Apollo 11 is still an incredible achievement

I stayed up too late last night watching the History Channel's docudrama on the Apollo 11 moon landing, "Moonshot." The show was less than riveting and, I thought, focused too much on the personal lives and character flaws of the astronauts, but it gave an interesting review of the lunar landing 40 years ago this week. (A good history of the manned space program is Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff.")

I stayed up late 40 years ago, too. I sat with my family to watch the blurry, fuzzy, black-and-white (my parents would not buy a color TV for another five years or so) images. I used a film camera to take a picture of the TV screen as Neil Armstrong stood on the moon. The enormity of the event — humans setting foot on another world; humans looking back on Earth from 240,000 miles away — was difficult to grasp. The world was in awe of the transcending engineering achievement.

I had grown up in what was dubbed the "Space Age." My schoolmates and I sat in an auditorium (there was only one television in the entire school) and watched rocket launches. The Mercury flights dominated the news. I was disappointed when, as the manned flights grew in length from minutes to several hours, the television networks halted their nonstop coverage, returning to afternoon soap operas while an astronaut was still orbiting the Earth.

The moon landing was the culmination of that era. President Kennedy made the outlandish promise to land men on the moon and return them to Earth by the end of the decade. That gave NASA barely eight years to pull off the greatest feat in the history of human travel. It is still incredible that America was able to achieve it. Traveling to the moon and back required giant leaps in rocketry, computers, space suits, orbital rendezvous and basic engineering. It boggles the mind to realize that America was able to do it.

That magnificent achievement 40 years ago engendered a new expression, "A nation that can put a man on the moon should be able to ... (fill in the blank)." The Apollo program succeeded because of a determined commitment to achieve a clear goal. Apollo didn't have to waste time coming up with a mission statement; its mission was to go to the moon and back before the end of 1969; no further statement was needed. Another amazing point is that the Apollo program, for all its vast commitment of national treasure, cost less over its lifetime (adjusted for inflation), about $150 billion, than a year of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This 40th anniversary has brought out the expected challenges to go back to the moon or go to Mars. There was a time when, still thrilled by the rocketry of the early 1960s, I would have agreed with those advocates of space travel. Today, I'm not so sure. NASA is clearly floundering and needs a new goal, but going back to the moon would produce few benefits, and going to Mars is a far greater challenge than going to the moon was when President Kennedy made that commitment in 1961. The primary reason for space exploration is simply that — exploration, the human desire to see what's not been seen, to go where no one has gone. I don't know that that's a good enough reason today, given the fiscal restraints Americans face.

Still, this anniversary brings back a bit of the thrill from the 1960s, an era of magnificent accomplishments in science and engineering.