50 Years. Et Tu, Apollo?

Today is the 50th Anniversary of President Kennedy's speech to Congress in which he first put before the American people the challenge of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely within the decade. A short time later would come perhaps the even more well known speech given at Rice University in Texas.

I've always admired the boldness of the Apollo Moon program and consider it to be the glory days of our nation's efforts in space. What strikes me as I listen to President Kennedy's words is how true they ring today. We again face a time in our history where we face the very real possibility of ceding technological superiority to a number of different countries around the world.

It is almost impossible to quantify the technological, economic, and societal bounties furnished by Apollo I think few would dispute them. Any number of the technologies we take for granted to day are built on the back of early investment in space.  Apollo accomplished its goal both literally of landing a man on the moon but also more figuratively of beating the Russians. It's fair to say that Apollo was what was needed at the time and given the countless benefits was the right thing for the country.

The question kicking around in my head planted by the NYTimes Article, "Looking Back at the Apollo Mission, 50 Years Later", is: was Apollo as executed the best thing for humanity's future in space? True creating a space faring race was never the established goal of Apollo but did Apollo undermine that goal?  Apollo was a program with a very singular goal it can be described in a mere sentence. The marching orders were clear and just about everything we did in space between 1961 and 1969 was focused on that goal, with little (until much later) thought to what lay beyond it.

The Apollo mission was "flags and footprints" through and through. Once that goal had been accomplished then what? A scramble ensued to try and develop reasons to keep flying. The problem is that Americans already had exactly what they'd been promised. Of course Kennedy also died before being given the opportunity to express any vision for our efforts in space beyond Apollo.

What if from the get go Kennedy had made the case that our effort in space must be more than simply a flash in the pan or a game of king of the mountain. What if it had been argued that this was the start of something bigger, a multi-decadal push into the stars, an expansion of the frontier the likes of which humanity had not seen since the closing of the American frontier. And further still that the push into that frontier was absolutely vital to insure our economic and national security interests far into the future. Would Congress and the American people have bought it? Where would we be now? Moon Bases? Sub Orbital transatlantic travel? Mars? Mining Asteroids? United in exploration of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons? Oh course we will never know.

I'll confess it feels a bit wrong somehow to look back on Kennedy and Apollo's bold mission of a moon landing as some how shortsighted. I will always continue to be fascinated by our early space program and Apollo and what it accomplished, my intent here isn't to take anything away from that. Hindsight is always 20/20 certainly. However I think asking such questions, particularly now as we again ponder humanity's future in the larger universe, can prove very useful.

Whatever we do moving forward we must resist the urge to compromise, to lower our sights, and we must have an integrated sustainable approach. Perhaps the ISS can teach us some good lessons here. The ISS allowed us to move beyond simply isolated missions to a decade long sustained human presence on orbit. Whatever we do beyond earth orbit (BEO) must have this as the goal. If we simply make a trip to an asteroid here, a moon landing there, we will have failed. A similar goal of sustained presence (and a continual outward expansion of that presence) must be our benchmark of success for any efforts we undertake BEO moving forward.