This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Artemis

Doing Something Again For The First Time

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 16, 2022
Filed under , ,
Doing Something Again For The First Time
Apollo 11

Keith’s note: I was just booked to do an interview on BBC radio about Artemis 1 for their morning show. Their 2021 audience reach was 489 million. Maybe someone will hear me.

My in-going take: “NASA has spent billions more than it had planned to spend on a rocket that is years behind schedule. But now it is ready. If it works – and it should – then the path back to the Moon will be a little clearer. But the first landing will now be made using a SpaceX starship – not a NASA lander. So SLS may be ready for use just as it is becoming obsolete. Still people on the Moon is cool since more than half of the people on Earth have never seen other people do this.”

The producer replied “Enlightening response thank you and yes I’m already imagining the excitement of young people witnessing people on the moon on their computers / mobile phones.”

Which got me thinking about something I posted in 2017 and revised in 2019:

Doing Something Again For The First Time

From 2019: “I first published this two years ago. Yesterday both Jim Bridenstine and Elon Musk noted that they were not alive when humans walked on the Moon – so they do not have memories of that event. Alas, so much of how NASA has conveyed the importance of Artemis – and the way that the media describes it – seems to harken back to events that my fellow Baby Boomers and I resonate with. What is often neglected – and is therefore needed – as Bridenstine noted, is an effort to create new memories for a whole new generation for whom seeing people walking on the Moon is a novelty. Bridenstine and Musk also spoke in global terms with regard to the value and impact of seeing humans walk on another world- so I have added some global figures as well.”

Keith’s original 28 November 2017 note (update): There is a lot of talk these days about yet another pivot in America’s civilian space policy. This time it is “back” to the Moon. Mars is not off the agenda – but it is not moving forward either. Personally I think we have unfinished business on the Moon and that creating a vibrant cis-lunar space infrastructure is the best way to enable humans to go to many places in the solar system – including Mars. Regardless of your stance on this issue, a common refrain about going back to the Moon – starting with President Obama is that “We’ve been there before”.

Humans first reached the South Pole by an overland route in 1911/1912. While we visited the pole by plane in the intervening years, no one traversed Antarctica’s surface again until 1958. 46 years between Antarctic polar traverses. Why did we go back to do something – again – in a similar way – to a place “we’ve been [to] before” after 46 years? Because there was still something of interest there – something we’d only had a fleeting exposure to – and we had developed new ways to traverse polar environments. James Cameron revisited the Challenger Deep in 2012 – after a human absence of 52 years. Why? See above. It is understandable that explorers seek to explore new places and not redo what has been done before. There is only so much funding and there are still so many places yet to be explored. But it is also not uncommon for explorers to revisit old, previously visited locations with new tools – and new mindsets.

Look at the stunning imagery Juno is sending back of Jupiter. Compare that to what we got from Galileo – and Voyager – and Pioneer. Why send yet another mission to the same destination unless, well, you have better tools – tools that enable the pursuit of ever greater exploration goals.

I was 15 when humans first walked on the Moon. The generations who have followed mine have never seen humans land and walk on the Moon. Indeed a lot of them seem to think it never happened. But American space policy is made by Baby Boomers (and older) population cohorts so we just operate on our own biases i.e. been there, done that.

Take a look at the chart below (Source: CIA based on UN data). More than half of the Americans alive today never saw humans walk on the Moon – as it happened – including Administrator of NASA, the head of SpaceX, and the entire 2013 and 2017 NASA astronaut classes. If you look at the global chart (Source: CIA based on UN data) you will see that perhaps 2/3 of humanity was not alive. If/when we go back to the Moon in the next 5-10 years the number of people with no personal memory of humans walking on another world will increase at a rate of 15,000 an hour. For them these future Moon landings will be THEIR FIRST MOON LANDINGS. That’s billions of people waiting to see what I saw in 1969. Has anyone stopped to think of what the impact of this will be? We need to be thinking of this not in terms of Baby Boomer nostalgia but rather as a new adventure for billions.

Just sayin’

https://media2.spaceref.com/news/2017/united-states-population-py.jpg
https://media2.spaceref.com/news/2019/XX_popgraph_2018.jpg

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

4 responses to “Doing Something Again For The First Time”

  1. robert_law says:
    0
    0

    SLS is not obsolete

  2. Leonard McCoy says:
    0
    0

    and look, if the US doesn’t get their act together and get back to the moon – quickly, China will surely beat us back. And who wants them staking out claims for all the resources on the moon and excluding other nations. Think this is hysteria, well just look at some of their hysteria when some congress people from the US visited Taiwan. Treaties, you say – at this point national interests will likely make these moot.

Leave a Reply