The birds sang.
It was early morning 3:50 July 21 (July 20th in the US) and me and my little
brother sat watching Neil Armstrong swallow an "a": A small step for (a) man, a
giant leap for Mankind. Our mother had woken us up so we wouldn't miss it. I
think we had a black'n'white TV set at the time - but it didn't matter, because
the flimsy pictures from the surface of the moon were in b/w. I think I saw all
space related programs from as long as I can remember as a little kid. (That
included science fiction shows, like "My Favorite Martian", and the impressive
German "Raumpatrouille Orion".)
In the Swedish TV studio was the legendary Bengt Feldreich - long time host
for the Nobel Minds science talk show - and space reporter Eugen Semitjov, who
I later came to know very well.
Thanks Neil and Buzz! You had a couple of kids about to turn blue. We were
breathing again.
I continued to follow development in space. I remember all the drama around
Apollo 13. I saw the first Space Shuttle launch. I thought: Surely, soon this
bus will have a fixed time table - a lunch every week or so - and it won't be
long before we had bus stop on the moon and a route to Mars. In the 1980's I
became active in the Swedish Space Movement group and went to the International
Astronautics Federation in Stockholm 1985, meeting both US and Soviet
Astronauts.
And the birds sang. But the short-sighted politicians sang to a different
tune. Space initiatives were launched and killed. Over and over again. And the
Space Shuttle exploded. And burned up. The Swedish Space Movement faded away,
to a certain degree through unbelievable actions of a certain person whom I
shall not name. But also due to that space projects had become as cold as the
2.7K of the cosmic background radiation.
Now, suddenly, there is a lot of Buzz...eh, buzz around that it was half a
century since the greatest explorers since Leif Eriksson or Magellan or Captain
Cook set their feet on a new world. There's Apollo 11 50 years everywhere in
media! Papers run page after page. Swedish TV has an Apollo special all
Saturday evening.
It is as if everyone has a bad conscience that we've done so bad in space
exploration!
It costs too much, some say.
Well, I saw figures that the Vietnam War cost six times as much as the Apollo
program - a war that lead to few things beside deaths and suffering. I think it
was that pointless war that killed off further progress in space. Sure,
Apollo costed, in 1969, 2.31% of the US Federal budget
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA), but that was less than 0.5% of
the US GDP, since the federal budget is "only" ca 20% of the GDP. Now NASA
gets ca 0.5% of the federal budget, translating to 0.1% of the GDP. I believe
American taxpayers spend more on dog food and cosmetics than that! (Sweden
spends even less than that on space, or ca 0.017% of GDP I find after some
googling and quick calculations.)
Space costs *very little* and has given us much more back!
If we take the Apollo program, it is estimated that its requirements for
getting good integrated circuits gave the IC industry an extra 10 years of
development. ICs became the CPUs, memories and other circuits of modern
computers and mobile phones. Without Apollo, the first PCs would have arrived
in the early 90s, the Internet would have had its public breakthrough in the
mid 00s, and we would have just recently got the first slow mobile phones with
touch displays.
And that's just *one* thing. Satellites have given us global communications,
hundreds of TV channels, navigation precise down to a few metres, weather
forecasting, and more. There are lots of lives to be saved and billions in
property values through early hurricane warnings. GPS also saves lives and
makes transports more efficient and safe. Other satellites monitor Earth
resources. We can eg evaluate crop yields and in advance notice if food supply
looks bad in a developing nation - lives to be saved, again. Satellites monitor
risks for war and conflict, I'm sure we that way now exactly what Iran and
North Korea are up to. Peace, lives and much more to be saved. What's the value
of all that? Astronomical, I'd guess.
There is much more of what we call space spin-off. New materials, solar
cells, other energy technology, medical findings, temperature technology,
optical sensors, project management, etc.
And then we have the science, the things that tells us how the universe works
and aren't of practical use - yet! Things that tells us what are we made of?
What's our position in the universe? Is there life elsewhere? Intelligent life?
How did the universe begin? Most basic science will find practical use sooner
or later - we just don't know what the uses are yet. What we do know is that
new findings in basic science will be immensely valuable at some future date.
And space development is very good at producing valuable spin-offs and basic
science findings. That's because space is a difficult environment so we must
stretch our intellectual muscles and work near the limit of what we can do.
That's also BTW a good reason for keep sending humans into space! Homo Sapiens
is fragile and because of this we must think and work double overtime to keep
astronauts safe. If we just send robots we don't need to go that extra mile and
put in those extra efforts since robots can be replaced. (And besides, putting
people on the Moon and/or Mars ensure Man's survival in case of a stupid
nuclear war or a dinosaur-killing size comet.)
Some say that Apollo's photographs of the blue Earth tells us how fragile our
planet is. But most of all it tells us how much Mankind can do! If we want to,
there are almost no limits for what we can achieve.
You see a photo, and all you think of is...the Earth? Come on! The
photographer was *in orbit around the Moon*, dummy! Think of *that*. Think of
what we can do if we can go to the Moon.
Things now looks slightly more optimistic, but not thanks to NASA. We have eg
Elon Musk and his Big Falcon Rocket, which will be capable to go both to the
moon and Mars, and it is constructed for vertical landing from the beginning.
(It boggles my mind that a private entrepreneur can do this, which big NASA
with the entire US government behind it has been unable to do for now close to
50 years!) We have the Chinese, who have declared that they aim for the moon.
India has recently landed a probe on the lunar surface.
There seem to be many standing in queue to do something.
And it is time to *do something* in space. To sing another song. To stretch
our wings.
--Ahrvid
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