sp!ked reposted an older article by James Woudhuysen on the long-term importance of space exploration and the stay-at-home attitudes that oppose further development of the “final frontier”:
One thing unites the critics of lunar exploration. Forty years after man first landed on the moon — on 20 July 1969 — they share a disdain for the grandeur of extra-terrestrial endeavour; for the scale of human ambition involved; for the very idea that human beings should climb into space, as up a mountain, ‘because it is there’.
I have no special preference for size, thrust during lift-off, or the traverse across vast distances. The development of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s, so important to the Apollo programme, was a tribute to miniaturisation rather than to high energy or physical scale. No, my admiration for both Saturn boosters and tiny electronics grows from a respect for open-ended curiosity, for human achievement, and for taking risks. With space travel, a lot of bravery was also at stake. And with both space and the development of semiconductors, there is much teamwork to celebrate — teamwork that, in the case of Apollo, involved not just three astronauts, but the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people.
[. . .]
In keeping with the new century’s premonitions of doom, getting into space is also now seen in desperate, instrumental terms. People worry excessively about energy shortages, and do not have the confidence to believe that solutions are available on Earth — not least, by harnessing the tidal power set off by the moon. As a result, there is more talk, à la Moon, of going lunar to mine an isotope of helium, 3He, as a low-radiation, cheap-to-engineer alternative, in nuclear fusion reactors, to the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium (6). Going into space is also hawked as a means of protecting humanity from cosmic impacts, freakish weather, famine or nuclear war (7).
There’s more. America’s original space flight programme is seen as prompted not only, and in the main, by the military imperative of beating the Soviet Union in missile and related technology (which it was), but also by the thirst for knowledge about astronomy, space travel and extra-terrestrial life — by a ‘burning drive to know new things’ which itself, we’re told, ‘is a form of hubris’ (8). And, consonant with today’s reduction of politics to taxes and expenditure programmes, there is a renewed emphasis on what are felt to be the enormous financial costs of the original Apollo mission. These are contrasted with its allegedly ‘minuscule’ benefits (9). A similar tactic is to argue that going into space is all very well, but… why not use cheap robots instead of expensive human beings? (10)
Finally, there is a fashionable feminist angle to the criticism. Back in 1970, in his typical style, the American novelist Norman Mailer detected sex and the phallus everywhere around Apollo 11 (Apollo 11 was the first manned ship to land on the moon, followed by 12 to 17 between 1969 and 1972) (11). Ever since, feminists have joined him in identifying rocketry in general as an infantile male pursuit. In the 1980s, the slogan of the petit-bourgeois Greenham Common protesters against Cruise missiles was ‘take the toys from the boys!’. More recently, a contributor to America’s left-Democrat weekly The Nation attacked George W Bush’s plans for space exploration by lamenting the 48 per cent of Americans that favoured them, adding that such people were ‘disproportionately men, but you knew that’ (12).
Today’s inchoate, stop-the-world-I-don’t-want-to-get-off-it political culture ensures that all of these criticisms come from different angles. Yet the history of assessments of the Apollo programme shows how vital it is to overturn all the negative contemporary verdicts that are now made on it. The amount and content of negativity about space has always reflected the amount and content of pessimism toward progress here on Earth.
