Apollo 50 Countdown: 5....

"We are still Go with Apollo 11."

 

Counting down - just five days left until the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin in 1969.

It surprises me that there isn't more public attention being paid to the anniversary - the Apollo 11 landing is arguably the most significant accomplishment of the 20th Century.  Neil Armstrong's step onto the surface of the Moon is a clear demarcation point in the history of our planet, the moment when we truly became a spacefaring species.

In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the importance of the missions that preceded Apollo 11, but somehow it seems a game of incremental steps that eventually lead to the Moon - increasingly higher flights until Yuri Gagarin crosses the line and orbits the earth in 1961, followed by multiple orbits, unmanned test flights, longer duration manned missions, the first lunar orbits by Apollo 8, more orbital tests, and the final "small step" onto the surface of the Moon on July 20th.

However, in some ways that culminating footstep was as pointless as it was historic.

The competitive origin of the initial landing contained the seeds of the Apollo program's termination.  The sole purpose of the Apollo missions was political: for the United States to land on the Moon before the Soviet Union.  Once that goal was accomplished, the Apollo program was more than a little like a dog chasing a car - what do you do after you catch one?  And so, after five more landings*, distinguished only by Alan Shepard's Apollo 14 golf stunt** and a few lunar rover photo ops, the program sputtered out in 1972 after Apollo 17.

The fiftieth anniversary of that final landing will arrive in 2022, and it might well be just as important to acknowledge that landmark as it was to recognize the anniversary of the first landing.  Hopefully by then we will have permanently returned to the Moon, or perhaps bypassed it on the way to Mars, but if not, a reminder of that last point in time when impossible was made possible might revive the desire to do so again.

- Sid

* The ill-fated Apollo 13 mission would have made it six.

** Insert "Moon shot" joke here.