THE APOLLO Moon operation, whose 40th anniversary is being celebrated this weekend, has been well described as a project by engineers who tried to reach the heavens. It combined extravagant prestige and compulsive public attention in equal measure.
A hugely ambitious and dangerous mission which took eight years and 400,000 people to organise, it arose directly from superpower competition with the Soviet Union after the United States felt humiliated by Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit of the Earth in April 1961, shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. One of the most memorable images from the operation is the first sight of the Earth rising from the Moon, the birth of a new green consciousness for following decades. And a list of the eventual technological spinoffs from that intense effort includes mobile phones, computers and micro-chips, solar cells and joysticks – not to mention the remarkable television footage seen by 600 million people in the then largest ever broadcast audience.
Before those political shocks for US president John F Kennedy, the Moon landing project had been low on his list of priorities. In retrospect, it is difficult if not impossible to answer the question of whether the project was worth the cost and effort involved, given what we now know about the spinoffs. A cost-benefit analysis could analyse them; but how should it be factored into the great expansion of space exploration and orbital flight since then?
The several subsequent Moon landings shortly after Apollo have not been repeated since then. Efforts by the Bush administration to revisit them were resisted within the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) in favour of a flight to Mars. Planning for that proceeds, but largely on an international basis, which is now the central methodology of space research. Within that setting, European, Chinese, Russian and Japanese expenditure and activity have increased markedly, but even so Nasa still has more technical and financial resources than the rest of the world’s space agencies put together.
Neil Armstrong’s words as he made the first landing – “It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – reflect this concern for humanity as a whole, even though his first act with Buzz Aldrin was to plant the US flag on the Moon’s surface, acknowledging the national interest which drove their mission. It was only by chance that they noticed and then recorded the Earth rise when they were reunited with their spacecraft before returning home. That moment is unquantifiable.