Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407290002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARCIA DUNN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. LENGTH: Long
To this day, Buzz Aldrin regrets missing the party.
But not too much.
On the Earth he had left behind, bells chimed, horns blared, sirens wailed, whistles shrieked, signs flashed, corks popped, firecrackers burst and hands clasped in prayer. Apollo 11's Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the first humans to stand on another heavenly body, were too busy to celebrate.
For all of human history, the moon had beckoned, so near and familiar and yet so far. Now two men were leaving their footprints on its surface while a third circled overhead, his eyes, his ears and his mind straining to take it all in.
It has been a quarter-century since July 20, 1969, when the Eagle landed on the moon and the whole world held its breath.
But after those 25 years, there is no longer a clamor for such high adventure.
NASA has no plans for astronauts to venture far from Earth. And neither is the U.S. space program ready or able to send people to Mars or establish bases on the moon. Former President George Bush dangled that hope five years ago during the last big celebration of a moon-landing anniversary.
``When President Bush said we'd go to Mars by the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, we felt, `Geez, why wait so long?''' says Aldrin. ``I guess now I'm really wondering whether in another 25 years will we get back to the moon, much less Mars.''
The Apollo anniversaries rapidly are losing meaning for other reasons.
``Roughly 35 percent of the people now living were not yet born when we went to the moon the first time, so in that sense it's damn near ancient history,'' says Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon.
The U.S. Census Bureau says 93 million Americans have been born since July 1969 - an entire generation and then some.
Those who lived through that time, however, are not likely to forget it. After spending three days speeding through trackless space to reach the moon a quarter-million miles away, Armstrong was down to about 15 seconds of fuel and was dodging boulders when he brought the lunar lander called Eagle down on the Sea of Tranquility.
At the time, Daniel Goldin was a junior engineer for an aerospace company. He's now NASA's boss.
Goldin considers Apollo 11 ``a crowning achievement.'' But he quickly notes: ``Saying that, enough is enough.''
``Celebrating the past is nice, but the past is past. We ought to be writing new history,'' Goldin says. ``My worst fantasy is that people are going to be celebrating Apollo as a high-water mark in what the human mind and spirit can do. That's the downside of this 25th celebration.''
Space policy analyst John Logsdon agrees it's time to move beyond Apollo.
``We should declare a moratorium on celebrations of the Apollo anniversary after this year until maybe the 50th, when I expect us to be back on the moon,'' Logsdon says. ``Is there any other element of our ongoing national life where we celebrate the past and neglect the future?''
Armstrong and Michael Collins, who watched over the command ship Columbia in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon, would love a moratorium.
They are avoiding reporters and ceremonies, leaving Aldrin the lone participant in the grand adventure to speak for Apollo 11 in this silver anniversary year.
Armstrong, Apollo 11's commander, is 63 and a businessman in Lebanon, Ohio, 80 miles from the farm where he was born. His involvement in space matters has been minimal since Apollo. His most visible role was as vice chairman of the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger accident. Collins, 63, is writing his fifth space book. An avid fisherman, he splits his time between Cape Hatteras, N.C., and Marco Island, Fla.
Aldrin understands his crewmates' reticence.
``We were not chosen in that profession for our abilities to satisfy the emotional queries of the public,'' says Aldrin, 64, a space promoter-consultant-author living in Laguna Beach, Calif.
Just about everybody Aldrin meets - thirtysomethings and up, that is - feels compelled to tell him where they were at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the Sunday the Eagle landed.
``Do I really care where they were?'' asks Aldrin. ``Of course I do because I realize they're telling me something that is extremely important to them that happened in their life. Not in my life, in their life, and it's so widespread that I've begun to appreciate that what happened on July 20, 1969, was not at the moon, but it was back here.''
What happened was incredible, both here and there.
For eight precious days - from the Saturn 5 rocket launch on July 16 to Armstrong's ``one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind'' on July 20 to splashdown back on Earth on July 24 - people just about everywhere cheered and hoped and prayed as one.
Then-President Richard Nixon exulted that it was ``the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.'' Nixon later wrote that it was the most exciting event of the first year of his presidency.
Chappaquiddick, Vietnam, the Middle East, campus and racial unrest, all that briefly was forgotten as a record 500 million television viewers watched Armstrong lift his left foot off the last ladder rung and lower it onto the lunar soil. The time was 10:56 p.m. EDT. Aldrin emerged minutes later.
Earthlings were mesmerized by the two ghostly images bouncing around in one-sixth gravity, gathering rocks and erecting and saluting a U.S. flag.
The astronauts accented America's space victory by unveiling on the moon a plaque that read:
``Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.''
Even those in Mission Control were spellbound during those two hours or so that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon.
``I almost thought it was animation, it seemed so unreal,'' recalls Apollo 12's Alan Bean, who was up there prancing four months later.
For the Apollo 11 astronauts, what happened in their absence was just as amazing. After seeing videos of the celebrations, Aldrin told Armstrong, ``Hey, Neil, we missed the whole thing.''
``We missed it,'' Aldrin says. ``We did not share in the enthusiasm, the happiness, the glory that was shared back here and, I mean, that's heavy. That's important. That's meaningful, and I'm not sure I really understand that nor does anybody all that much.''
President John F. Kennedy started America on its moon journey on May 25, 1961, when he issued this challenge:
``I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.''
It was an audacious move, considering that the United States had only 15 minutes total human space flight experience at that point. But Kennedy was smarting from a long series of second-place finishes to the Soviets. They were the first to launch a satellite, the first to put a human into orbit.
The nation was awed. The space agency was incredulous. Send men to the moon? After being beaten into space by the Soviets? The United States so far had only managed to send Alan Shepard on a 15-minute flight into space.
It took 420,000 workers, $24 billion and 21 manned space flights to get those first footsteps on the moon - six Mercury, 10 Gemini, five Apollo.
It took seven astronauts' lives, three snuffed out in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire and four in plane crashes.
It took eight years.
``Eight years and we started from scratch,'' boasts Apollo 10 commander Thomas Stafford, who flew one of the rehearsal missions for the moon landing, coming within 50,000 feet of the moon's surface.
Armstrong and Aldrin were only the first to leave their imprints on the moon's dusty surface. Ten others followed: Apollo 12's Charles ``Pete'' Conrad and Alan Bean, Apollo 14's Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 15's David Scott and James Irwin, Apollo 16's John Young and Charles Duke, Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan and Harrison ``Jack'' Schmitt. Apollo 13's James Lovell and Fred Haise missed out because of a ruptured oxygen tank.
Stafford compares all this to 10 years, $10 billion and counting for a space station that's still on the drawing board. No longer space rivals, the United States hopes Russian involvement will speed things up and drive U.S. costs down.
And instead of the pulse-pounding launches of the powerful moon shots, there are the relatively tame space shuttles that have flown 60-plus times at up to $1 billion a pop. Only three have attracted as much attention as the moon shots did: the first shuttle flight in 1981, the Challenger explosion in 1986 that killed all seven astronauts aboard, and the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission last December.
``We don't know beans,'' says Apollo 16 commander John Young, the only moon man still working for NASA. ``We're letting ourselves down and we're letting future generations down, that's what we're doing.''
The other moon men are similarly disenchanted.
``The moon looks farther away now,'' Bean says sadly. ``Then we could look at the moon and ... all this stuff was going on. When I look at the moon now, we're not doing any of those things.''
``I am unhappy and I haven't been happy for 25 years,'' says Apollo 17 moonwalker Schmitt, a former U.S. senator. ``It's just that I continue to see no coherent policy from this administration or any other administration relative to our long-term future in space - it's bipartisan.''
``We don't have a space program today. We've got a series of space events,'' frets Apollo 17's Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, on Dec. 14, 1972. ``We need a goal out there in the future we can all get our arms around.''
To the men who flew to the moon, the future is there and on Mars.
The space agency figures it would cost more than $400 billion to return to the moon and to go to Mars. NASA newcomer Goldin - champion of ``faster, better, cheaper'' - says those expeditions could and should be done for $25 billion to $50 billion maximum. In eight years. Tops.
The few at NASA who are working on such matters, on a shoestring budget or none, contend billions of dollars could be saved by making rocket fuel on Mars, out of Martian resources, rather than lugging it there for the return trip.
What worries them are the non-presence of the more elusive elements needed for outer-space travel, the kinds of things that prodded Apollo like a forceful, visionary president, a Cold War, a threatening race to space.
``Clearly, an expensive and necessarily risky human space program would have to be driven by something more than science, especially because robots could do so well,'' says astronomer Carl Sagan.
Apollo 15 commander David Scott admits that much of what he did on the moon could have been done by a robot, allowing him to do that much more. He's pushing for robotic exploration of the planets, so that when humans finally do get there - in 25 years, 50 years, whenever - they'll be more productive.
``The technology will improve, the cost will get less, the reasons for going will become clearer,'' Sagan says. ``The only question is when will it happen and which nation or nations will go.
``Unless we destroy ourselves, of course we're going to the planets. In that sense, July 20, 1969, was a watershed for the human species.''
by CNB