The 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing

I like ingenuity. I like the infinite range of human potential. I like when an impossibility becomes a reality. I like when a person’s ingenuity, or even just a silly idea, sparks a community of ingenuity. I like when human potential rises to an exponential rate because people work together. I like when the impossible is realized. I think I already said that.

Everything builds a future for something else. I’m stating that like it’s an absolute. It might be. And, of course, it can be a good future or a bad future. It can also be a mediocre future, but I’m going to leave the bad and mediocre to another time. For now, I want to celebrate the good things that humans have done that get me excited. I want to celebrate the things that inspire and thrill me. Space stuff and Moon stuff are two of those things.

It’s hard to pinpoint the one exact thing that excites me about space and moon stuff. Because it’s not one exact thing. It’s not really Neil Armstrong jumping down that last ladder rung to the surface of the moon and saying, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” that gets me excited. That’s part of it, don’t get me wrong. But it’s everything all together. The Russian Space Program. The formation of NASA. The Space Race. The selection of the first astronauts (and cosmonauts) and the almost insane elite-level competitive nature of fighter pilots. 

It’s the Russian Chief Designer, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, whose name nobody outside the program knew until rather recently (for security reasons maybe or just the general political paranoia of the time) and who inspired and motivated and fueled and designed the success of the Soviet Program. It’s that Yuri Gagarin (first human in space) and Alexei Leonov (first human to perform a spacewalk) considered Korolev as both a father figure and a friend. It’s the idea that maybe without JFK’s death we might not have gone to the moon in 1969. If he’d lived, we might have gone later, jointly with the Russians, or maybe not at all. It’s the idea that if Korolev hadn’t died in 1966, the Soviets might have beaten the U.S. to the moon altogether.

It’s the beautiful power of a competition that drives innovation (even if, in this case, it was built on paranoia, propaganda, political machinations, and the fear of someone else having Complete Control of Space!). It’s the story of astronaut Gus Grissom giving Frank Sinatra his flight jacket during a performance and Frank Sinatra accepting it with tears. It’s the fact that spacesuits were sewn by hand. Computers had to be shrunken from room size to suitcase size to fit in a spacecraft. Spacecraft rendezvous had never been done in space before. 

It’s that at the time JFK made his statement that we chose to go to the moon not because it was easy but because it was hard (my summary of his words to fit the verb tense here) it was impossible for us to go to the moon. It’s all the things that went wrong that were fixed on the fly. It’s the things that went wrong like the deaths of Grissom, White, and Chafee in the Apollo 1 fire that made NASA and all its contractors reevaluate the way everything was made. It’s everything all together and all the individual stories that make up the whole. All of that fires me up.

So, to celebrate, I (with the help of my mom, my dad, and my older sister) throw a 50^th Anniversary Moon Landing Party. It’s a relatively small affair, but a very fun one.

There would be no 50^th Year Anniversary of the Moon Landing if millions of other things hadn’t happened first. This may seem like a Captain Obvious statement, and I might be repeating myself again, but think about it. Really think about it, about the impact of a body of work, of the impact a single human (even if their name is never known) has in the history of something that becomes an Event. I like to think about that shotgun effect even for the things we don’t see as Events with a capital E, but that’s also something for another conversation. For now, I’ll say, every realized impossibility is fueled by all the successes and failures that came before it. For the moon landing, for example, all the things listed in the above paragraph plus many, many, many more.

Astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year on the International Space Station, said it this way in his book Endurance, “I’ve learned that an achievement that seems to have been accomplished by one person probably has hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people’s minds and work behind it, and I’ve learned that it’s a privilege to be the embodiment of that work.” (page 346.)  

It’s said that the Apollo Missions happened because of the combined efforts of over 410,000 people.

For the success of the Apollo 11 mission, we could go back forever, we could credit even more thousands of people for the work. For it all builds and builds upon itself. We could go as far back as the moment when Galileo used a spyglass turned telescope and discovered the moon wasn’t smooth. Or back to the myth of Icarus and his ill-fated flight toward the sun. Back to the moment when the first human first saw the moon. Or the sun. Or the bright shine of the planets. But we’ll start a little closer in time than that just for some perspective.

In 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first powered airplane. That flight lasted 12 seconds and the plane soared a whopping 20 feet above the ground.

In 1926, Robert H. Goddard, credited with both the creation and building of it, successfully launched his liquid-fueled rocket. The first of its kind. A gamechanger for many things both military and space exploratory.

In 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh successfully flew across the Atlantic Ocean, solo and nonstop, in an airplane that had come lightyears in design from the Wright brothers’ machine. His flight time was 33 and a half hours and 17.8 seconds longer than Orville’s flight only 24 years earlier. More than once, to avoid some annoying fog, he reached an altitude of 10,000 feet. That’s pretty high especially when compared to Wright’s 20 feet and the fact that most of Lindbergh’s flying was done over the unforgiving and easy-to-get-lost-in expanse of the ocean. Many pilots had been lost there, in fact.

30 years after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, on October 4, 1957, the Russians successfully launched Sputnik, the first humanmade satellite. An accomplishment which freaked out the Americans to no end. Sputnik beeped its way around Earth for three weeks before its transmitter batteries died and then it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere after a total of three months of orbital travel. The U.S., still freaked out and hating to be in second place, sent Explorer 1 up into orbit 27 days after Sputnik blazed to reentry glory and dust. The Space Race was definitely on. The U.S. was very far behind.

4 years after that first Soviet milestone, the Soviets said, more or less, “Shoot, we’ll do better than that.” And they sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth on April 12, 1961. The first human in space. On that day, Gagarin reached speeds of over 17,000 miles per hour. Reached heights of 1,071,840 feet (203 miles above sea level). And stayed aloft for 108 minutes. This also really freaked out the Americans. And upset Alan Shepard who would have loved to have been first. He blamed over caution on NASA and the U.S. government’s part as making him the first American and second human in space instead.

Then, by merit of an incredible amount of work, some luck, and a lot of other factors, political and otherwise, including Korolev and JFK’s deaths, the United States successfully put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969.

In a mere 66 years, humans went from flying 20 feet above the Earth to flying out of its orbit and landing on a satellite 240,000 miles away. In a spacecraft that had rocket power, astounding computer power (for the time), and controls for a pilot to fly it by hand at certain points in time, if and as necessary.

That’s pretty amazing. It just goes to show what can happen when people work together. It just goes to show what happens when we use accumulated knowledge to get us somewhere cool. It doesn’t have to be outer space, but it could be. At the time that JFK made his statement that we’d get people to the moon and back, no one knew how to do it. No one knew if it could actually be done. There was orbital mechanics to factor, there were rockets to build, astronauts to train (could a human even live for weeks at zero-gravity?), computers to miniaturize, software and hardware to create that had never been needed before and that had never even been thought of as being needed before, and oh, so much more. But incremental growth (which includes all the failures that happened along the way as well) can lead to seemingly impossible successes. From the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk to NASA’s Apollo 11. From 20 feet above the ground to the moon and back again.

I had a party to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of the Moon Landing and it was a blast. 

Of course, I couldn’t have done it without the combined efforts of my sister who helped me make decorations (among other things), my mom who let me use her house, bought a moon cake, and rubber duck astronauts (among other things), my dad who helped us decorate and listened to my infinite supply of moon and space related facts (among other things), and those who came to celebrate with me something magnificent and impossible that happened half a century before.

Because why not celebrate the achievements? Why not use that phrase that quickly became a cliché in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we…. ?” to see what else we can do? And maybe even do it with greater impact for all.

The moon landing was pretty special. But we let it stop there. Not to say we haven’t done super cool things on the ISS or with the shuttle missions because we have. But we can also be better. We can also be greater. We can also work together a little more than we do. We can create without destroying each other. We can repair what’s broken. We can listen. We can dream. We can imagine. We can build things beyond our wildest dreams. Whether it’s in space or not. For even if we send a crewed mission back to the moon or further on to Mars, we can still do great things on Earth. It doesn’t have to be either/or. We can do all things and anything if we decide to, set our minds and hands to the task, and if we work together for it.

I get fired up about potentiality. I get inspired by possibility. I get thrilled by impossibility.

For me, one of the most beautiful things about space and moon stuff can be summed up by another quote from Endurance by Scott Kelly. He said, “What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge?” (page 26.)

What is that worth? There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of the U.S. and Russia working together was an impossibility. Space exploration helped make that possible. What can we do to surpass that?

Maybe, just maybe, our generation, or even the next one, will inspire someone else to celebrate, 50 years after it has happened, the realization of something that was impossible. We went to the moon in peace for all humankind. But we don’t have to stop there. Let’s use what we learned, let’s use what we have, what we can dream up, and do something even more impossible than that.

In any event, no matter what else the future holds, in space or out of space, keep your calendars free for July 20, 2069. Now that I know how much fun a Moon Landing party is, I’ll invite you to the 100^th Anniversary celebration! I’ll invite everyone. We should celebrate the impossible.