The 1960s was a time of societal upheaval. Vietnam. The antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement. The assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., and Malcolm X. Student protests. Urban uprisings. Woodstock, then Altamont. The Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Adjacent to that turmoil and a rising concern for social justice, there was a legitimate debate over the wisdom of spending so much money on sending a tin can containing humans to the moon. In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “If our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their two feet right here on earth.” That critique is uncannily relevant this week.
Yet the space program—born out of competition with the Russkies—signaled that if we could work through all the conflicts and challenges of that turbulent decade, glorious achievements would lie ahead. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey promised us space tourism. You’d be able to fly Pan Am to the moon and stay in an orbiting hotel. Star Trek promised us a multiracial and multinational society seeking to collaboratively explore new worlds and boldly go where no one had gone before (where everyone spoke English). And The Jetsons promised us flying cars.
The space program fueled these dreams. When the nation was mired in Vietnam and locked in a twilight battle with evil communism, it delivered us astronaut heroes. In troubled times, it was a message that the future could be bright. And those photos of our Earth as a blue marble floating in a dark expanse helped spark the environmental movement.
Then came Watergate, the oil embargo, inflation, defeat in Vietnam, and the rise of even nastier and more divisive politics that exploited racism and hot-button social issues. After more astronauts walked on the moon, drove a lunar buggy on its surface, and hit a golf ball several hundred yards, public interest waned. Budget pressures in the 1970s—driven in part by spending on Vietnam—led to the cancellation of the Apollo program. Besides, the Americans had won the race to the moon. Wasn’t that the point? The contest was over. Space exploration lost its shine. It was just…another government program in a tumultuous nation.
Artemis II, with its four-member crew, lifted off while an unnecessary war of choice launched by Donald Trump raged in the Middle East. The crew was in the middle of their amazing journey—flying farther than any human ever has—when Trump threatened to destroy an entire civilization. There are many headwinds against inspiration that might come from this mission.
After all, we’ve been let down before. We never got vacations in space, global peace and cooperation, and those flying cars. Instead, we now have the planetary threat of climate change and the fear of artificial intelligence either stealing our jobs or subsuming humanity. (HAL was a warning sign!) A multiracial and multilateral international order seems rather distant, particular as globalization spurs economic dislocation and authoritarianism and jingoistic nationalism spread here and abroad.
So I don’t begrudge anyone saying, “We won’t get fooled again,” and refusing to be jazzed by this return drive-by to the moon. Nostalgia is a cheap emotion. I feel its tugs as I gaze at the images Artemis II zaps back to us—which hold more power than pics snapped by people-free probes. But this is a different time, and a space program is not going to excite and galvanize, as it once did. With Trump causing so much chaos, violence, and death—and threatening our democracy—it’s hard to be part of any celebration that he leads, especially one focused on winning a new race to the moon against China and other nations.
Even in space, Artemis II cannot be viewed in a vacuum. My friend David Grinspoon, a renowned astrobiologist who is excited about the scientific research that can be done on new trips to the moon, captured this sentiment—what he called “ambivalence”—in a roundtable discussion for the New York Times:
I’ve been a space geek all my life and I can honestly say my trajectory in life was shaped by the Apollo program when I was young. But when I hear the rhetoric about beating China to the moon as a major motivation, I find it distasteful and likely antithetical to long-term success at creating an orbital community and economy.
We already won the race to the moon once! Now we are going to win it again? Setting it up as a short-term race is just asking for the public to lose interest again in a few years and decide to cut the budget and end the program, which would be such a shame. One of the lessons of Apollo and the early space age was the need to care for our planet and unite as one humanity. Yet look at the world today. It’s so fragmented, fractious and seemingly unable to marshal the global-scale responses needed to solve our global-scale problems.
So my excitement about Artemis, my admiration for the amazing engineering and bravery and scientific potential, is tempered with sadness and regret for the lost potential…On this centenary of Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket flight we are rightfully in awe and proud of the fact that we can now launch spacecraft beyond the solar system and humans to the moon. Yet that same technology produced the V-2 and the ICBM. We humans are not living up to the promise I saw as a kid enthralled by Apollo, and so I dearly hope, but am not convinced, that this can help re-spark more than just cool rocket rides.
For most of human existence—which emerged between 150,000 and 300,000 years ago—people did not think much about the future. That is, there was no expectation that the future would be much different than the present. But at some point—at the start of the Industrial Revolution or earlier?—we Homo sapiens, looking at the new whiz-bang technology being developed, began believing the future would bring new marvels that could dramatically change our lives for the better. The World of Tomorrow—which was the theme of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York—became a real thing that might indeed happen.
Even after the horrors of the Holocaust, the violence of World War II, the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the terror of the new nuclear age, the space program of the 1960s epitomized that positive futurism. It embodied hope. It captured imaginations. And that didn’t last. No one expects new manned (and womanned) space exploration to revive such uninhibited exhilaration—not even if it brings us back to the moon. But if I could make a wish about Artemis II, it would be that this mission—and the images these four people are sending to the 8 billion of us here on terra firma—reminds us of the vastness of the cosmos and our place within it.
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