Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (44 page)

 

Page 242
"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what
you
can do for your country," John Kennedy had said in his first inaugural address. According to this ideal, each citizen was individually responsible for doing what
he or she
could to make society better,
not
the government. Consider how the 1960's American space program operated: NASA was run so much from the bottom that the presence and influence of Washington is practically invisible. The hard scheduling and engineering decisions were instead worked out by the ordinary lower-echelon workers thinking independently in the field. Not surprising then that the last person to find out about the prospect of sending Apollo 8 to the moon was NASA's administrator, the man who was supposedly in charge at the top. James Webb might have been responsible for making the final and essentially political decision, but unlike his Soviet counterpart he interfered little with design and engineering problems.
NASA, however, was a
government program
, and its success helped prove not only to the demonstrators that Borman faced, but to an entire generation how it was possible to use government to solve society's ills. "As revolutionary visions faded, many became crisp professional lobbyists: environmentalist, feminist, antiwar," wrote Gitlin of the aftermath of the 1960's. "Most were willing to think of themselves as unabashed reformers, availing themselves of whatever room they found for lobbying, running for office, creating local, statewide and regional organizations."
26
While Americans had often used local government to achieve their ends, and while the first half of the twentieth century had seen continuous growth in the use of the federal government to wield change, the 1960's saw a burst of federal activism that was possibly the largest in the country's history.
27
The success of the space program, though certainly not the sole cause, surely helped weaken resistance to centralizing American political power around the national government.
Nowhere was this process more obvious than in the environmental movement. As nature photographer Galen Rowell said in 1995, Bill Anders' photograph of an earthrise over a barren lunar surface was "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken."
28
Every edition of
The Whole Earth Catalog
displayed this picture on its inside cover, describing it as

 

Page 243
The famous Apollo 8 picture of earthrise over the moon that established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness (dry moon, barren space) and began to bend human consciousness.
29
Even the S.D.S., which had never shown any interest in technological matters except to condemn companies like General Electric and the Rand Corporation for doing research for the Defense Department, became suddenly aware of environmental issues soon after Apollo.
30
Nor were political movements alone in discovering a new awareness of our home world. As Carl Sagan wrote in 1975, "It is impossible to look at such pictures without acquiring a new perspective on our world."
31
Humanity had seen the earth for the first time as a
planet
, the globe's blue seas and swirls of white clouds giving it a colorful beauty and exuberance seen nowhere else. And as the only place in the universe known to sustain life, this "fragile Christmas tree ornament" beckoned to both the astronauts and to the population at large as a safe haven, a place that must be protected from harm at any cost.
Almost every astronaut to go to the moon after Apollo 8 said that the earth appeared delicate and fragile. Borman, Lovell, and Anders, however, said it first, and they said it when the greatest number of people was listening. Their words, and the images their took, shook society as much as Khrushchev's words and actions had in the 1950's.
Combined with an increased social desire to use government for moral ends, the images brought back from Apollo motivated environmental activism as never before. Though the movement had existed long before Apollo 8, environmental policy until this time had rarely used the federal government to enforce regulation. The National Park Service was created, and certain scenic areas of the United States were set aside for posterity, but national environmental legislation was uncommon and limited in scope.
Within two years of this first lunar voyage, however, the country celebrated its first Earth Day, and Congress passed both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act, establishing the E.P.A. and beginning a nationwide drive to make environmentalism a moral goal, along with a sudden, almost instantaneous skyrocketing of federal environmental laws.
32

 

Page 244
The irony of this profusion of legislation is how little such an approach differed from that of Nikita Khrushchev's. As he believed, "Centralization was the best and most efficient system . . . [Everything] had to be worked out at the top and supervised from above."
33
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Apollo 8's effect on American society had other short-term consequences as well. "It certainly would not be a very inviting place to live and work," Borman had said while in orbit around the moon. For most of the twentieth century, people had dreamed not only of exploring the moon, but of bringing humanity to it to live. Now the first humans to see the moon up close found it too inhospitable for their taste.
Less than four months before the Apollo 8 mission, the National Academy of Sciences urged NASA to eliminate almost all manned exploration and replace it with unmanned missions. "The ability to carry out scientific observations at a distance is developing so rapidly that I don't see any unique role for man in planetary exploration," noted Gordon MacDonald, chairman of the academy panel that issued the recommendation.
34
While few paid much attention to this recommendation before Apollo 8, afterward the calls to adopt it were many and insistent. For the first time since the nation was founded, respected and powerful voices were saying that sending explorers to open up vast new territories, to take daring and courageous chances for the sake of human advancement, was not in the interests of the United States.
And people listened. It was as if this nation of pioneers had become terrified by what had been shown during those televised broadcasts from the moon, and its citizens no longer wished to accept the challenge of bringing life to a barren world like the moon. Interest in space exploration waned and the space program wound down. When Jim Lovell flew on Apollo 13 sixteen months later, no television network was much interested in covering the mission, until something went wrong. By the late 1970's, the United States essentially had no operating space program, flying no manned missions from 1975 through 1981. In fact, in 1979 NASA launched only three satellites, two small short-term atmospheric research probes and one astronomical X-ray telescope.

 

Page 245
Even today, our plans for the human exploration of space are entirely limited to earth orbit. The idea of sending humans to another planet seems hard to fathom. After taking that brave leap to another world thirty years ago, we have become strangely fearful, and are once again hugging the coasts of earth, unwilling to brave the "oceans" that surround us in order to visit the planetary "islands" that exist nearby.
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The vision of the earth given to us by Apollo 8, "a grand oasis in the big vastness of space," did more than merely energize the environmental movement: it encouraged the concept of a single human culture. Before Apollo 8, the earth had always been seen as that far horizon line, a flattened curve beyond which lay alien cultures and foreign lands. Each culture competed, sometimes peaceably, sometimes not, to exert its influence on human history.
After Apollo 8, however, the human vision of our mother planet changed. The image of a "bright, blue marble" in the starkness of the void was far more compelling than anyone had dreamed. The day after the astronauts read from Genesis, the
New York Times
printed a short commentary by poet Archibald MacLeish, in which he gave his interpretation of the Apollo mission.
To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold brothers who know now they are truly brothers.
35
Now the earth was no longer seen as land over which nations could claim control. While borders might exist in the differences and diversity of human culture, the planet itself was one.
Frank Borman's own words over the next few months illustrate this change. A man who had spent his life defending the American idea of freedom could not help but espouse the idea of world peace and cooperation in his

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