Moon mission sent our vision skyward

By Carl Heintze

It was 30 years ago in July that man first landed on the moon. I don't know where you were, but fittingly enough I was flying over the Atlantic in a crowded DC-8 on my way home from Europe. The pilot announced the landing on the cabin loudspeaker and we all cheered. And we got home before Neil Armstrong, et al., did at that.

I had some additional reason to remember the moon landing and the space program because during its early days I was a science writer for a newspaper. I didn't cover it all, and I wasn't at Cape Canaveral when it happened, but I did get to see some of the early parts of the moon program.

For instance, I remember when we got our first briefing on the proposed voyage to the moon, the mechanics of orbiting the earth and the moon, of descending in the LEM and returning to earth.

My first thought was it was a jerry-built plan and no one would ever make it. Which shows you the depth of my knowledge. But, of course, we did, or at least a half dozen or so Americans did, thus ending the space race temporarily and showing the rest of the world, but especially the Soviet Union, that we could beat them at their own game.

Getting to the moon was as much a geopolitical event as it was a scientific and technological achievement. The revisionists--and there are always some around to rewrite history--make much of this. But getting to the moon had another and more profound effect.

For about a decade our eyes, minds and efforts were skyward. We looked up and not down. We saw the purity of the air and of space, not the mud and dirt of the earth. While that upward gaze might have been driven by a desire to have the earth our own way, it also lifted many people's spirits out of the ordinary. We got a little closer to God, as it were.

The moon might not be worth much. It's an even deader planet than Mars, Mercury or Venus, but getting there showed us how puny we are and gave us some inkling of how large the universe is.

Since then, depending only on the space shuttle for inspiration, our collective gaze has returned to the earth, and we seem to be preoccupied with such human digressions as Kosovo, Angola, the Sudan and Columbine High School. They show us we are back looking at the mud and dust again and not at the heavens. I don't mean that we ought not to try to settle the conflicts in Northern Ireland or along the borders of Israel. Those troubles make it clear we didn't gain any lasting inspiration from the space race. But we ought not to abandon the attempt to reach outside our puny little planet with its puny little problems for something greater.

We ought to reshape and reinvigorate our look at the heavens. I'm not sure if the much-touted space station is what we ought to be doing. I guess it is a step in the right direction. We have managed some other steps with unmanned craft, the various probes to the outer and inner planets, landings on Mars, the Explorers which have sailed off into eternity across the Milky Way.

We're talking about moon bases and manned trips to Mars to settle once for all if there was ever life there.

My guess is we'll find that we are alone in the solar system, that the earth, at once our joy and our prison, is what we are going to have to be satisfied with for a long time to come. My guess also is that if we can find a way to make our earth habitable and peaceful, we may eventually find ways to transcend it, to get to some other place much like our world.

I don't expect to be around to see that happen, but I'd like to think that my descendants might. Thinking that gives me some sense of immortality, some assurance that we are more than those who live in the mud, blood and mess of earthly warfare, that we have reached out somehow with the moon program to touch the face of God.

Perhaps by striving for a vision of something beyond the everyday we have found a way into eternity; we have become something a little lower than the angels, but a little higher than the rest of life on earth.

It's not too wild a dream to cherish and it's a dream which we may have first glimpsed when Neil Armstrong took one small step for himself and one giant leap for mankind.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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