Thirty years ago today Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon. He was the first human to do so. It was perhaps the greatest human achievement of the century. But the venture was marred by bad motives. And space exploration and research is only now slowly recovering as a scientific enterprise to improve the knowledge and condition of humankind.
The fact that Armstrong rarely came into the public limelight in the ensuing 30 years — like Albert Einstein or Edmund Hillary — is instructive. It indicates that the flight to the moon was not the achievement of one human, which often signals a determination to discover for its own sake. Rather it was a collective effort. Armstrong was the pilot. He was not critical to the mission. If it had not been him, it could equally have been another pilot. Indeed, one was ready at the time.
The moon voyage was the achievement of a nation driven by competition and fear. It began seven years previously when President John Kennedy declared that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Without the fear of the Soviet Union getting there first, it might never have happened. Or at least it might never have happened this century. There was no inevitably about the human voyage to the moon this century or indeed ever. After all, on this day 30 years ago most people watching Neil Armstrong’s first steps would have thought that the journey to Mars could not be far away, perhaps by 1979, certainly by 1989. But it has not happened. Sadly, that is probably because there has been no competition to do it and there has been no driving force of fear.
The mission to the moon was very much linked to notions of conquest. It was, after all, a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union undertaken in the context of the cold war. And it was a quasi-military operation. The two super-powers had been jostling for power and influence everywhere on earth since 1945. The mission to the moon was just an extension of that contest. The Soviet Union had captured most of eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war and was exerting influence elsewhere, including Cuba on the doorstep of the US. It had also launched the first satellite and put the first man and first woman into orbit. The US was threatened by the possibility of Soviet missiles on Cuba and the US felt threatened by the possibility of Soviet domination of space and perhaps conquest of the moon.
So the US was determined to get there first. The US would ostensibly declare the moon for all humankind, but it would still be a US conquest.
The lunar program wound down very quickly after the initial voyage. The contest was over. It is unfortunate that it took competition with, and fear of, the Soviet Union to capture enough public imagination to permit the spending of the large sums it took to get to the moon. Without them, the funding for space research has dropped dramatically. And the drop has come right at the time space research offers great benefits, in medial research and materials technology, for example. Alas, they are in a time-frame beyond the imagination most political leaders – decades not years.
Fortunately, many of the people who worked on the moon program were imbued with a spirit of discovery and inquiry even if the underlying funding came from different motives. These people and those that followed have changed the focus of space research. With the end of the cold war we now have more cooperation. And 30 years later, the moon landing is being looked back upon as a voyage of discovery rather than the “”race” that it was viewed as in the late 1960s. There is hope in that re-evaluation.