Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 17, 1995 TAG: 9507180128
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TIMOTHY FERRIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Fortunately, ``Apollo 13'' is a good movie. Accurate and skillfully made, it testifies to what Al Reinert, the co-author of the screenplay, has long said about the cliff-hanging Apollo 13 mission: The real story is too good to need embellishment. (Reinert grew up in Texas, became enamored of spaceflight early on, and spent more than 10 years making ``For All Mankind,'' an evocative documentary about the Apollo project.)
Still, to consider that many of the young people applauding ``Apollo 13'' did not previously have more than a nebulous notion of what the moon project was all about - and that many who went to see it over the long Fourth of July weekend could not tell you what that holiday celebrates - is to ponder anew the sobering mystery of why we seem to be intent on strip mining our own culture.
And, for all that the film does to celebrate a technological apex in American history, inevitably it leaves those of us old enough to have witnessed the moon landings with a saddening sense of how short a way we have come in space since the days of Apollo. Indeed, it may be that we've slid backward. The space shuttle, the pride today of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, can go no farther into space than the low-Earth orbit in which Apollo parked before hastening on to the moon. We have no missile on line today that comes close to the power of the Saturn V booster that launched Apollo. (The last Saturn V, scrapped by the space agency to make room for the shuttle, is on display in front of the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, where tourists, reasonably enough, mistake it for a mock-up.)
The recent linkup of the shuttle Atlantis and the Mir space station prompts the perhaps churlish reflection that much the same thing was accomplished 20 years ago, when American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts shook hands in orbit after joining an Apollo command module to a Soyuz orbiter.
Nor is the unmanned space program in vastly better shape. In the 1970s, the United States landed two probes on the surface of Mars and dispatched Voyager spacecraft to reconnoiter the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Today we have no active craft at Mars - the last one we sent blew up as it approached the red planet - and a single probe, the crippled Cassini now lumbering toward Saturn with a fouled main antenna, remains our sole ambassador to the outer solar system.
America's decline in space has been ascribed to various causes, among them a reaction against high technology occasioned by the obscene uses to which it was put in the Vietnam War, and the flagging Cold-War symbolism of space once the race to the moon had been won. But I suspect that another reason has to do with our insatiable appetite for entertainment.
It is true, as the Hollywood producers are always reminding us, that we all like to be entertained. But that's also the problem. Entertainment does little to challenge us. (That's where it differs from art.) Its values are the values we bring to it, ticket money in hand, and the last thing an entertainer wants to tell us is that we should expand our horizons and rethink our basic suppositions about the world. A society saturated by entertainment therefore tends to lose sight of what a challenge is. It can even lose sight of the real world where challenges are posed.
NASA in the Apollo days was in the business of overcoming some of the most daunting challenges in the history of exploration. Accordingly, it had trouble providing suitable entertainment, and the final few Apollo missions were canceled mainly because the viewing public had stopped watching them on television. Thereafter, NASA paid more attention to entertainment and to its close cousin, public relations.
Fighting for survival in the post-Apollo age, the space agency made preposterous claims for the space shuttle that it could never fulfill but that NASA officials themselves began to believe. This approach kept Congress amused, but it ran aground when Challenger exploded, after having been launched in violation of the spacecraft operations manual by officials who evidently had taken to heart the agency's ludicrous assertion that the odds against such a disaster were a million to one.
The iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman, who served on the panel that investigated the crash, drew from it the lesson that ``reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.''
It's a lesson we would all do well to take to heart. We are a part of nature, which cannot be fooled. We got where we are today by studying nature and acting with bravery, skill and ingenuity within the framework of nature's laws. This point is made handily throughout ``Apollo 13,'' notably in the sequence where the astronauts fashion a makeshift housing for a carbon dioxide scrubber that saves their lives. We did not get here by dazzling ourselves with shallow-draft illusions proffered by carny barkers who think our national anthem is ``Hey, Rube!''
It's impoverishing to raise a generation that knows the lyrics to a dozen predigested pop songs but cannot identify the call of a loon in the wild, that has seen the same movie 13 times but has never seen a truly velvet-black, starry night sky - and it's also dangerous. The restless and ceaselessly changing natural world has not read the press releases, and when it catches up to us it will do us no good to plead that we're sorry, we didn't notice, we were too busy watching TV.
Timothy Ferris, a professor in the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of ``Coming of Age in the Milky Way'' and other books on space. He wrote this for Newsday.
- L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB