Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly depressed that that the first decade of this millennium is almost over and our world isn’t even slightly similar to Stanley Kubrick’s space-faring visions in Space Odyssey: 2001. I couldn’t help but wonder: if we still can’t travel regularly to the moon and beyond, then what on Earth (quite literally) have we been doing for the last four decades? Thus I decided to open up my mental filing cabinets, in addition to a few tabs of Wikipedia, to figure out what we’ve been up to since Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps. Join me on a trip down memory lane, one decade at a time, to relive some of the most significant cultural and technological achievements of the last century.
Why aren't we there yet?!
1999
This is a year perhaps better defined as the one before 2000. Dozens of woefully ignorant psychos are building Y2K-proof homes in remote forests, while new cults herald the return of Jesus, aliens, and sentient dolphins. The Backstreet Boys release Millennium. DVDs are just beginning to gain some traction against the still dominant VHS format, and NASA seems like it just can’t keep track of its Mars rovers – it loses both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander within a span of two months.
1989
A quick jump of just ten years before 1999 and the world is already unimaginably different. Though the Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse and the Berlin Wall is being dismantled, the threat of Communism is still a very tangible presence in the United States. The phrase “George Bush” isn’t yet synonymous with all things evil, but is rather the name of a President who would have an 80% approval by the end of this year. Tape cassettes are still the best way to store music. NASA and the European Space Agency are busy fending off budget overruns as they’re trying to complete their joint venture, the Hubble Space Telescope.
1979
The United States is in the middle of its second oil crisis, which means that small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars are suddenly extremely popular. Chrysler prophetically asks the U.S. government for a $1 billion loan to avoid bankruptcy. Michael Jackson releases his first blockbuster solo album Off the Wall, and Jimmy Carter is attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing. The Apple II is the platinum standard of “home computing”, but is in all honesty a glorified graphing calculator. Voyager I, which, in thirty years would be well on its way to exiting the solar system, is just now flying by Jupiter to give us our first look at the planet’s rings and moons.
The icon of a revolution.
1969
The Vietnam War. Hippies protesting in college campuses all over the country. The very first Wal-Mart opens, the very first Brady Bunch episode premieres. “Computers” are known as “workstations”, and running on just the very first build of Unix, they can’t do much at all. Slide rules are an engineer’s best friend, but addition and subtraction you still have to do by hand. Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this technological backwardness, America also managed to fly some guys onto the moon.
A whole bunch of guys playing with these is how we got to the moon.
2009
So what have we been doing for forty years? It seems like simultaneously a lot, yet not much at all. Our personal lives have improved drastically with the popularization of computing technology, but at the same time the Apollo 11 moon landing still seems like a pinnacle of human achievement. Black-and-white photographs of the Saturn rockets and the Lunar Module still look surreally like scenes from a sci-fi movie, yet the rockets and spacecraft were designed with slide rules. Why does sending men to the moon now seem as much a pipe dream as it was back then?
Both congressional and presidential belt-tightening has severely impacted NASA’s operations in the past few decades, and the slowing global economy looks like it’ll only make things worse. But with trillions of dollars now invested into “stimulating” our flagging economy, space exploration is still being inexplicably neglected. As with infrastructure expansion, money spent on space exploration would similarly create thousands of new jobs. The long-term benefits of the cutting-edge technologies developed in new space programs would far outweigh those produced in other government projects, and if the Apollo program was any indication, space exploration has the added benefit of training and inspiring engineers in all levels of education.
According to our government, a new moon program would cost too much.
Furthermore, though the Space Race was born in the midst of an epic ideological battle between the Soviet Union and the United States, space exploration has since then become a surprisingly effective vehicle for international cooperation. From the formation of the European Space Agency, to NASA and the ESA’s collaboration on the Hubble Space Telescope, and to the fifteen-nation joint effort on the International Space Station, conquering the final frontier has brought together countries with even the most hostile of histories. Expressed best by Indira Ghandi, who at the time of the Apollo 11 landing was prime minister of India, “I fervently hope that [the lunar landing] will usher in an era of peaceful endeavor for all mankind.”
Perhaps most importantly, though, Space represents something gloriously intangible, a worldwide dream of mankind that has persisted unchanged over thousands of years. In no religion is Heaven anywhere but the sky. It is Ra’s ocean, Zeus’s mountain, the high court of Emperor Huang Di. NASA’s space programs have been named for Gods because these endeavors symbolize not just man struggling to escape from his terrestrial, mortal shackles, but also the possibility that one day he too, through sheer ambition and bravery, can join the ranks of the Pantheon.
Why aren't we there yet?!
1999
This is a year perhaps better defined as the one before 2000. Dozens of woefully ignorant psychos are building Y2K-proof homes in remote forests, while new cults herald the return of Jesus, aliens, and sentient dolphins. The Backstreet Boys release Millennium. DVDs are just beginning to gain some traction against the still dominant VHS format, and NASA seems like it just can’t keep track of its Mars rovers – it loses both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander within a span of two months.
1989
A quick jump of just ten years before 1999 and the world is already unimaginably different. Though the Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse and the Berlin Wall is being dismantled, the threat of Communism is still a very tangible presence in the United States. The phrase “George Bush” isn’t yet synonymous with all things evil, but is rather the name of a President who would have an 80% approval by the end of this year. Tape cassettes are still the best way to store music. NASA and the European Space Agency are busy fending off budget overruns as they’re trying to complete their joint venture, the Hubble Space Telescope.
1979
The United States is in the middle of its second oil crisis, which means that small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars are suddenly extremely popular. Chrysler prophetically asks the U.S. government for a $1 billion loan to avoid bankruptcy. Michael Jackson releases his first blockbuster solo album Off the Wall, and Jimmy Carter is attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing. The Apple II is the platinum standard of “home computing”, but is in all honesty a glorified graphing calculator. Voyager I, which, in thirty years would be well on its way to exiting the solar system, is just now flying by Jupiter to give us our first look at the planet’s rings and moons.
The icon of a revolution.
1969
The Vietnam War. Hippies protesting in college campuses all over the country. The very first Wal-Mart opens, the very first Brady Bunch episode premieres. “Computers” are known as “workstations”, and running on just the very first build of Unix, they can’t do much at all. Slide rules are an engineer’s best friend, but addition and subtraction you still have to do by hand. Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this technological backwardness, America also managed to fly some guys onto the moon.
A whole bunch of guys playing with these is how we got to the moon.
2009
So what have we been doing for forty years? It seems like simultaneously a lot, yet not much at all. Our personal lives have improved drastically with the popularization of computing technology, but at the same time the Apollo 11 moon landing still seems like a pinnacle of human achievement. Black-and-white photographs of the Saturn rockets and the Lunar Module still look surreally like scenes from a sci-fi movie, yet the rockets and spacecraft were designed with slide rules. Why does sending men to the moon now seem as much a pipe dream as it was back then?
Both congressional and presidential belt-tightening has severely impacted NASA’s operations in the past few decades, and the slowing global economy looks like it’ll only make things worse. But with trillions of dollars now invested into “stimulating” our flagging economy, space exploration is still being inexplicably neglected. As with infrastructure expansion, money spent on space exploration would similarly create thousands of new jobs. The long-term benefits of the cutting-edge technologies developed in new space programs would far outweigh those produced in other government projects, and if the Apollo program was any indication, space exploration has the added benefit of training and inspiring engineers in all levels of education.
According to our government, a new moon program would cost too much.
Furthermore, though the Space Race was born in the midst of an epic ideological battle between the Soviet Union and the United States, space exploration has since then become a surprisingly effective vehicle for international cooperation. From the formation of the European Space Agency, to NASA and the ESA’s collaboration on the Hubble Space Telescope, and to the fifteen-nation joint effort on the International Space Station, conquering the final frontier has brought together countries with even the most hostile of histories. Expressed best by Indira Ghandi, who at the time of the Apollo 11 landing was prime minister of India, “I fervently hope that [the lunar landing] will usher in an era of peaceful endeavor for all mankind.”
Perhaps most importantly, though, Space represents something gloriously intangible, a worldwide dream of mankind that has persisted unchanged over thousands of years. In no religion is Heaven anywhere but the sky. It is Ra’s ocean, Zeus’s mountain, the high court of Emperor Huang Di. NASA’s space programs have been named for Gods because these endeavors symbolize not just man struggling to escape from his terrestrial, mortal shackles, but also the possibility that one day he too, through sheer ambition and bravery, can join the ranks of the Pantheon.
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