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Aviation History
1973
1973 - 0103.PDF
FLIGHT international. 11 January 1973 Reflections on Apollo By K. W. Gatland* THE LANDINGS ON AND first explorations of the Moon have been acclaimed as Man's greatest adventure and most rewarding scientific effort, while being faulted for being uninspiring and a waste of money. Early Earthbound explorers returned?' with material riches or clear promises of power. They captured public imagination with tales of individual daring and dramatic lands. Apollo spectators saw only non-negotiable rock and pictures of barren hills, obtained by an army of dry technicians. If drama was lacking on the Moon it was because Apollo was too successful, and if poetry was absent it was the fault of commentators who saw the venture merely in terms of political prestige and Moondust as the only realistic profit. Nasa officials have themselves acknowl edged that their publicity effort did not match up to their technical skills. It has often been argued that the money would have been better spent on poverty programmes or cancer research. But only limited attempts have been made to point out that space expenditures were small compared with other demands on the US national purse, and in some cases were more beneficial from the social point of view. For example, in 1971 the Nasa space budget was about 1-6 per cent of the total federal budget or roughly $15 per person per year. Other per capita expenditure amounted to $400 a year for defence and $400 for health, education and welfare. In the same period, Americans each spent some $35 on alcohol, $17 on tobacco and $16 on cosmetics. In Nasa's first decade (1959-1969) the total cost of all programmes was about $35,000 million, or some 2-5 per cent of all federal spending over that period. Apollo cost about $19,000 million up to the first, landing, the final total being about $25,500 million. People are often surprised when they discover that the bulk of space money has not disappeared into space but is still circulating in the economy. In the late 1960s about 420,000 Americans worked in the space programme. They spent their money on houses, food, cars, education and entertainment and paid taxes. Perhaps the greatest communications fault, due to television pundits as much as to Nasa, was the failure to explain the evolutionary nature of technology, the outright refusal to see Apollo in the greater perspective of human achievement. If Apollo had not been developed could we have gone so quickly, and so cheaply into Earth- orbiting space stations with their potential for opening up entirely new avenues for research into medicine, biology and ecology, and the manufacture of materials in the unique environment of weightlessness and vacuum? Those who argued that it would have been cheaper to have sent robots—even if this were true—missed the point entirely. Since astronauts first visited the Moon there * Member of Council, British Interplanetary Society. Apollo II command module pilot Ron Evans poised over the instrument section after extracting one of the film cannisters during the return flight EVA has been a noticeable change in attitudes. There has been a growing recognition that Apollo has done much to open people's eyes to the true nature of our own world as well as that of the Moon. It is also apparent that space experiences have had a marked effect upon the astronauts themselves. More vividly than ever before, the men of Apollo understood the frail quality of our home in space. They saw the Earth shrink to the proportions of a small sphere and watched the Earth rise over the edge of the Moon. The miracle of life itself lay before them. Were not Earth and Moon merely "dust-balls" 5,000 million years ago? Now one of them teems with life—and life itself is stirring into space. It is small wonder that men returned to ponder deeper mysteries and seek to express their innermost feelings— notably Jim Irwin, who is now a Methodist Minister, and Edgar Mitchell, who is probing the misty frontiers of parapsychology, paraphysics and ESP (extra-sensory perception). "The sensation of the Earth dropping away from you is awesome," says Neil Armstrong. Our planet is "a beautiful deep blue over the oceans, covered with a white lace of clouds . . ., the land masses tans of browns, turning into greys as the distances become greater. The greens are seen only along the continental edges, river bottoms, and some plains.". Some vaguely remembered statistics from school days return; only 10 per cent of the Earth's land is arable—and now we have striking visual proof of that fact. Clear colour photographs enabled us on Earth to share these experiences. Early - newspaper comments centred on this "Spaceship Earth" theme and helped cultivate a new and strong ecological sensitivity. As the Apollo programme neared its end, the same newspapers indepen dently hailed the contribution made by Apollo to a growing interpersonal or social awareness—the same sentiment that itself has generated much of the criticism of the Moon programme. Near the Moon, Armstrong said, one recalled that planets, stars and galaxies were in a continual state of
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