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Two views of the US space programme reviewed for New Scientist,\u00a02 July 2014<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWE HAVE no need of other worlds,\u201d wrote Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer and satirist in 1961. \u201cWe need mirrors. We don\u2019t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can\u2019t accept it for what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n A few years later, as NASA\u2019s advocates hunted for suitable justification for the US\u2019s $24 billion effort to put a man on the moon, they began to invoke humanity\u2019s \u201coutward urge\u201d \u2013 an inborn desire to leave our familiar surroundings and explore strange new worlds.<\/p>\n A hastily concocted migration instinct might explain tourism. But why astronauts visited the moon, described by the 1940s US columnist Milton Mayer as a \u201cpulverised rubble\u2026 like Dresden in May or Hiroshima in August\u201d, requires a whole other level of blarney.<\/p>\n In Marketing the Moon: The selling of the Apollo lunar program<\/em>, released earlier this year, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek curated that blarney in their illustrated account of how Apollo was sold to a public already paying a bloody price for the Vietnam war.<\/p>\n Historian Matthew Tribbe, on the other hand, looks in an almost diametrically opposite direction. His No Requiem for the Space Age<\/em> sweeps aside the Apollo programme\u2019s technocratic special pleading \u2013 and the subsequent nostalgia \u2013 to argue that Americans fell out of love with space exploration even before Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon in July 1969.<\/p>\n There is no doubt that national disillusionment with the space programme swelled during the 1970s, as counter-cultural movements sent the US on \u201cthe biggest introspective binge any society in history has undergone\u201d. But digging beneath this familiar narrative, Tribbe also shows that opposition to Apollo was both long-standing and intellectually rigorous.<\/p>\n The Nobel laureate physicist Max Born called Apollo \u201ca triumph of intellect, but a tragic failure of reason\u201d. And novelist Norman Mailer considered it \u201cthe deepest of nihilistic acts \u2013 because we don\u2019t know why we did it\u201d.<\/p>\n Apollo was the US\u2019s biggest, brashest entry in its heart-stoppingly exciting \u2013 and terrifying \u2013 political and technological competition with the Soviet Union. By the time Apollo 11 was launched, however, that race was already won, and only a fanatic (or a military-industrial complex) would have kept running.<\/p>\n There was a fairly concerted attempt to sell Apollo as science. But that never rang true, and anyway what we really seek in space, as the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke told the American Aeronautical Society in 1967, is \u201cnot knowledge, but wonder, beauty, romance, novelty \u2013 and above all, adventure\u201d. Apollo was supposed to offer the world\u2019s most technologically advanced nation a peacetime goal as challenging and inspiring as war.<\/p>\n But the intractability of the war in Vietnam put paid to John F. Kennedy\u2019s fine words to Congress on 25 May 1961, about sending an American safely to the moon before the end of the decade. As the Washington Evening Star columnist Frank R. Getlein observed: \u201cThe reason you have a moral equivalent of war is so you don\u2019t have to have war\u2026 For us Americans, unfortunately, the moral equivalent of war has turned out to be war.\u201d<\/p>\n Tribbe argues that popular enthusiasm was doused as soon as people realised just who was going into space \u2013 not them, but the representatives of the very technocratic power structure that was wreaking havoc on Earth.<\/p>\n This, you could argue, was hardly NASA\u2019s fault. So it is reassuring, among all this starkly revealed futility, to see Tribbe expressing proper respect and, indeed, real warmth for NASA and its astronauts. NASA had labelled them \u201csuper-normal\u201d; with such a moniker, it was perhaps inevitable that they failed to capture hearts and minds as easily as everyone had assumed they would. While public uninterest is Tribbe\u2019s theme, he does not lay the blame for it at NASA\u2019s door.<\/p>\n Explorations rarely inspire contemporary stay-at-homes. For example, over a century elapsed between Columbus\u2019s initial voyage and the first permanent English settlements. Lem was right. We don\u2019t need alien places. We need an ever-expanding supply of human ones. The moon may yet provide them. This, at least, is the compelling and technically detailed argument of Arlin Crotts\u2019s forthcoming book The New Moon: Water, exploration, and future habitation<\/em> \u2013 a perfect speculative antidote for those who find Tribbe\u2019s history disheartening.<\/p>\n Tribbe quotes an unnamed journalist who wrote, during the Vietnam war: \u201cThe moon is a dream for those who have no dreams.\u201d This may sum up many of the problems people had with Apollo in the 1970s. But Tribbe is no pessimist, and history need not demoralise us. Times and technologies change, so do nations, and so, come to think of it, do dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two views of the US space programme reviewed for New Scientist,\u00a02 July 2014 \u201cWE HAVE no need of other worlds,\u201d wrote Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer and satirist in 1961. \u201cWe need mirrors. We don\u2019t know what to … Continue reading