselves off and accomplish something worthwhile again. Together.
4
@flyinointment Like many people I really became aware of just how big a boondoggle the program was, as well as not all that difficult, when I saw them tearing around on the lunar rover and shooting golf balls. And it isn't as if I am in any way a libertarian or anything like that ilk. What's worse the propaganda, misinformation about the benefits, mindless parroting of how great this was, etc. continues to this day - even to the point of wanting to do this kind of epic waste program again!
A while back we landed on the moon, an inevitable trip as human technology advanced. So why on earth are we going nuts about it now?
"So the fact that Apollo promised something similar and then failed, at least for our time,.."
Allow me to disagree.. I've mentioned before here but it applies again: if Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant scientists ever, were provided with unlimited funds and given the best minds at the time to work under him, he could not have come up with a device like a "simple" radio. At that time the body of knowledge required to build a radio was rudimentary, at best.
Rudimentary is also our knowledge on how to get out of this planet(*) and move somewhere else where the specie(s) can survive. But the 'Moon Race' of the 50s & 60s gave us critical knowledge that can be built on for that endeavour.
(*) If Amun-Ra, Thor and all the other gods we invented really are not there, then we better find a way to continue to exist somewhere else, with whichever species we can take with us - Noah's Ark was a mythological story but one such a vessel might as well exist in our future.
Cheers,
2
Sorry to spoil everyone's rosy moonshot nostalgia by pointing out that this wasn't really all that hard and required absolutely no collective sacrifices whatsoever. Just throw money at a pointless boondoggle race and enjoy the show, the tang and the space blankets.
By and large Americans built the machines that put the men on the moon. At some point American manufacturing, and much of the skill and knowledge that made it possible, was sent overseas. The generation that put men on the moon could do it with slide rules, generations since can’t get to Starbucks without GPS. However, watching SpaceX land a rocket on a barge at sea gave me hope for future generations.
1
Thank you for writing this. It's been demoralizing to see the Apollo mission used as a platform to flog us all with identity politics. What a reduction in the human spirit.
2
The abundance of pieces on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing remind me of a July 18, 1989, column by the Times editor A.M. Rosenthal describing the newspaper's preparation for the moon walk 20 years earlier. The paper ordered one-inch type. “Shouting is one way to express joy,” Rosenthal wrote. A poem was commissioned for the front page: “…[W]e wanted to say to our readers, look, this paper does not know how to express how it feels this day….But like every person who watched, we felt we personally were part of the beauty and achievement, the great soaring. We loved those three men because we knew their adventure was born of the elegance of the human mind and desire. They allowed us to feel part of that elegance. Humanity was loving itself, which does not happen often.”
How do we get back to Humanity loving itself today? Would it be a true global commitment to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals which includes eradicating extreme poverty by 2030? Is that our moon shot? Would it be truly tackling climate change? Is that it? One thing is certain, somewhere deep in each of us is a desire to experience that elegance of the human mind and desire in our own time.
2
Too bad that the technology jump Apollo has to be made through depriving a large part of America of a decent life.
"So the fact that Apollo promised something similar and then failed, at least for our time,.."
Allow me to disagree.. I've mentioned before here but it applies again: if Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant scientists ever, were provided with unlimited funds and given the best minds at the time to work under him, he could not have come up with a device like a "simple" radio. At that time the body of knowledge required to build a radio was rudimentary, at best.
Rudimentary is also our knowledge on how to get out of this planet(*) and move somewhere else where the specie(s) can survive. But the 'Moon Race' of the 50s & 60s gave us critical knowledge that can be built on for that endeavour.
(*) If Amun-Ra, Thor and all the other gods/godesses we invented really are not there, then we better find a way to continue to exist somewhere else, with whichever species we can take with us, simply because Earth has a 'Best Before' date stamped on it. Noah's Ark was a mythological story but one such a vessel might as well exist in our future.
1
I am having trouble understanding how a man so in awe of a spectacular government-driven success can be committed to a party which insists that government is the problem, not the solution. Mr. Douthat, the next time you hear yourself decrying the value of government, remember this column, which contradicts that nonsense.
4
I agree that the moon landing was a great event and the men getting to the moon, and getting back to earth was an example of what human beings and science can accomplish. This was in 1969 while Woodstock was the rage that summer and our young men were dying in Vietnam by the scores. How could we do such a great thing (moon landing) and at the same time feed our young men's lives into the maw of a terrible, unwinnable war?
Here's a line from Country Joe and the Fish's song "I feel like I'm fixin' to die rag" and the line is "Be the first one on your block to have your boy sent home in a box. " The Vietnam fiasco was a bipartisan effort.
1
I would recommend reading the below article which describes the moon landing as more of an artistic and aesthetic achievement rather than the beginning of a space age which will probably never materialize.
https://theweek.com/articles/852955/sublime-romanticism-moon-landing
Ross, you gloss over the violence and shredded social fabric and chaos of 1969 -- including the horror of the Vietnam War. All products of post-WWII America that seemed to culminate in that single year. Remember too, the U.S. space program and so many of its glories, arose out of and with the irreplaceable help of Nazi German technology. So, not inconsistenly, your column is right and wrong at the same time. We'll be back. I have great faith in the next generation of young Americans.
2
Fifty years ago Neil Armstrong said "one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind."
Great achievement, no doubt, but the greatest achievement will be ending all war, all bigotry, all racism, all hatred, and all intolerance here on earth.
What happens when a for-profit corporation is the first to land a person on Mars, its corporate logo strewn about in every photograph? Will we similarly wax poetic then?
Postmodernism has been defined as the death of the hope of progress, the end of the Enlightenment.
It begins in 1969. The long journey of the astronauts ended nowhere. We should be ashamed. Jouissance is a joke.
Today we can’t even “do Infrastructure.”
3
Ross, I not sure who you're writing this piece for. Your target audience could care less about science and a significant number doubt this ever happened.
2
Hey Russ, were you even alive 50 years ago? Because if you were alive in ‘69 you would know that we suffered through lots of political and social problems not the least of which was the Vietnam war. Why not let us enjoy man’s greatest technological achievement without trying to equate it to present day shortcomings of the United States.
1
On this anniversary, let’s not be too pessimistic. Who were the 400,000 Americans of 1969 that achieved this “Total Work of Art”? Let’s say that the average age of these people was around 49 (born around 1920). Their parents knew the horror of the Great War directly. They were acquainted with grief from a young age. They were 9 years old when the Depression started and they lived through that decade to see, when they turned 19, the Nazi invasion of Poland and, when they turned 21, Pearl Harbor and World War II. They went to war in their 20s and had experiences that most of us cannot properly appreciate. My own 3 children were born between 2006 and 2011. They have enjoyed greater stability and comfort than the “Apollo Generation.” And yet, my children – all of our children – will be tested. Will they be tested as much as the Apollo Generation? I sincerely hope not, but here is a sampling of the other headlines from today: “The G.O.P. is Now a Personality Cult” and “Heat Waves in the Age of Climate Change: Longer and Deadlier”. The Apollo Generation survived a trial by fire and produced our American Total Work of Art. For this anniversary – for today, at least – let us say: as all our children are tested (and not just American children), may they find that same Sublime Grandeur … and may they bring America and the World along.
1
Ross, you always have the ability to surprise me with your column. Sometimes I disagree vehemently. This pean to the ecstasy of finding new worlds is one I love.
Only read the title and subtitle. Agreed, and it’s all thanks to the no-nothings in your party.
The moon-landing was great. Saving our species from the effects of climate change, i.e., from our own arrogance and stupidity, would be even greater.
Amen, Mr. Douthat, amen.
Good points, Ross. Especially the regret, disappointment, and shame.
Think of some of the ways we COULD have gone forward, as a nation and a people. On climate change and energy infrastructure, for example. Not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
And necessary. We could have said: WE are going to do this, because humanity needs us to, and because WE are the ones to get the job done.
Instead, we have devolved into something a bit pathetic. We're subterranean dwellers now, which is to say head-in-sand. We've cultivated an impressive can't-do attitude. We denigrate government, its programs, and its capabilities. Many of us deny science and indeed basic reality.
We point fingers. At China, for example. Blame someone else. Anything to absolve our own culpability and minimize our own responsibility. We set the bar low and fail to clear it.
We can't afford it, we say. Our people are taxed too heavily, especially our rich, so we keep cutting their taxes. The Apollo program cost 2 percent of 1965 GDP, a quite significant national investment. In 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent.
Imagine if we'd made an Apollo-scale or Marshall-scale investment AND commitment to converting our entire economy to renewable energy. Imagine if we'd invested heavily in solar, with national purpose, in large-scale energy storage technologies. In grid technology.
Imagine.
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The race to the Moon was all about Cold War hegemony between the Soviet Union and America.
NASA was built and led by Nazi German war criminal rocket scientists who also helped build nuclear tipped ICBM's and spy satellites.
Once America ' won' the race to the Moon, the American people lost interests and other socioeconomic political priorities took over. The American War in Vietnam was still raging. Black people were suffering. Nixon was just beginning his reign
Computer and biological. chemical and physics scientific technological advances are on the verge of creating amazing unknown synergies for the human future.
' Text without context is pretext.' Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
1
Ross ignores the most obvious reason why we have not reached the pinnacle of the Apollo missions of the past. And that is the amount of money we spend on the military every year. It is now up to $700 Billion helping to generate a close to $1 Trillion annual budget deficit. And does our military suck up so big a part of our resources? For one we can blame capitalism, as the military industrial complex is a powerful lobby that is self perpetuating. Another reason is the aftermath of the era of colonialism that broke many countries around the globe. This has resulted in the current era of terrorism that demands a bloated military to protect one's way of life.
Funny coincidence that Trump now wants to take us back to the Moon. That same Trump whose motto is make America Great Again. Conservatives like Trump and Ross are backward looking people who long for the good ole days when America was great (dominant) and everyone knew their place. Unfortunately, the way Trump and the Republicans are fracturing this once united nation I do not see us returning to an era of great technological achievement. There will never be enough money available to accomplish great things as long as we waste our resources on war making.
Please note that the US space effort, including the moon landing, was led by Werner von Braun, who had led rocket development in Nazi Germany. Immediately after WW II von Braun and his merry band of 1,600 rocketeers were spirited out of Germany by US intelligence agents, brought to America and magically cleansed of their Nazi backgrounds. Von Braun and his colleagues also shaped the development of the US ballistic missiles that carry nuclear weapons.
Ironically, the Russkies wanted von Braun and his key people as much as the US did, but were a bit late on the scene and ended up able to “recruit” only the remaining second-tier German rocket scientists who were taken to Russia, pumped for what information they had, and ultimately repatriated to Germany.
This is perhaps an inconvenient truth, but a truth nonetheless. America’s landing on the moon owes a debt to the Nazis, since it was they who trained, cultivated and built their rocket science on von Braun and his many colleagues.
At least von Braun ended up working for the US; how might things have turned out if the Russians had got hold of von Braun and his people before we did?
2
Cheer up Ross.
Luckily most such prognostications are usually wrong.
I thought it was racist to say that American greatness was in the past.
The hoax was a stroke of genius.
Watching Apollo 11 on CNN On Demand: Okay, I’m only 23:28 minutes into this 1:44:53 excellent production, but I am greatly disturbed by the huge majority of white-privileged white supremists I am seeing in Mission Control, among the assistants suiting up the astronauts, among the engineers making last-minute checks of the Saturn V rocket, among the visitors watching the launch at Cape Kennedy — even among the astronauts themselves! — and the total non-representation of the LGBTQ,ETC,ETC,ETC. community, meaning that this NASA project to put a MAN on the moon, and not a [choose your own noun or pronoun here] on the moon was insensitive and flawed from the start, for which all harmed protected classes should now be awarded reparations immediately. I am surprised and disappointed that CNN, of all broadcasters, did not catch this and is responsible for airing this sexist, racist, misogynistic, homophobic propaganda garbage.
2
That is ridiculous. How do you know the men weren’t gay and why could it matter? Times were different.
Identity politics is the end of the USA. Sad.
Before we get carried away with these paeans to American greatness, let’s remember that the space program would not have achieved as much as it did as soon as it did without the considerable contributions of Wernher von Braun, who got his start shooting rocket-propelled bombs at London for Adolf Hitler. Von Braun was a member of the Nazi party, an officer of the SS and used slave labor from concentration camps on his rocket programs. He was a key figure at NASA from its inception in the late 50s until the early 70s. What does it say about our achievements that they depended so heavily on an ex-Nazi and protégé of Heinrich Himmler? History is never a simple story.
1
"The peak of American greatness lies 50 years in the past"
Not true. Everything we have accomplished in technology, healthcare, engineering so far has been the low hanging fruit with science that was fairly well understood.
Really going to the stars will require "warp-drive" or "worm-holes"; curing chronic diseases and aging will require new understanding of basic biology; harnessing gravity (for star wars type levitation) will require new physics...
we are just getting started.
1
Y'all act like your were there n stuff. You people never been to the moon. Y'all not authentic.
1
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk? Please make your point without sending readers to reference books. You went to Harvard, show you can write for all.
Oh, come on! Turn it up a notch and try to learn something new. I thought that was a brilliant turn of a phrase.
2
Of course this all happened during the height of hippie liberalism Douthat regularly condemns.
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I remember the awe, to the point of joyful tears, when two brave men walked upon the moon: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” My husband and I were soon to become parents for the first time. So much hope for us personally and for what our nation could accomplish. We seemed invincible, so able and capable. So young and naive about the ways of the world. Life happens for better or for worse, as we been forced to learn. Back in 1969, who would have ever predicted the horror of 9/11? Endless wars and entanglement in the Middle East. A man unfit to sit at a desk in the Oval Office. But...during that time we also had our first African American president, and hopefully in the near future a woman will grace the White House. Daily our astrophysicists are answering the questions of the universe. Treatments for once incurable diseases are becoming realities. Do not get discouraged for this seemingly “worst of times.” It can also become the “best of times.”
56
Who would have predicted endless wars - Ike and before Kennedy entangled us in Vietnam.
2
A small personaI note.
I was just a kid, sprawled on the floor watching grainy monochrome images of Mankind's Giant Step with 650 million fellow travelers, but the effect of that July evening upon the course of my life was deep and enduring, if indirect.
NASA became my dream. I was the first person from my town to be accepted to MIT in seventeen years. As a freshman, I sat down with Sheila Widnall, a young professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics who became, years later, the first woman to serve as Secretary of the Air Force. I asked her how best to become an astronaut. She said, "Aspiring to be an astronaut is a bit like aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice: no matter how much you distinguish yourself, there are only so many slots".
The odds have improved a bit since then; as of today, 356 Americans have flown in space, while only 114 have served on the Supreme Court. And four women have been Secretary of the Air Force.
Professor Widnall suggested that I might find fulfillment as a space scientist. Several years later my NASA dream was realized when James Hansen hired me to work for him at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the upper floors of the building whose street view is immortalized in the "Restaurant" cover shot in Seinfeld, where the characters ostensibly met for coffee.
Science has been a mainstay of my life. I have many to thank, not least Sheila Widnall, but it started with Neil and Buzz and Michael on a muggy summer night half a century ago.
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Reading about the supposed fall of America from some glorious past is getting tiresome. Journalists should get over it. Or can they? Is there a thumb on the scales somewhere back in the shadows of the journalism fraternity? As a child of the Manhattan Project, I learned about compartmentalization of information; how thousands of people can work on something without knowing its larger purpose. Something like that may be going on in the news
industry. There may be surprises ahead.
You see something I saw as a kid who watched public interest fade so quickly after the first landing. As Wyatt tells Billy near the end of Easy Rider, “We blew it.”
After Apollo 11, we entered the Era of Dirty Harry, Kent State, the Fall of Saigon, and Watergate. For all the nostalgia, the 70s were a dark decade. To reference another cultural marker of the time, a song by Blind Faith, since 69 we have not found our way back home.
1
@Peak Oiler Of course we had entirely different leadership in Washington, DC, than we did when the moon project was announced.
That surely had a lot to do with not pressing forward.
At times, even robotic exploration and Hubble-like projects had a very tough time in attracting support of the pursestring holders.
Yet hardly a person who has seen a Hubble deep space picture can deny they aren't fascinated, if even for a moment if not for a lifetime of pursuing science and engineering.
It's a different world, with our limited attention and even more limited money that prevents further investigation of our Universe.
I wonder how much the fundamentalists and strict interpretation crowd (the earth is only 6000 years old) have held a grudge against those interested in science and promotion in our schools, and thus intentionally but quietly, limited any attempt to find out more about what the world really is made of?
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"The peak of American greatness lies 50 years in the past"
Yes, republicans have always striven to put reign to the imagination. Community in service to commerce, rather than the reverse. Yet it does not take too much imagination to find moonshots right in front of us if the veil of misdirected conservatism did not continually try to obscure them with proud ignorance. Like THE Moonshot, dedicating resources to eradicating hunger and poverty, and abating global warming are even more worthy moonshots waiting to be taken. And like the one in 1969, which had unknowable, but now realized and sizable economic benefits that far eclipse its public sector investment, such visionary programs have no immediate term payoff other than stimulating communities hungry to feed commerce 50 years hence.
1
The "failure" of Apollo in the face of "space's vastness" and "the decline of the technological sublime"? I don't know Ross. Have you forgotten about the Mars lander, the Voyager spacecraft and the photographs of the universe taken by the Hubble and other telescopes? Our feet may not have gone beyond the moon but our exploration of space is light years ahead of where it was in 1969. Unless we are looking for another place in the universe to live (which hopefully won't be necessary), exploring space with machines is fine by me.
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@Jay Orchard I love this blue marble, and our robotic work in space, but ask a child what we should do.
Our destiny is the stars. We can solve our problems here and become a spacefaring species.
1
The space program was the pinnacle of Achievement in my life. As a kid in Elementary school, teachers tuned in the Gemini missions, and we were riveted to our black and white TV’s. When Apollo debuted, we were horrified at the Accident of Apollo 1, but those men were redeemed by the later missions. Apollo 8 saved 1968, the most horrific year of my youth, from the useless war and murder of my heroes Bobby and Martin. I was alone at home when Neil came down the ladder to make his “one small step” I was 13. Since then, we seem to have gone backward. In 69, we all had jobs, “Made in USA” was the norm, not the exception. We have had endless war for oil for 18 years, and gotten what? Our jobs that allowed a thriving middle class are gone, as is our pensions, health care and hope
5
I really don't think we should frame Apollo as a technological feat. Yes, going to the moon involved technology. In hindsight, unexpected and rapid progress in certain technologies is perhaps Apollo's greatest legacy. The iPhone in your pocket is ahead of schedule because Apollo needed to fit a big calculator inside a cockpit.
That's what Apollo and all these other examples have in common. They were exercises in engineering; the practice of applying science and technology to solve problems. Technically speaking, the Oldowan toolkit dating back 2.5 million years is an engineering accomplishment that eclipses any of the mentioned examples.
We're talking about humans constructing stone axes for the first time. We needed to chop wood and cut wild grains. Behold the stone ax! Problem solved. That's engineering.
The problem with Apollo is we can't easily see the problem Apollo was trying to solve. Going to the moon obviously involves a countless number of small problems. However, the purpose behind a moon landing isn't self-evident like a dam or bridge or jet or skyscraper. The short answer is we went to the moon because the Cold War sent us there.
Real life is obviously more complicated but that's the bottom line. If we hadn't been in a fight with Russia over aerial and nuclear supremacy, the moon landing never would have happened. The engineering problem we solved was geopolitical rather than civil or mechanical. Once solved, we no longer needed the Apollo program.
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@Andy
And I would contend that today's renewed fascination with manned space flight is once again geopolitically motivated. Now the race is with China, as well as Russia.
Unmanned space exploration makes more sense scientifically, and much more sense economically. Saving Planet Earth should be the priority of the human species. What possible good are a few people living with hugely expensive high tech support on the hostile surface of Mars, while the the 6th great species extinction, and global climate change here on Earth go unchecked? The romantic notion of our species spreading out "to the stars" is fantasy. The dire state of the only planet that can actually support human life is fact.
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@Andy
I would disagree with your assessment that the common person has no clue what technological advances need to be made to have what we do today.
While the common person quickly gets over the marvel of a new invention (who sits around gawking and applauding the wheel, the knife, the stone axe) they do use it, and for a short while do acknowledge the advancement. Apple depends (depended) upon those incremental improvements to sell many phones to those who owned something perfectly functional and acceptable.
Only with insightful media reports being aired of the things we enjoy today which in some way were linked to that whole period of rapid discovery and improvement, will we keep those ideas in front of the common person.
But just like Apple needs at least a wee bit of something new, we need a new camera around Saturn, on the surface of Mars, or just taking high resolution pictures of our precious earth. We tend to take such things for granted, and we should not.
@Andy
The problem we were trying to solve WAS geopolitical. We wanted to prove to the world we, out culture, was the best. That we should be the global leader that they follow into the future. That message was subverted by many factors some of our making like Vietnam, CIA involvement in other governments. Externally, the rise of Islamic Theocracy as an alternative to Democracy or Communism.
But we tore that down, starting with the Neo-Cons removing constraints (regulations) in the pursuit of money. From a global perspective, the final nail in the coffin was George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. America could no longer be looked upon as a leader to be looked up to, just one to be manipulate.
Now the technology we have created, iPhones, Facebook, have been used by others (Putin) to manipulate our system. To put into place political leaders that favor policies that weaken us on the geopolitical stage and tell the world to no longer look to us for leadership.
With the success of the Moonshot and the collapse of the Berlin Wall we gave up working on geopolitical leadership and replaced it with the destructive backstabbing of Conservatives vs. everything else for the past 50 years.
If you want transcendent moments your country has to be a leader bent upon building the future for the good of the world rather then pursue a path of xenophobic self-indulgence and destruction.
It was to a significant degree credit to a vibrant young president who created a vision of daring, not just in averting global disaster (Cuban Missile Crisis), but in setting sail on voyages to the unknown, which energized the country, and created a sense that anything was possible. Today, we have almost the antithesis of that, a leader precisely marching us into racial disharmony, international conflict, and environmental disaster.
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@PT
Cheers erupted at our championship football game on that Friday in November of 1963 when the opposing team's busload of fans arrived after a long trip across the bottom of Georgia. No doubt they are in lock step with the march you so accurately describe.
1
"So to mark the anniversary by passing moral judgment on the past is a way of burying the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since."
These are my feelings exactly. Maybe because I am old enough to remember excitedly watching the moon landing. Maybe because I have told my sons all about it over the years and shared my excitement with them. Maybe because I can't help but feel (and I hope I am wrong here) that our country will never reach such a historic height again. Maybe because I am saddened to see what a polarized America is becoming.
3
I like the article but! We seem to forget that there was a great deal of innovation that was developed from the space program. We abandoned the moon because there was nothing on it that was worth anything, until. In the past 20 years there has been numerous unmanned missions that have found water. Frozen water that is the bases for life. Now the moon has real value. Now the moon can produce all that is needed to live there. Now is the time to go back and both government and private will take us there.
The other argument by some is that it was a waste of money. Money that could have been used for housing and health care amongst other things is dead wrong. Wrong because there was plenty of money to do all of those things but for one very large problem that is front and center today. Congress has not been able to spend money on the people because of ideologies, not because of lack of money. There are certain people that believe to give assistance is wrong because they where able to do it "all by themselves " so everyone else should be able to also. Now to be clear money was used as a reason not to help but it was a poor excuse as the tax cuts have demonstrated. We are now more in debit than ever before just so the wealthy can get more wealthy. Someday and it better be soon We The People will wake up and smell the stench of trump and his lackeys. In the mean time I will enjoy the greatest achievement by man/woman that was accomplished by ALL Americans.
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I use the Apollo program as a convenient marker that marks the apex of Pax Americana. America was ascendant up to that point, descendent ever since. The decline picked up speed starting with the Reagan era, when America started to scale back investment in education, infrastructure, and scientific research. This is also the start of the rise in religious nonsense that today has resulted in one third of the population's near complete detachment from a personal relationship with reality.
The trump era marks the beginning of free-fall. It's all over folks. America is now 50 years beyond its once greatness.
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@oldBassGuy This article is not about current day politics, though New York Times readers apparently want to make it about Trump. The moon landing and successful return was a bipartisan effort supported by Democrats and Republicans. Even Joe BIden was recently castigated for working with Southern Democrats to get things done. Obviously, you don't give Reagan any credit for bringing down the old Soviet Union.
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@John Kellum
"... you don't give Reagan any credit for bringing down the old Soviet Union. …"
Correct, Reagan does not get any credit whatsoever for bringing down the Soviet Union. He and Bush41 were just a couple of guys who happened to occupy the WH when the Soviet Union self destructed.
The Soviet Union collapsed all on its own due to its own self destructive internal corruption and rot. America is on the same path. I give Reagan credit for starting and the rise of America's own self destructive corruption and rot.
Virtually all of Douthat's articles tie something in the past to current day politics.
I was fortunate enough to have spent the first two decades of my life when America was at its apex. I saw the moon landing, it was magnificent, and this seriously impacted my worldview to this very day. This why I see current politics as a complete forlorn exercise in futility.
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Mr. Douthat-
America's greatest achievements (defeating fascism, scientific breakthroughs, audacious infrastructure projects) have always come with shared effort and sacrifice. They were collective projects funded through tax dollars and run through the government. What happened? The Reagan 'Revolution', the core message of which was that government was the enemy and that all could and should be accomplished through the private sector. The Challenger disaster spelled the end of the Space Program in favor of Star Wars and other military escapades. Our present selves, this smaller, hollow vision of what America is and can be, is the result. Congratulations.
6
Apollo was magnificent. If you can, visit the Apollo exhibit at the Kennedy space center - only a couple of hour from that other great American invention that didn't make Ross' list - Disneyworld....
By the way Ross, the jet plane was not an American invention. The first to fly was a German fighter plane and the first commercial airliner was the British Comet. But then again Apollo also had its roots in Europe building on Werner Von Braun's V2 rocket of the 2nd world war..
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Very true, however like most inventions the glory often goes to those who make improvements on the technology.
Furthermore, the if the US didn’t enter WW2 how would have Stalin have gained from the German rocket technology and for what purpose?
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It's engraved in my memory. As a triumph of aspiration, acheivement, and national unification it was unmatched in our history by any event other than victory in great wars. I was working for your current employer at 229 W. 43 St., and the atmospheric mix of anxiety and anticipation was so thick it was hard to breath.
2
I watched with my father. A veteran with a tiny role in the Manhattan Project that cost him his life to cancer at 55. The Apollo Project and the Manhattan Project both were similar monumental achievements. They represented the ingenuity and persistence that made us the envy of the world. They also celebrated an ethos missing in today’s America. They were the epitome of the partnership between government and the governed that made us great. Neither project is possible in today’s corrosive environment. As we face the challenges of the next 100 years we need to find our way back to our core values. They and they alone made us a great nation. We are farther from those values today than we ever were from the moon.
4
The values of our forefathers and mothers have not vanished but have been vandalized and tarnished by many people for the politics sake rather than what is best for the nation.
What is missing is the “rationalization” behind the politics, which a prime example was recently displayed in Congress voting on emergency funding to provide the basic necessities for the people entering the US at our southern borders. If a small group of newly elected Congressional Representatives indicated that these facilities lacked specific necessities and medical aid, the rational response is to vote for the additional funding, but their platform and their need for attention was their agenda.
So when the media jumps higher than the moon when video is found of President Trump discussing pairing a group of African-Americans against a group of white people for his then television show, the media pundits rational points to using racism for his gain, but aren’t the 4 outspoken freshmen Congressional Reps using the plight of migrants from Central America doing the same for their political gain?
In summary our differences as a society, as well as our common goals is why the United States of America is Great, like it or not.
1
Ross, JFK was an imperfect man and President, but he was, and remains, a powerful avatar for our nation.
"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.”
This soaring rhetoric is cut from the same cloth as his even more famous inaugural address:
"And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
"My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you."
"With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
I sincerely miss Kennedy's vision for America - without which I suspect there would have been no Moon landing. That vision, I argue, was neither libertarian nor liberal, but communitarian.
America is, above all, a community - and I dare say that we forget this at our national peril.
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Beautiful, thoughtful column. Thank you. The first Western work on the sublime was by Longinus, though it's not clear who he was or if it was he who wrote the work. He suggested there may be two possible ways to reach sublimity--and argued for one of those ways. In one, an author does everything he's supposed to do in a work and does it extremely well. The sublime in this case is the accumulation of well-done things. Longinus cites as an example a Greek poet who wrote an epic and whose name I no longer remember. In the other, the writer does one thing or several things in a transcendent, awe inspiring way and does many other things in a so-so or inferior way. Longinus cites Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey, were, alas, imperfect. And, Longinus asks rhetorically, who wouldn't rather be Homer than the other guy? So yes, Apollo 11 was an imperfect endeavor. Not one Jewish astronaut in the bunch :) People back then were human and fallible, believe it or not. But what they did right, they did in a transcendent, awe inspiring way. Sublime.
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The moon shot was the result of the blow to national pride when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik. That event was the stimulus for serious investment in a space program that led to those pictures of a human being standing on the moon. It was a political performance that told the world that the USA was still "great."
The Soviet Union is gone and so is the USA that launched the moon shot. We have succumbed to the Siren song of division and a powerful campaign to undermine trust in the federal government and, not incidentally, willingness to pay taxes to support our aspirations.
7
It’s truly time for an Apollo-like exploration of our own world. I point to Dr. Sylvia Earle’s lifelong mission to bring awareness and understanding of our oceans—and the devastation we are inflicting— to humanity. Lack of awareness and lack of collective reverence for the vast, poorly understood, poorly protected universe that makes up most of the life on earth and that all life on earth depends upon would be another giant leap forward for humanity. Protecting our planet by revealing the truth, the fragility and the complexity of the oceans, and humanity’s inextricable dependence on them would be a good start. It seems like a good way to ensure that Appolo’s legacy of greatness actually meets the most pressing challenges of our time. It’s time for a deep dive....in more ways than one.
2
Ross is impressed by a spectacular triumph of engineering and somehow extols it beyond all significance with no regard for real accomplishments in science and their basis in rationality, not showmanship.
3
From a science perspective, we have achieved way more. It may not be as theatric but we understand the cosmos better than we did 50 years ago.
As a scientist, the problem is that we need to look within ourselves as well as outside. Science looks at the world around us largely but there's a science of the mind and consciousness that I think is an even harder problem. We don't spend enough time looking inward.
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I think this is rather missing the point of the article. Science is the common property of all humanity, the Apollo program was American. Unfortunately the America that created the space program is as dead as the Soviet Union.
1
Mr. Douthat's straining for the sublime in a mixture of nationalism and technology worship is confused, painfully anti-humanist and, what's more, the opposite of traditional American ideals. The glory and grandeur of past civilizations were at the expense of the slaves and serfs who sweated and bled to support the few powerful ones on top. America, by contrast, as personified by people who were from the working class, like Abraham Lincoln or Walt Whitman, was the land of the common people. Personally, I will take moral progress over grandeur any time. When you've seen one pyramid, you've seen them all--especially if you're the guy that has to build them.
5
Egypt had its great eras. Then the passage into the age of vassalage and reign by the Ptolemaic kinds of the Hellenistic era.
And now the best we can do is hope to return, to guild another pyramid, to land some more on the Moon -- this time a woman!
Those were great years and Apollo was great. But it is clear we are stuck in increasingly depressing reruns.
We have no new great ideas.
Except tax cuts. That apparently is an evergreen for our bereft nation.
2
Apollo was a US military expedition to a dead rock in space. I would turn my spaceship around and head for Woodstock . . .
The documentary was great, but I would have loved it without the music. We learn what the astronaut saw and did, but not what they heard. The music was much too loud and tasteless. (Going crescendo at every exciting moment, as if we could not know that without being told.) Smearing ketchup on all delicacies.
8
America has gone on to do things far greater than the 1969 moon landing.
To pick just two: (1) We discovered the charm, bottom, and top quarks. (2) We detected gravitational radiation. That is, we extended the human senses beyond the familiar sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste to a sixth sense, the sense of gravitational radiation.
Great work is continuing in these directions.
What does Mr. Douthat think of this ongoing sublime grandeur?
On 21 December 2013, he called it the "crack up" of "the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism".
The fact that Mr. Douthat doesn't (perhaps can't) recognize the grandeur of discovery all around him reflects only his lack of perception. That grandeur exists whether he recognizes it or not.
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@Dan Styer The moon landing affected our emotions in a way the later scientific achievements you cite can not. Those can be recognized, understood, and appreciated as awe-inspiring by only a tiny fraction of the human species. The non-physicists among us could see the moon landing on worldwide television allowing a real-time emotional response that we still remember 50 years later. We knew the moon was very far away, that the mission was difficult, the effort and resources required was immense, and the men of Apollo were courageous. We shared the in that sublime achievement.
Apollo 11 was sublime grandeur.
But, it was Apollo 13 that was all but a miracle:
America at its most aspirational, America at its best.
Consider: The whole world held it's breath, and held those three lives in focused prayer as never-say-die engineers figured out how to make their heavily damaged spacecraft - that was hurtling towards oblivion - capable of bringing them home safely.
In a plot twist that would make even MacGyver blush, they used socks and Duct Tape, among other things.
Socks. And Duct Tape.
There is a lesson there: Apollo was a great technological feat, but it was an even greater illumination of the capacities of the human spirit.
15
Certainly not the sort of thing that would have been envisioned by a republican president or party.
2
Apollo 11 was sublime grandeur!
And yet, it was Apollo 13 that was all but a miracle:
America at its most aspirational, America at its best.
Consider: The whole world held it's breath, and held those three lives in their hearts as 'never-say-die engineers figured out how make their heavily damaged spacecraft - that was hurtling towards oblivion - capable of bringing them home safely.
In a plot twist that would make even MacGyver blush, they used socks and Duct Tape, among other things.
Socks. And Duct Tape.
There is a lesson there: Apollo was a great technological feat, but it was an even greater illumination of the capacities of the human spirit.
2
We were at lunch yesterday in Jerusalem when someone brought up the moon landing. Out of four US born boomer-age people at the table, two of us had fathers who worked on an aspect of the moon shot. We talked about the sheer scale of having hundreds of thousands of people all over the United States employed in one focused, collective effort, and our childhood memories of that special day in human history.
We also discussed why nobody has gone back and came to a somewhat deflating conclusion: no one needs to. Machines can accomplish more at far less expense and risk.
5
The Apollo program is something we as Americans & all people can be proud of. It was a marvel of the human will. JFK said we're going to do it, & we did it. It was an incredible moment to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I've thoroughly enjoying watching the various retrospectives on TV this week.
But I can recall 2 other moments that caused me a thrill of pride in our country: the election of Barak Obama as president, & the SCOTUS decision making gay marriage the law of the land.
These weren't giant leaps forward for all humankind, since other countries had done both things before, but they were huge steps for the USA. I never thought I'd see a black person elected president in my lifetime (just too much pervasive racism, & not just in the unrepentant South). I also thought it would take a generation or two for the gay rights movement to reach that point.
Of course back in November, 2016 I experienced shock & dismay at our country electing Trump. If it was a protest vote, Trump supporters aimed at the wrong target. It was the Republican-controlled Congress they should have voted out of office. They were & are (I'm talking about you, Mitch McConnell) the true swamp. Trump is just the swamp thing.
We will elect a woman as president in the near future (I think), & that will be another great moment of which to be proud.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..."
It's our ongoing mission. Warp speed ahead.
32
A year before the moon landing Stanley Kubrik's 2001 sketched out a view of what we might go on to achieve in the exploration of space. Sadly, we fell off that curve. There is no better place to seek wonder.
3
I can’t say that the lunar missions failed. It seems that they succeeded in their intent to touch the moon. Actually touch the moon. (I’ve touched with my bare hands samples they took.) To intimate that they failed is really just projection of so many wants and desired meanings not relevant to the primary goal of traveling to and then touching the moon. I’m going to watch it rise tonight and contemplate that prior to my generation nobody had done so. If you still feel the need to bemoan the failure of the Apollo missions then I must remind you of a stunning and unexpected gift from those missions, the photograph entitled: “Earthrise over the Moon “.
8
Apollo was one unmistakable sign of our amazing potential for human greatness, when we choose to pursue it. But it was not the peak of American greatness, by a long shot.
3
It’s useful to point out that the great initiatives (as well as great calamities—Vietnam) that this country has undertaken have been led by either Democratic presidents or congresses. The New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, the Great Society, the space program, the Civil Rights Movement, and Obamacare, among others. The party of small government—the GOP—has never had the appetite or vision for using federal power to achieve great things. Eisenhower built the interstate highway system and Nixon had the EPA, but both were carried out with solid Democratic congresses supporting them. We’ve seen this cramped GOP vision played out over the past ten years—the total obstruction of the GOP congress during Obama’s presidency and the dismantling of government under Trump. If Republicans use the muscle of the federal government for anything, it’s in service to the military and for purposes that hardly lift people up. It’s ironic that Douthat celebrates the space program since his political party and philosophy wouldn’t even endeavor to imagine such a grand experiment.
84
I agree. The irony of this columnist praising a socialist government program that cost enormous sums and required huge taxation to achieve a communal goal is, well, ironic. But I’m glad small minded people can be inspired by something even if they don’t understand it.
35
@AlNewman
Exactly. If Republicans had their way there would be no social security, no Medicare, no EPA, no unions, certainly no moon landing. All that money would have been shoveled back into the greedy maw of the people phony baloney, two faced, racist Republicans really represent: the mega rich, the military industrial complex, rapacious corporations, fossil fuel polluters, insurance vampires, Big Pharma, and of course themselves and their own enrichment. It’s been a 40 year con job designed to destroy the government and reduce Americans to serfdom and fascism.
Getting rid of the Republican Party -all of it, at every level of government, and making them pay for their numerous crimes against our country and it’s people, is the first prerequisite to saving our democracy and redeeming our nation.
8
This is so beautifully written it tempts one to agree. But the expansion of human dignity and rights for non-astronauts since the moon landing is a far greater measure of our worth.
8
There are two (2) aspects that Mr. Douthat did not include in his otherwise fine piece. The first one is the science and engineering that had to be developed in order for the Apollo Program to be successful. The second one is the will to do what President Kennedy had noted (in paraphrase), "We do things not because they are easy, but because these things are hard."
Having grown up as "a Sputnik baby" (and having watched the initial moon landing fifty years ago this evening), I benefited in being able to have a career in science and engineering that has now begun its fifth decade. Every day in this profession can be (and usually is) exciting.
Likewise, we take on assignments where, as I tell Clients after completion, "If we knew what the answers were before we started, then it wouldn't have been fun." It remains "the challenge" that keeps us going (and young).
Many of us who have tended these vineyards know that the ancillary effects of the space program have impacted just about all aspects of life in the past half century.
It is the accomplishments directly and indirectly associated with the space program (that in the current era where most people are too young to remember what it was like to be inspired) that I would dearly love to see duplicated.
I task/toast this new generation with our CAN DO optimism and a glass of Tang!
11
My father, an engineer at Grumman who worked on every Apollo mission, would point out what seems to be lost on this generation, and its generation of writers: without this giant technological leap, we would be 20-25 years behind where we are now. Our computer would be the x386, the flip phone would still be on the drawing board, there would be no Internet, banking would be done in-person, bill paying by check and by mail, there would be no MRI (an invention derived directly from the Apollo program), and as well, no commercial HEPA filtration for industry (also an invention directly derived from the Apollo program). I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Life as you know it now would be as it was in the early 90s. So get your head around that. And then, say 'thank you' to people like my father for giving you the things you take for granted now and could not live without.
33
Thank you for sharing.
1
I was a little worried that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing would slip by with little note. But since Americans can’t celebrate an international soccer championship together anymore, maybe we are anxious to find something that reminds us of what we have in common.
As soon as the moon missions began, people of good faith started asking why, if we could put a man on the moon, we couldn’t stop polluting our own planet. Or make sure every child has enough to eat. Or make sure everyone has a fair chance to flourish. And in the 50 years since, I have not heard a single satisfying answer.
But if Neil Armstrong had never taken that first “small step,” we’d never have been able to ask ourselves those uncomfortable questions. The moon missions were never about the Moon, or the Earth, or the space in between, but rather, about who we are and what we can do, together, when we decide we want to.
Cynics remind us that the genesis of the Apollo program was a desire to assert economic and technological dominance over an implaccable Cold War enemy. And the cynics have a point. But the motivations of the movers behind historical events ought not limit the lessons we can draw from them.
You don’t have to be a Catholic, or even a Christian, to appreciate the wonder of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The Apollo program was the greatest work of performance art in human history; it changed how we see ourselves. Whenever I look up at the Moon, I see a place we have been.
62
This is an exceptionally poignant perspective.
18
This is familiar. No, that isn't the word. The word is "trite".
It's too simple to anoint Apollo as a "peak of American greatness". A small percentage of the population did this while another small percentage of the population marched in the streets for justice and yet another small percentage of the population grooved on Hendrix's version of the National Anthem and yet another one fought in Vietnam. These all happened in parallel, simultaneously but not overlapping, so any national "we" attached to this is imaginary. Speaking of it collectively and then lamenting how "we" let it all go is as shallow as the commercialized "reverent nostalgia" from that John Stewart song, and that's not just inaccurate. It's dangerous.
"They were just a lot of people, doing the best they could … what ever happened to those faces in the old photographs … Oh mother country, I do love you" is the self-mythology stitched across Trump MAGA hats. It's "reverent nostalgia" for sale.
7
FYI: John Stewart campaigned for Robert Kennedy and was devastated when he was killed. Read about him-he was an interesting guy and I suspect the lyrics were more ambiguous than they appear.
"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..."
It's long past time "we do the other things," that we are capable of and in the case of climate change are absolutely essential that we do.
I was a child of the Cold War and the Space Race, when we couldn't have enough scientists fast enough. I benefited from that time. Now a significant number of Americans, including our leaders, disparage science, follow ridiculous theories, don't believe in vaccinations, believe in astrology, don't know why we have seasons, call climate change a hoax and don't know what phase the Moon is tonight (waning gibbous).
Or care. And that's the worst part.
29
We did not fail in the face of space's fastness. Our engineering is up to that challenge.
We failed in the reflection of our political smallness, cramped vision and a growing aversion to risk and inevitable, temporary, failure.
We throw our hands up in the face of challenges like climate change instead of simply getting down to the hard work of designing solutions simply because it *is* hard (and no, not all or even most of the solutions will be technological but social, political and economical).
We retreat from science and rational thought and cower in the shadows of bias and delusion.
The scientific traditions that took us to the moon now tell us we need to reform our civilization or face collapse but we refuse to listen because it is ... inconvenient.
Earthrise showed us the ineffable truth .. no visible boundaries on an achingly beautiful oasis ... ancient, yet ever renewing, fragile yet resilient ... and we have turned away in fear when once we would have rejoiced in the glory of it all.
12
I so agree with this. Speaking as one who was 15 in 1969, our country is far more equitable and just now (except for the economic equality thing, granted). But we no longer aspire to greatness, to accomplishing things larger than ourselves.
Raising excluded groups up, giving them a voice -- yes, these are all wonderful and I cherish them. But what great singular feat have we aspired to and accomplished since the moon landings?
Society is mostly improving and yet I can't shake the feeling that we've become cramped and skittish in our thinking.
7
We all just assumed that the exponential progress of transportation - from horse to railroad to motorcar to airplane to supersonic jet - would just continue on to interplanetary rocket ships and then starships. We just didn't realize how hard getting to, living in, and traveling through outer space really is. In retrospect, Apollo 11 was not like Columbus voyaging to America. It was like a tribe of European Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers building a raft with crude stone tools, and somehow managing to navigate their way across the Atlantic Ocean. Hard to repeat on a regular basis.
16
Yes, I've sometimes made a similar argument, pointing out that an Egyptian pharaoh was able to send a ship or ships to circumnavigate Africa about two thousand years before Vasco de Gama kind of repeated the feat. But where Vasco's little fleet travelled to India and back in two years, the Egyptian galley(s) took three years. For better or worse, Vasco's expedition founded Portuguese colonialism in the Indian Ocean, but the Egyptian exploit was never repeated in Antiquity.
We may see other trips to the Moon, because it's so near, but regular travel to the Moon and beyond will require different levels of technology.
4
We achieved greatness with Apollo 11, and we united humanity with that achievement. We we got our money's worth in national pride and in international appreciation. I have had no complaints. We also found and sat in a studio in North Hollywood, watching every extravehicular activity, for Apollo 12, 14-17. The studio cleaned up the video before sending it to MSC.
1
When we were truly great as a nation--as with the Apollo 11 mission--we never felt the need to tell everyone how great we were. We let our deeds do the talking.
But in the 50 years since Apollo 11, name the great things we have done. What are they?
The Vietnam War? Desert Storm? Toppling Saddam? Afghanistan? Pulling out of peace treaties? Hardly greatness.
How about social goals--eradicating poverty, drug addiction ("Just Say No!"), homelessness or hunger? They've probably gotten worse.
Tech? High speed computing, the world wide web, wireless communications, including the smartphone, and online shopping are some big accomplishments, but while everyone's lives have been changed by these developments, history will judge whether these represent "greatness" or, on balance, even made our lives better.
Science? DNA sequencing and testing is pretty impressive, but also creates ethical dilemmas that will plague us forever.
Cleaning up the environment on our planet? There has been progress, at least in the US, on air and water. However, we have failed in stopping climate change, unless you are a right wing Republican who considers ignoring it a success.
Trump talks, he bellows, he tweets, he insults, he brags and he lies, but will leave his presidency having accomplished very little of importance, with the possible exception of nominating right wing Luddites to judicial appointments. If that's what passes for American greatness these days, my point's been proven.
14
But be grateful that from Desert Storm the nation got CNN
@Jack Sonville
Wow. Rather than marvel in the accomplishments of our country, you focus on politics. Since 1969 we have perfected open heart surgery, separated conjoined twins, cured many cancers, done many amazing things. And as we have throughout history, we have made blunders. But that does not take away from the progress of our country, even if some of it is not to your liking. And then to lay it on Trump? You lose all credibility. Particularly comparing to eminent legal scholars to right wing luddites. You may not like them, but they are far from that.
I feel badly for you if this is your view of our country.
1
@Ny Surgeon
Don't worry about me--I am just fine. I love my country. I would also love if Republicans would stop making up history and flapping their gums about "greatness" when they have done little or nothing to make it so in recent decades. Unless you consider tax cuts for the rich and gerrymandering their contribution to greatness.
But you're right that there have been some amazing medical advances in the last 50 years. Too bad that if it were up to Republicans, tens of millions would never have access to them because they would have no health insurance and slashed Medicare.
And I do agree with you that we should not confuse politics with greatness. Republicans have been great at the former over the past several years, but there's been nothing "great" about their actual accomplishments.
2
I recall the huge thrill of watching the Lone Ranger TV premiere in 1949. I was seven years old and the obvious implausibilities didn't matter... it was fun.
I recall family being being thrilled watching the TV coverage of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. By then, l was 26 and I was not thrilled - I was just relieved when the crew returned safely... with the most expensive box of rocks ever collected.
I thought the whole manned space program was a mistaken, very limited approach to extra terrestrial research. It struck me as more of a (very successful!) exercise in political show business than a practical contribution to exploration.
I firmly believed that robotic technology would soon prove to be a superior and far more economical means of collecting information.
That has been proven by the spectacular success of deep space probes like Voyager and the remarkable results obtained by the robots that continue to collect troves of data exploring Mars, often well beyond their projected durability.
And none of them have required the massive payload and budget burdens of even short term life support provisions for a human crew... or the cost of a return trip.
So, Mr. Douthat's commentary on Apollo's cultural significance brings to mind what Yogi Berra might have to say today: "Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be...maybe it never was."
1
I am very proud of the achievements that have taken place after Apollo 11. First, the rescue of Apollo 13 comes to mind. Have you forgotten the Space Shuttle program? that was a very important step into space. We have an International Space Station and it has been up there for years! What about the amazing exploration of Mars that is taking place right now? Juno is currently orbiting Jupiter sending back spectacular images and data of that gas giant. We have sent probes to land on asteroids and comets, and it is hard not to forget those lovely pictures of Pluto. What about the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope that has transformed our view of the Universe? The deep-space pictures showing the great multitudes of galaxies that exist in the Universe is staggering to the imagination. We have a tremendous space program that is doing terrific science. Sending people to the moon and beyond is so terribly expensive. Also, it is extremely hazardous, requires tremendous energy and resources and takes so long to get anywhere. We have accomplished so much in the last 50 years.
33
Like Ross' piece, the commenters show exemplary expression of the greatness bestowed upon us by the lunar/space program achievements. And inspiration. No we haven't transcended our earthly "coils" in any significant way, but the generations of people inspired by this great technological and scientific achievement is impossible to quantify yet palpable. The past greatness is largely defined by the low bar America now sets for itself, as personified by Mr Douthat's sadness, brought on in part by our current literal and figurative lowering of our sights below the stars. Yes, in 1968 we had an acute existential nuclear threat and overall competitor in USSR. And that threat went a long way towards bringing most everyone together behind the space program, despite the general division of the day. But an argument can be made that back then we were less selfish and more willing to sacrifice for a greater good. Today's threats are just as existential, just as Moscow, but more insidious. With the lack of honest evaluation of threats by the political class, and the overall poisoning of the "information well" by politicians and media alike, I too am saddened. It seems America is too divided because we are too soft and easily duped and/or entertained by carnival barkers and other exploiters, online or otherwise. We can't even come close to agreeing on what needs to be done. Greatness is further from us than the moon ever was unless we grow up.
10
The sense of being in it together which was the norm in 1960 was starting to come apart by 1964, and was gone by 1980.
9
@Casual Observer
I agree. And I attribute it to the welfare state. No longer do we ask not what our country can do for us.... we only ask what our country will give us for free.
3
@Ny Surgeon
In 1969, we mostly all agreed to contribute to the general welfare, and we paid our taxes, even the rich, toward our collective betterment.
Social Security, public education, and Medicare were relatively uncontroversial compared to now, and were considered welcome benefits to society.
The Apollo Program was something we could all take pride in because we all had a stake in it because we all paid taxes to get it off the ground.
What happened? Ronald Reagan told us that our government was the problem, not the solution, and thus, the libertarian mindset took hold.
The ones who benefit most from the shrinking of the government are the very ones government should be protecting us from.
33
Apollo didn't fail, it was abandoned. We may never conquer the stars, but without the Vietnam war to distract us and ruin the budget (yes, wars cost trillions even then) we could have built upon our success to learn to mine the moon, and use the breakthroughs to further improve life on Earth.
Post-Apollo was a failure mostly of statesmanship and imagination. We could have used our moon walk as a springboard to a better world. Instead we turned it into t.v.and then forgot about it.
14
We have gone from the age when we reveled in scientific achievement to the age where many are reveling in science denial. We aimed at the stars, and stopped at the moon.
36
We aimed for the moon - then fell back to earth.
On July 20th, 1969. Every human on Earth with access to a t.v. and a working signal watched Armstrong step down on the Moon. Every person was proud of that act. For days afterwards, people discussed how wonderful it was. It was that important to mankind, not just Americans. The possibilities for human progress seemed to be unlimited, but people still had plenty of complaints about real problems that needed attention.
Those concerns led to loss of support for further advances in space exploration. In fact, the real disagreements about whether to spend efforts and resources on recognized complaints have used up more time and resources that actually fixing problems. The ability of people to act with contrariness has been jaw dropping.
13
Apollo 11 was indeed a great moment and for a brief period brought together most of the nation and even much of the world to marvel at such an accomplishment. But as great as it was, it was only a distraction from the ongoing problems of the Vietnam War, and the cultural divides between young and old, rich and poor, blacks and whites, and educated and less educated. For a few days, we Americans were seemingly together, but there was no glue to hold us together. Nixon was already telling his lies about how he was going to end the war, while secretly planning a nuclear attack; money that should’ve been spent on improving education and health care was being spent on more needless trips to the moon; young people would soon be chastised for their celebration of love and peace at Woodstock; and while white male elites pounded their chests for this achievement, woman and poor blacks and Hispanics continued to be discriminated against and our inner cities continued to decay. All of that laid the foundation for the present state of affairs.
Some use the moon landing to tout America’s so-called exceptionalism, but the moment missed the opportunity to truly jump start this country toward being a great country rather than the still developing, morally and intellectually wrong minded nation it is. The moon landing is a moment to be celebrated but also one to be mourned for the opportunity we missed as a people to really make a giant leap for mankind.
3
Once we achieved the Moon and nobody from Russia did, our popular interest and that of elected officials in devoting further efforts to space exploration just dropped to a low priority.
The talk now shows no great interest. Going to the Moon is seen as a been there done that proposition. The next heavenly body close to the Sun would consume any visitors in a fiery corrosive dissolution in minutes. The next further from the Sun will take many months to reach through millions of random flying objects and a real risk of overshooting and never being able to return. Any serious failure in the space vehicle would mean certain death. There is some talk about space tourism but how many people want to spend the earnings of the average lifetimes earnings times an order of magnitude on one short trip?
3
@Casual Observer Do some research on navigation of the asteroid belt. The asteroids in our solar system are farther apart and have more stable orbits than you think. It is not like in the movies.
1
Yes and no. Objects with brief orbits are readily tracked, but those with long ones are often unknown.
One striking aspect about the moon landing is how much of a national unifier this endeavor was. Americans seemed to align with President Kennedy’s pride in the United States for being a global leader in space exploration. This was our achievement.
Today, although the scientific knowledge has expanded considerably over the past half century, we are less cohesive as a country. The man in our highest office regularly pits people against one another and puts down American institutions. And in this environment, even advanced technology cannot match the dysfunction coming from a figurehead who can’t look towards anything beyond his own immediate political gain.
10
@NM Yeah, well, that was Kennedy. We went from that to a master of campaign espionage and political revenge, then later to a president who told us that "after all, it's your money", that government (our government, the one that put humans on the moon) is the problem, and that we are all called to look out for good old number one. That president came from the party to which Ross Douthat is committed, something he evidently forgot while writing this paean to a grand achievement of ... government.
3
Apollo 11 the peak of America so far, as far to becoming sublime as America has been able, and what we have to do to surpass Apollo 11 and go more deeply into the sublime?
The path to true greatness, sublime development of a people, depends on an excruciatingly difficult process. It depends on the people, made up of individuals who are alive, conscious, aware they each will one day die, and each eager to be remembered, nevertheless somehow choosing, pinpointing the individuals and groups among themselves who are most deserving of honor, most deserving to be remembered, and continuing to improve on this process, locating the giants amongst themselves in Newton's words, and building further on the giants who came before.
Apollo 11 is incredible, for among other reasons, by allowing a single and simple yet incredibly brave man, Neil Armstrong, to be remembered probably thousands of years from now, while probably the rest of us will be long forgotten. A people simply cannot develop, improve, there is no true goodness to a people not to mention a capacity for the sublime, unless the people can keep vanity at bay, each person seriously question whether he or she deserves to be remembered, not to mention deserves it so much as to climb ruthlessly all over fellow citizens in realization of the objective.
America no longer matches Apollo 11 because it appears eager to be a nation of petty, vain, envious, jealous people, desperate yet undeserving of attention and remembrance.
12
In 1969, as now, there were essentially two perspectives on the moon landing and the Apollo missions generally: one emphasized the poetry, the performance, the triumph of human ingenuity and science; the other lamented, literally, the lunacy of devoting such significant public resources to projects when as a society we might better look to solve more mundane earthbound problems like poverty, education, and healthcare. It turned out that those problems were more intractable than idealists of the late 60s imagined. The flip side of our failure, if such it has been, to make more progress in exploring the universe beyond our immediate neighborhood is that even our greatest achievements in science and exploration only expose our supreme insignificance in the universe. So, a lesson on greatness and humility all in one.
4
That human minds all over the globe are connected now through the internet and most of the in text knowledge our species has acquired is now available to all of them seems like a much more significant accomplishment than sending men on a mission to the moon- even if it won't make such a dramatic movie.
We may be in a pause as far as space exploration that involves the dangerous and expensive transport of humans to the moon but when humans again pursue that specific challenge we will be far better equipped to do it competently.
Nostalgia has a way of glorifying the past, and 50 years from now some talented writer like Douthat may be lamenting that nothing as significant as the great internet connection of humanity has occured for the last half century.
But maybe not, because this connection of minds is going to accelerate technological progress so quickly that we may be overwhelmed with the almost unbearable speed of technological change and development.
6
@alan haigh Believe me, the world is never going to relegate the moon voyages to the realm of insignificance.
I find my memories of watching the moon landing as a child, triggering a sense of pride AND great loss.
"They did something great, in keeping with the best spirit of this often great, sometimes wicked, always remarkable country ... "
"Great" has left the building. It has been replaced by a collective cowering meekness, a desperation to avoid hard truths for lazy fictions, a meanness of spirit.
We still talk about American leadership but can't be bothered to do anything about climate change; instead millions lie to themselves about the awful inheritance they are leaving their grandchildren.
We talk about the genius of our system of government ... federalism, check and balances, a distrust of centralized power and the tyranny of the majority; and now millions have formed a cult of personality around a ignorant grifter authoritarian wannabe who has lied to them well over 10,000 times in less than 3 years and treats the foundations of our system of government as a target to be destroyed.
We sing the praises of our bravery yet millions of use shake in fear at the mere mention that a brown child may escape his cage at the border or that a handful of young women members of Congress may criticize our Dear Leader. They must all be Sent Back.
We were once flawed and great, striving for better. Now? The flaws remains, the trend is backwards. American Exceptionalism has turned into America the Barely Adequate.
16
The peak of US greatness lies 50 years in the past for another reason, as well. The torch was passed from our last great president to a group of mediocre to horrible presidents. When Nixon took over from LBJ, it was the beginning of the trend to Trump. LBJ was responsible for the civil rights act, the voting rights act, the fair housing act, Medicare (today's most popular government program among Democrts, Republicans and independents), Medicaid ( a key factor in the success of Obama's ACA). Headstart, Foodstamps, the immigration act of 1965, PBS, NPR, etc. The presidency went from the hands of a just and compassionate man to the hands of a crook. Fifty years later, we have Trump. Crook is hardly a sufficient word to describe this hateful, xenophobic, bigoted, divisive pathological liar. His only connection with our last great president is that he was at the U of Pennsylvania while LBJ was president.
24
@James Ricciardi LBJ was just and compassionate? The Vietnamese people and the GIs sent to fight there would have a different view I think.
1
@Abbott Hall How man successful war presidents have we have had since the Korean war which was fought to a draw? You will have to think long and hard to find one. But LBJ saved tens of millions of lives with Medicare and Medicaid, and improved the lives of hundreds of millions with those two programs and the civil rights, voting rights and fair housing act. Numbers matter. Vietnam affects his overall rating as a president, but does not detract one iota from the successes of his Great Society programs.
2
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
- A Tale of Two Cities
Our little family of four, in our 20's, two babies watch that landing in 1969 like countless millions, most rewarding. But the next day, it was back to the shipyard, working on nuclear missile submarines that could destroy the planet. War was raging in Vietnam, the Cold War in full swing, the Civil Rights Act struggling to survive the onslaught of bigotry.
Those were the 60's and 70's. That's what I remember.
5
For a kid just out of high school, Apollo 11 was an inspirational, jaw dropping moment of wonderment. That anything was possible at age 18 attitude infected me and the lunar landing only added weight to that argument. A hitch in the Army some time after that brought me back down to Earth from my lofty thinking. However, I still hold on to the spirit of that day with each moonrise.
8
"...because what Apollo represents is not goodness but greatness, not moral progress but magnificence, a sublime example of human daring that our civilization hasn’t matched since."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We're at our best when we discover and create.
We're at our worst when we destroy.
The moon landing was a pinnacle of us at our best and we, as a species, were proud of that.
I believe the world saw that then, too...
16
Five hundred years from now, people will gasp at the daring of the Apollo astronauts.
From that future perspective, the rickety crudeness of '60's space technology will amaze and no one alive at that time would dare repeat the journey in the old vessels.
Come to think of it, neither would we.
13
What if China puts someone on Mars first? Would that be considered a leap of greatness for humankind, or would that only occur if America gets there first? And what if the mission were led by a Chinese for-profit company that engaged in intellectual property theft of American technology? I bet China would still be very happy to take credit for all the greatness.
5
One could argue about a lot of things (in relation to greatness), but is it a fair comparison to put technological marvel (machines really) on one side and the human condition (and our collective moving forward) on the other ?
I am not so sure.
We can essentially achieve anything we want (not just as one country, but the entire world) if we spend enough money, devote enough human capital, and achieve political consensus.
We are going to have to do so when climate change achieves a tipping point (if it hasn't already) and we have to collectively band together (pretty much all nations) if we are even going to have a chance at saving ourselves.
What makes any population or civilization ''great'' is how it treats its least well off citizens. ''Civilized'' is right there in the word. (we tend to forget that) So one could easily argue that a guaranteed basic income, full human rights (especially for women and autonomy over their own bodies) health care for all, getting climate change under control, and demilitarization (as examples) would be what a civilized society would be doing. Correct ?
We have very far to go friends before we can proclaim anything remotely resembling ''great'',
19
We, the human race and America, needed time. We needed these past 50 years to consider where it is we might go and, most importantly, why we might want to go there.
The decades have not been empty of the exploration of the vast, almost unimaginable worlds beyond our own. There have been the Voyager missions, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station (a holding place in the sky for humans and human ambitions) and, of course, the Space Shuttle, an attempt to make near space "routine" and much less expensive, goals that could not be reached. Taken in their all and all, they have served to show us how grounded we are on earth and how unlikely the science fiction dreams of Mars colonies or escaping our solar system are at base.
We are here. We might not like that limitation, we might have incorrectly concluded that the "giant leap for mankind" was the start of something much greater and, perhaps it will yet prove to be, but it is not surprising that going to the moon, in all of the magnificence of the accomplishment it represented, showed us, more than anything, where we would not be going any time soon.
By going to the moon, we fell back to earth. That's not such a bad thing.
There are journeys ahead even now being dreamed and imagined, plotted.
Our lives are short but human life, at least in theory, can stretch forward of many thousands of years. We don't know the final answer to these questions. They will.
(The writer covered the space program for NPR.)
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I am sure that the technologies to be unveiled over the next century will be almost miraculous, and I hope they improve humans' lives. But I am afraid that we place too much faith in technology, instead of trying to create a more democratic, just, and equal society. We don't need to go to Mars. We need to concentrate on fixing America and the Earth.
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The failure to pursue space exploration, like the failure to adopt universal health care and the failure to pursue clean energy was not foreordained. It's just that as a country we are plagued with politicians who are determined to stand against the tide of human progress shouting "stop, no further." We should be ashamed.
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Americans lost interest.
People who are "eggheads" or "elites" are shrugged off or scorned -- or actively hated -- while pop stars and athletes are cheered and emulated.
A sizable proportion of our country is getting dumber. We've dumbed down our schools so that those who can't keep up won't feel bad about themselves, and our radio shows and general discourse have become coarser.
Our president seems to have some native, self-serving shrewdness, but he is not an intelligent or thoughtful man.
As a personification of our grunt culture -- a kind of anti-intellectual, almost irrational, intensely self-absorbed mindset that afflicts all colors and creeds and political leanings -- this president fits the bill.
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I don’t think it’s even arguable that the peak of America’s greatness occurred November 4, 2008.
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@Wayne
Electing a black man president was an apology for the sins of the past. It showed not greatness but merely adequacy, and was only remarkable because of past failures. If your greatest moment is merely the settling of an old debt, then the nation is truly in decline. The moon landing was a great moment in history. Obama's election will be a footnote, a denouement to the civil rights movement. That Nixon was president during the moon landings should remind us that we are defined by what we accomplish, not who leads us.
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I don’t think it’s even arguable that the peak of America’s greatness occurred November 4, 2009.
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How the mighty have fallen. Our country once climbed the summit of daring, intelligence, creativity and courage and planted a flag on the moon. Now we’re a petty, sneering mob led by a fool, chanting hateful slogans and wallowing in self-pity and spite.
Scientific achievement is now countered by anti-vaxers and global warming deniers. Universities can’t mention delicate subjects without warning students, who run to a safe room and hug a bunny. A master’s degree cost me a total of about four thousand dollars at a good State university in the late ‘60s. Now students can’t afford college, or are saddled with debt for life.
The vision to achieve landing on the moon is a rare commodity. Now ignorance reigns supreme as social networks spread nonsense to the susceptible. After John F. Kennedy started us on a journey to the moon we could never have imagined that a petty, tweet-happy ignoramus would be our president, amid shouts of “lock her up!” and “go back where you came from!”
We can never go back. There were serious problems back then, but we could find moments of accomplishment and pride to reflect on. When we look back at this era, pride will not be in the picture.
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@gemli
There is a tribe of Americans who take a perverse pride in finding fault with the country. They are free to do so, but they will never lead; they will forever be observers from the balcony, heckling those on stage. You can't lead by looking backwards, or forever apologizing. This leadership vacuum was a key enabler of the Trump presidency.
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That is your view and perhaps many others as well, but there are equally many other men and women find pride in such achievements and who equally pain for the ills of history and today.
Reality is exists in many forms even with the infinite amount of interpretations, it still exists as it happens, just like the question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to here or see if fall,does it make a sound?”
Well reality is, the tree still fell.
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@gemli
NASA's space program was built by Nazi German war criminal rocket scientists.
America's nuclear weapons program was built by German American Jewish refugees.
There are more German Americans than there are any other kind of Americans by cultural linguistic ethnic national origin.
Nazi Germany killed 27.5 million Soviet citizens during World War II. Only the 30 million Chinese killed by the Japanese Empire was a deadlier ethnic sectarian holocaust.
Going to the Moon didn't make black African Americans divinely naturally created equal persons with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness equal to Ivana and Melania Trump.
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“... the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since....”
There have been a number of “greatnesses” since. But as their appeal is more to the mind than the heart, and can be said to lack the visual impact that only the moon landing can provide, they don’t get the deserved notice.
Stopping HIV readily comes to mind.
But it is the collective effort that will be required on the part of all of mankind to slow and then reverse the climate emergency that if successful will dwarf the greatness of the moon landing. As that is a process, not a singular event, it too will lack that “wow” effect, but it will be far more significant.
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We need to contemplate the next advance in science -- understanding human psychology. It can be done. It is being done, in some places that don't much get in the news.
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@unification I believe that it already has been done but without the singular event that holds the world’s attention. In 1969 we were just starting to understand molecular genetics and over the past 50 years truly remarkable strides have been made. We can now remove T cells and engineer them to attack cancerous cells. Like the Apollo program, these achievements required the efforts of hundreds of thousands of talented and dedicated scientists but nobody televised them. This is also true on a similar scale in computer science , electronics and communications.
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@Abbott Hall I am not talking about human psychology in terms of molecular genetics, though that must be a part of it, but primarily of the influences of largely-early-childhood interactions with other humans. That too can be science.
We are becoming selfish, petty, insular. We bicker about our inheritance. O
I can't think of the last useful thing Congress did. My respect for the Supreme Court lessens by the year. And don't get me started on the man in the Oval Office.
Our culture is vapid, our most popular movies mindless sequels of earlier mindless sequels, all of it to be forgotten in time. We inspire nobody.
Where once we sent astronauts to the moon who "came in peace for all mankind," now we declare "America First" and literally pick fights with our friends and allies just because we can. We are gratuitously mean spirited.
I can't see how this ends well.
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@Andy
It won't.
It will likely end with the splitting apart of The United States of America into two or more offspring nations, boundaries and forms of government to be determined.
The real question is how much violence will be involved in that process.
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“America First” is both insulated and demonized by many people here and abroad by the collective achievements and failures of our nation, but this melting pot continues to be stirred into a meal for all to feed upon that some enjoy while others spit upon to define the nation by the darkest moments as the only aspect for historical judgment.
The iconic words of Neil Armstrong after absorbing in the first moment a person set foot on a surface 250,000 miles from Earth is now subject to a ridiculous form of scrutiny by groups of people who oppose gender identity and have the desire for the expulsion of history for a political agenda.
His words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” may one day be stricken from text books or other forms of media, or even dubbed over.
One aspect many people who attempt to reshape our nation by cleansing or purposely omit certain segments of our history tend to overlook the entire context of our freedoms and the tolerances this freedom manifests and mixes into our daily diet.
If not America First or Keep America Great, then where on Earth and in the physical universe would give people such an opportunity of freedom to explore and challenge for a more inclusive society to take more steps forward?
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@Andy "We"? Donald trump isn't "we."
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"the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since."
Wow! Finally something on which Mr. Douthat and I agree.
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