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Time for another Kennedy-like commitment
(by Ed Flynn - March 12, 2008)
Watching the shuttle Atlantis glide gracefully back to earth last week I couldn’t help but wonder how many Americans were aware that it had even been in space.
Space flights, it seems, have become routine, a far cry from those days when returning astronauts were hailed as heroes and honored with ticker tape parades up Broadway. By contrast, there was one NASA astronaut aboard that flight of the Atlantis who was returning to earth from 120 days in space spent on the International Space Station and I’d be willing to bet that no one reading these words could tell me his name.
You really don’t have to be as old as I am to remember the early days of space travel. It was only 47 years ago, on May 25, 1961, when President John Kennedy committed the nation to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” before the decade had ended. At that time the had been left behind in the cosmic dust when a Russian cosmonaut became the first human to orbit the earth. The best the had been able to do was to send Alan Shepard into space for a short suborbital flight. In 1962 when John Glenn equaled ’s accomplishment by orbiting the globe, the mission was considered so risky that the post office distributed stamps commemorating the occasion in sealed pouches with orders that the pouches were not to be opened until Glenn had returned safely. If he failed the pouches were to be destroyed unopened.
On July 20, 1969, 40 years ago next year, President Kennedy ’s challenge was met. On that date, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin disembarked from the Apollo 11 and became the first humans to step on the surface of the moon.
When I was a boy growing up in the era before World War II, space flight was the stuff of science fiction. In those days we kids would invariably congregate on Saturday afternoon at Pop’s Palace theater in Bergenfield, just as kids did at their hometown theaters all over , for the almost cult-like matinees where, among other things, we watched the next chapter in the serialized adventures of one of our heroes. It might have been some cowboy like Tom Mix but the most popular were Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon who were engaged in an on-going battle against evil in outer space. While we watched them take off in their “rocket ships” most of us knew that space travel was really impossible because it was generally believed that if an aircraft could ever reach the speed of sound it would break in pieces.
Another difference was that in my youth we had some idea of how things worked. I recall, for example, making my own crystal radio set and running a cooper wire antenna from my bedroom window to the oak tree in the back yard to capture the signal. OK, I didn’t really understand it completely, but I did grasp the theory and I knew how the electromagnets in my headphone caused the diaphragm to vibrate and recreate the sound waves.
Today, we live in an age where that science fiction of my youth has become reality, an age of remote controls in which knowing what button to push passes for an understanding of how things work. Commercial aircraft routinely fly faster than the speed of sound, hand held wireless phones connect us to the Internet, laptop commuters access the accumulated knowledge of mankind at the touch of our fingers. We even have navigation systems in our cars. And, oh, yes; spacecraft now return from the International Space Station as routinely as a passenger jet touching down at some domestic airport.
So, in an era where everything seems possible, why does so much still seem impossible? Why, for example, can’t we end our dependency on foreign oil and develop a car that will work on alternative fuel or battery power like the toys my great grandchildren play with? Why can’t we devote our science to the goal of finding a cure for cancer and other disease in the next 10 years? Why can’t we eradicate hunger around the world? Why, while we are exploring outer space, can’t we end global warming here on earth before we destroy our own planet?
And perhaps most of all, why can’t the Democratic and Republican candidates in the upcoming election pledge to put aside personal attacks long enough to agree on another Kennedy-like commitment to solve the real problems that face our nation and the world?
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