Curiosity as Part of a Space Campaign Theme
It’s time for America to make miracles again — with Obama, opinion, Katheleen Kennedy Townsend, Orlando Sentinel
“On Aug. 6, NASA again made history by successfully landing the Curiosity rover on Mars to look for signs of life and pave the way for the first human mission. No other country in the world has done what we have done on Mars. I was almost as excited by that miracle landing as I was in 1969 as an 18-year-old girl, mesmerized by the sight of American footprints on the moon. President Kennedy never lived to see that dream come true. But so many of his miraculous dreams are living reality today.”
Obama on Medicare, space in Florida, Politico
“And while Obama was in the neighborhood of the Kennedy Space Center, he praised NASA for the successful landing of the spacecraft Curiosity on Mars last month. Obama called Curiosity “an incredible achievement that speaks to our sense of wonder and can-do spirit.” He said the landing serves as “an example of what we do when we combine our science, our research, our ability to commercialize new products, making them in America.”
It’s truly refreshing when politicians can communicate the importance of mesmerizing the American public, giving them a sense of wonder, and exemplifying our can-do spirit by talking about space endeavors that go beyond putting flames and smoke under human bodies.
Human space flight is an important component of space exploration, but unfortunately it has largely been cast as its defining activity. It’s more than refreshing. It’s actually somewhat brave of politicians to dare challenge that definition.
Young people seem to be as mesmerized by rovers on Mars as they are by humans in space, which is really great. For some reason however that wasn’t the case in the early days. I have heard so many scientists, engineers, astronauts etc. say that Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon is what got them interested in space. But I can’t remember hearing even one person say that Surveyor really got their attention. Why is that? I remember Surveyor being something that you read about, and saw a few photos. But Neil Armstrong took us there with him which is why people got so excited and inspired.
Somehow the Mars Rovers have been having a similar impact on the current generation as Neil Armstrong did to a previous generation. Perhaps it’s because with today’s technology which includes the Internet, realistic animations, and high resolution photos, the Mars rovers are taking us with them in the same way that Neil Armstrong did, and people are getting excited and inspired.
That’s a good thing because although humans are still needed for space exploration, we won’t be seeing one landing on anything in space anytime soon, so thankfully the rovers are not only exploring other worlds but are also capable of inspiring people here on Earth.
I think your comparison of Surveyor and Apollo isn’t quite right. The reason that Apollo can be considered to have been “inspirational” to a generation is because what Apollo was mostly about was beating the USSR. Not about “exploring” the Moon. Apollo was about power, superiority, and the intense pride that came with it. Asserting those things to a dreaded foe was hugely uplifting. It wasn’t about science. Surveyor had no such storyline behind it. In fact, the USSR has already put Luna 9 on the surface of the Moon before Surveyor.
But you’re right that by taking us along with him, Neil Armstrong was able to relate far better to the public than Surveyor could. I think you’re also right about that being the attraction of the Mars rovers. We could endure the “seven minutes of terror” along with the Curiosity scientists and engineers. In that sense, I think the excitement from space exploration comes from relating to human emotions — fear and joy, rather than being about humans themselves. Future efforts should bear this in mind.
Having lived through the Apollo period as a young and impressionable space geek, just turning a teenager at the time of A11, and having continued on into space flight as a vocation, I disagree with your perspective that it was all about beating the USSR. That might have been one of the prime political reasons the program got kicked off and initially supported, but for young people Apollo was all about the excitement of exploration and adventure, new missions, new places, new vistas, and new goals. One of the goals might have been to beat those Russkiys, but it really was not very significant, especially after 1965. While the Russians might have continued work on N-1 and their lander, and maybe the CIA was aware of it, from the US public perspective, the Soviet missions were over long before the time Apollo was flying. For the peak of the Apollo, Soviet competition was not a consideration (it might have been a consideration of the CIA and some top level NASA leadership but the public was oblivious).
Also, saying Surveyor was a “robot” is a bit of a stretch. Curiosity has significant artificial intelligence and can operate pretty much on its own and it does lots of things. Surveyor had a couple of functions, mainly driven through teleoperation.
That said, the JPL people have done a marvelous job of explaining the Curiosity mission and vehicle and of communicating it appropriately to a large fraction of the public. Every couple of days, two or three times a week, we get an update. Its not that there is not more information out there. You can find a dozen websites to feed you information, but the info that is good for the public to know and is widely distributed comes out sparingly and you find it everywhere.
For a lot of reasons that have been highlighted on NASAWatch and other blogs, NASA’s human space program cannot seem to figure out what to say or how to say it. Its not that they don’t have some good material, or that they don’t have some people capable of producing the kinds of products that are required, but they do themselves harm with too little continuity, too little history, too little rationale, too much stuff all over the place, too many places to go to find the information people might want, too little focus.
For example, it appears over the last few years that NASA decided a process of appeasement through social media was needed and so they started training people to serve as individual social media funnels. A couple people I know now have thousands of Facebook friends and followers. So now I get a dozen email messages a day, and 2-3 dozen Facebook updates and tweets, and everyone offers a new tidbit of info or a picture or something, except they have so flooded the data-networks that I have to admit I look at them less than ever.
You might as well ask, why can an Apple or a Walmart be successful, and the key to that is very deliberate marketing and market strategy. They are not sending me 20 messages a day, every waking hour on the hour. That was what 13 minutes of terror was all about. Its not a matter of spending more money to tell the story more. Its about using their resources more effectively. Before they do that they really need to focus their story-what is it about, what are they trying to do. Where are they going with this. Do they know what they are trying to say?
The recent Voyages report or the speech by Lori Garver are good examples of what not to do. Lots of pretty pictures, lots of directions, lots of ideas, we are going a million miles an hour, spending billions upon billions of dollars, month after month, but getting no place fast. Thats what that speech and that report told me.
It is almost like they are trying to repeat the error of Shuttle. Shuttle was a wonderful technological innovation and capability-when it was introduced in 1981-and it has never been surpassed for the kinds of things it did. But if we are spending those many billions of dollars, mission after mission, year after year, we expect some changes and some improvements that demonstrate we are continuing to pursue technical improvement. Some of the improvements should have been in the form of efficiency. Those never seemed to happen either. One lady, nontechnical, told me, ‘you know with Air Force planes there are A and B and C versions and they put new engines on or new capabilities in, but with Shuttle it never seemed to change. We just kept getting more of the same.
I don’t think ISS is too different at this point. We had a wonderful capability a couple years ago to announce to US taxpayers that at long last our orbiting lab was open for business and to focus people on a tour of its configuration and operation and capabilities, and really kick off something like CASIS in a big way-that was a couple years ago. We are still waiting.
Kind of hard to tell your investors your plan if you do not have one.
Helen I think that you are mixing up two different things – the reason that the U.S. government funded the Moon landing beginning in 1961, and the personal feelings of Americans in July 1969 when the Moon landing occurred.
Yes some of us are showing our age by giving first hand recollections of what it was like, and what the mood was, and what people were talking about when the first Moon landing occurred. Your world I am guessing (since I don’t know your age) is one where people have always walked on the Moon. Our world however was one where nothing like this had ever happened before, and the significance of it was almost overwhelming. The excitement was almost palpable – humans setting foot on another world. You may find this hard to believe but no one seemed to care or think about beating the Soviets. I’m sure some people did, but most people were caught up in fascination watching one of the most amazing moments in human history.
You may have seen clips of Walter Cronkite becoming speechless when the Moon landing occurred, a moment which always embarrassed him, but the fact is that Cronkite, like everyone else was simply overwhelmed. He later said in an interview about that moment, “When that vehicle landed on the moon, I was speechless. Everybody there was up-cast. We were looking toward the stars, looking toward the moon.”
Cronkite’s reaction was a reflection of seemingly everyone. And you don’t have to accept our recollections,you can see this reflected in newspaper headlines and articles at the time as well as interviews made at the time of ordinary people and what they thought about the Moon landing.
In fact the great thing about the Moon landing was that it transcended the United States. People around the world saw it as a human achievement. Apparently one of the things that impressed Armstrong and Aldrin when they went on their world tour after the landing, is that people in other countries would come up to them and say “We did it!”. Not “You did it!” or, “The U.S. did it”, but “We did it!”
Even U.S. newspaper headlines reflected this sentiment. Nearly every headline that I could find (listed below) refer to variations of “Men on the Moon”. I only found one headline that even mentioned the words U.S. or Astronaut.
Take a look at the New York Times coverage of the Moon landing and try and find any mention of the Soviet Union in any of the articles. Maybe there’s one buried there somewhere but I couldn’t find it.
I agree with everything you’ve written, except what it ultimately means. The subtext in all of this isn’t that we now can understand the Moon, or even that it was a hugely dramatic and fabulous accomplishment. The bottom line was that WE ARE REALLY GOOD. That’s the foundation on which all of these newspaper headlines are based. That’s the ultimate source of excitement for the general public.
Please understand that I am in no way trying to belittle this incredible accomplishment. But the incredibleness about it is what it means about us, and not what it means about the Moon. To the extent it inspired anything, it inspired people to reach out to build on how incredible we are in technology and engineering. It DID NOT inspire development of the Moon, nor even greatly expanded exploration of the Moon. The Moon was left behind.
Yes, the WE ARE REALLY GOOD could be interpreted culturally, as well as nationalistically. But to U.S. citizens it felt like the latter.
JFK understood this. He didn’t seek to explore the Moon. Actually, it’s well understood that he didn’t care squat about the Moon. What he was seeking was something to give our nation confidence in itself, an expression of exceptionalism, and he and his successors succeeded dramatically.
The trouble with human space flight these days is that it is getting dragged down into what is known as the “exploration myth”. That noble myth largely began with our quest to put people on the Moon, and we’re still trying to live up to it. We don’t know how. We’re still trying to articulate exactly what exploration means, and we still have never quite succeeded in doing so. But what’s important in all this isn’t putting ones foot on one rock or another, but proving to ourselves how good we are. Don’t confuse those tasks. Curiosity proved, with a drum roll and a cheer, how REALLY GOOD we are, and it did this by going to a place we had already gone before …
Curiosity means to me that we have the capablity. Now we just need the reason and the PLAN
Using space to protect earth/us hummm??
robots and humans working together.
Commercial working hand and hand with NASA R and D
cutting SLS
using cots dragon trunk program to load the tool box.
using robots to build that moon outpost to be manned later.
Joe Q
future Tick Pilot
What can we do to help????
Some 4th graders saved a fresh water shrimp on spaceship earth.
Any news on Spacex first hopper test???
I still wonder why everybody references only JFK when debating this subject. Two speeches and a couple of funding debates with Congress were pretty much his entire contribution, aside from making the original proposal, which, in fact, wasn’t entirely his idea. He asked a select group of people one day, (paraphrasing) what can we do to show our superiority over the Soviets? The Moon idea evolved out of the discussion that followed.
Once the decision was made and announced, it was LBJ, both before and after Kennedy’s death, who made Apollo happen. Kennedy died in November 1963, a year and a half before the first Gemini manned flight and long before Apollo kicked in. It was Johnson who asked his friend James Webb to take on the NASA Administrator job (and had to talk him into it). It was Johnson who fought for the funding for Apollo (until he got more hooked on social programs). And it was Johnson (and McNamara) who continued to keep the US in Viet Nam long after it was clearly a no-win situation pointlessly costing much money and many lives, which both cut into Apollo funding and perpetuated unrest across the country.
The latter 1960’s were a terrible time in social terms in the US, and the country was building up to an explosion. Apollo was the one thing that was contrary to all of the bad things in the news and in the streets. A story I’ve always loved is about a woman who sent a telegram to NASA for the Apollo 8 astronauts, just after their “reading” from space and the transmission of the Earthrise photograph. In it she said simply, “you saved 1968.” That is what Apollo meant to the people. You can add any words you like, but in the middle of any sentence about the why of Apollo is the word pride.
One of the unusual things at the 1968 Democratic Convention was a chant that went up at one point, “The whole world’s watching,” repeated over and over. An overstatement, obviously. But on July 20, 1969, the whole world was watching. That day, and for a little while afterward, the people of the world were united in a way never approached before or since. That, too, is what Apollo meant to people. All of the politics and space-racing and rationalizing were there, too, but they were ultimately minor factors by comparison. Apollo was about people feeling proud.
Steve
Humans set foot on another body.
The dream lolol
man kind felt good!
keep laughing at the feel good point.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone of you gets it.
Just another magget on this rock lolol
how long will we last lolololol
From deeper in the thread…
“That still doesn’t explain why when the Moon landing took place, people weren’t jumping up and down shouting “We won the space race, we won the space race” or “We beat the Russians”. I believe that the reason is because people understood that it was much bigger than that.”
Okay. Now try to imagine N1 had worked, and Saturn V blew up on the pad and delayed the program three years, and the Russians were the first to land on the moon. Do you see it inspiring the same reaction in the people you think “understood it was much bigger than that”?
Look at it another way, when the US capability in space exceeded theirs, the Russians pretended they had had no lunar ambition, focusing on space stations in low Earth orbit.
So the US got to the moon essentially unchallenged. Got to say, “We came for all mankind” and be all magnanimous. Then what did they do? What was the very next program?
More missions to more places on the moon, Apollo mkII? No. Lunar bases for scientific expeditions? No. Pressurised lunar rovers (already being designed by Boeing, I think)? No. ON TO MARS!? Hell no. So what was it?
Skylab. A space station in low Earth orbit.
[Edit: I should say, I do think people transcended the program. And I think that’s what people remember. You know how when you dig into history, heroic figures are often deeply flawed? Apollo is one of those heroes.]
Excellent hypothetical. However I think a big factor in that scenario is that there was virtually no openness in the Soviet space program back then, so it would be very difficult for people outside of Russia to really follow along with the progress. Assuming like previous successes the Soviets only reported it after the fact, then people around the world would not have been able to watch it live on TV, and would have instead woken up to the news which would basically be the Soviet announcement and photos provided by Pravda.
If hypothetically the Soviets were as open as the U.S. had been, and virtually every step of their Moon landing program could be followed along, and the cosmonauts were identified ahead of time and gave interviews so that we could get to know them, and people around the world could watch on live TV the launch of the N1, as well as live transmissions from space as the cosmonauts journeyed to the Moon, and listened in as they landed, and watched on live TV as Alexei Leonov stepped onto the surface, then I would hope that people would have been just as awed and inspired by the moment.
In reality the Soviets almost certainly would not have been open about it, and due to nervousness and suspicion about Soviet intentions exacerbated by their secrecy, enthusiasm probably would have been dampened somewhat as it had been with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s flight which the outside world also only found out about after the fact via Soviet announcement.
Although – the infamous Huntsville Times front page for April 12th, 1961 had the headline “Man Enters Space” which sounds very similar to the headlines eight years later for the first Moon landing, if that is any indication.
It’s frustrating that it even pops up from the Obama side as the presidential budge was going to cut $300m from planetary exploration. How painfully hypocritical…
The Obama administration has at least maintained the total NASA budget at essentially the same level. If the Administration had its choice, the Mars budget would not have been cut. Congress has forced the issue.
The NASA budget has declined about $1billion since 2010.
Who thinks it’s the same nation? Our nation now is substantially poorer than it was in the 1960s, and far less able to appropriate the funds that would be necessary to achieve what we did then. Our nation is also not credibly threatened by a technologically sophisticated international power anymore.
Sorry, but you don’t get to the Moon by waving flags, brandishing the Constitution, and singing patriotic songs.
In retrospect, it never was a technological threat. The weapons gap didn’t exist when Kennedy made his speech.
I also don’t think exploration is purely about cost. We can sink many billions more into other projects with less benefit, when it suits us (*cough*Stealth fighters*cough*).
The problem is who gets driven by what.
The youth is driven by the promise of adventure.
Politicians are driven by votes. It was the threat of lost faith in the US government, and lost votes, that drove Apollo. It was the threat of lost votes that canned it. Its the fear of having a second rate military that drives them to buy fighters.
Curiosity will bring the votes in an era where no one is exploring.
Robots work until other nations start pushing men beyond orbit, then all political hell is going to break loose.
Whether it translates into a new space race remains to be seen.
The missle gap was a well crafted delusion (largely crafted by JFK, and his election campaign was based fundamentally on it) that, it is true, was beginning to be disproved a year before Kennedy’s Rice speech. But the gap was very much still in the public consciousness at the time. Gap or no gap, the USSR was, at the time of that speech, considered to be a very serious threat to national security. Kruschev never clarified until 1963 that his “We will bury you” line referred to shovels, rather than missles.
I wish I had as much free time to pontificate as some of the folks on this site.
Possibly.
The point is what politicians want and what we want are two different things. We want results, they want job security.
What’s lacking is a way to tie those two things together.
Ah, touched a nerve, eh? Your age and history have little relevance here.
I have some deep professional insights into this matter as well, though your experience could well be different than mine.
My perception is that exploration and discovery were the “for show” reasons for Apollo. Although beating the USSR was the real reason we did it (c’mon, no argument possible there), we needed a noble excuse for beating the crap out of a feared geopolitical opponent. We aren’t a nation that raises the flag and salutes beating the crap out of anyone. “Exploration” was a noble exercise that fit the bill.
So if you take a step back, the “pride” you refer to wasn’t really about peering under lunar rocks (which was a fundamentally boring thing for anyone watching the EVAs), but about asserting technological superiority. The way you assert that is by showing that you’re better than someone else. That’s exactly what we did.
That’s why the many people you know who were inspired by Apollo didn’t end up with careers that involved kicking lunar regolith around. They went on to jobs that NASA, frankly, would not consider to be exploration or even discovery, and our nation is still blessed that they did. They went on to do jobs that contributed to our technological superiority. That’s what they were inspired to do.
I understand what you’re saying. I just think you’re misreading the situation.
Found this jewel in our little country branch library.
Good text book for your on line space policy course Mr. C
It is filled with lots of history and referances to help a non space guy like me.
See I’m Arming Mr. C lolol
Spaceguard may need to go on Alert 🙂
A 4th grade teacher was teaching her class about species extinction.
A boy raised his hand and asked the question
WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP?
The teacher had no answer. So see decided to have the kids find a fresh species in trouble and help.
They chose a fresh water shrimp in a water shed near by that was in trouble because the streams it lived in was being farmed.
They contacted the farmers and started planting willow trees on the banks of the streams.
Today 15 years later the shrimp still thrives and the farmers lose less soil to erosion and there are triple the number of birds that live there.
Using Space to protect Earth
WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP???
Launch time: TBDLaunch site: SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FloridaThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the third Dragon spacecraft, called Dragon C3, on the first operational cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station. The flight is being conducted under the Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. Delayed from Aug. 9 and Sept. 24. [July 18]
When should Spacex launch next flight???
and what are reasons for TBD???
ADD
before october 15th
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id…
http://spaceflightnow.com/n…
“and NOT A F***ING ONE OF THEM thought it was about beating the Russians to the Moon. NOT A ONE. NOT EVEN PARTIALLY.”
Yeah, absolutely. After all, if it had been about beating the Russians everyone at the time would have called it the “Space Race”, instead of… oh wait…
That still doesn’t explain why when the Moon landing took place, people weren’t jumping up and down shouting “We won the space race, we won the space race” or “We beat the Russians”. I believe that the reason is because people understood that it was much bigger than that.
Yeah. All they got out of Neil Armstrong’s steps on the Moon was a driving desire to be a national leader, and make our nation proud. Yawn.
Guess who paid for your job. Politicians. And why do you think they paid for Apollo? What Apollo workers thought does not realy matters to them.
Agreed. Robots should always be thought of as the advance team.