On this day, 49 years ago, man achieved a millennial yearning and set his mortal, unworthy feet on a heavenly body. On July 21, 1969, at 02:56:15 UTC, Neil Armstrong, a corn fed, hayseed Yankee boy from Wapakoneta, Ohio, took his first steps on the moon. Above him, the Soviet unmanned spacecraft, Luna 15, was hurtling towards the lunar ground. One breathless hour later, US President Richard Nixon picked up the receiver and made the most historic phone call ever. He told the boys, Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin: “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man's world’.
For one brief moment, the riven mass of squabbling humanity united in spirit and gave out a collective hurrah. And America descended into a moon-crazy summer. The moon landings were watched by 530 million people worldwide, as history was made before their very eyes. The world hailed them as Homeric heroes. Their odyssey in space was at a time when mankind had boldly gone into the vast steppe spaces of the cosmos. The message of man in the space age was to dream and dare.
The dreaming, and the daring, and the willing have long since diminished. It is the unpalatable truth that space programmes around the world are languishing in. True, we still send satellites into space and occasional probe or rover to Mars. We have even exported private men and capitalism into space. But the space age is truly gone.
The collective ambition, when US President John F. Kennedy bravely said, “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.... We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
That spirit which moved the Americans, Russians, Europeans and Indians to reach for the stars is now largely a figment of memory. Space exploration was at the heart of national governments across the world and heads of government took personal interest in it. It is now a curious department that occasionally does interesting things. Why this degeneration?
The space race began when the Russians punted little Sputnik into the stars in October 1957. Beep… beep… beep… the signal from Sputnik sent waves of wonder and fear across the west. The Americans, leader of the free world, were mortified that an alternate system of government, ‘those godless commies’ had first conquered space. Free men in the land of liberty had to take up the challenge and the leviathan, that is the US government, put in its heart and soul into the mission.
The ‘Sputnik Crisis’, as it was called, spurred the US to overhaul everything from public science funding to education. Money poured in from the federal government coffers for the comprehensive effort and there were no ‘taxpayer alliances’, ‘no conservative anti-government lobby’ trying to stymie the effort.
Within a few months of Sputnik, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA. It began with a budget of $89 million. Eight years later, its budget had ballooned to $5.933 billion dollars. That was 4.41 per cent of the federal government budget. In glaring contrast, by 2017, NASA’s budget had shrunk to $19.5 billion dollars or a mere 0. 47 per cent of the federal government budget.
After Sputnik, there were fears that science education in the US was inferior to that in the USSR and young Americans must be equipped for the space age. The US Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), a four-year programme that poured billions of dollars into the US education system. Over a billion dollars were directed towards improving American science curricula. In classrooms, educational tools began to change. Lab kits and overhead projectors were added, and educational films became part of the curriculum.
The US mass media, too, swung into the act. In a welcome break from showing bands of drug-addled youths traipsing around the country in search of free love, a new sensation appeared on American TV screens. In a faraway corner of the Milky Way, a smartly attired gang of heroes and heroines were exploring space—the final frontier. In September 1966, Star Trek was broadcast for the first time. It showed a multiracial team of heroes working towards fulfilling a united mission and even featured the first interracial kiss. Civil rights had now gone into space.
All of this put together unleashed a cascade of effort on both sides of the iron curtain. Sputnik, Apollo, Mercury, Voshkod, Vostok, Gemini, Skylab, Salyut... it was the saga of spacefaring.
In the year of Apollo 11, India, too, leaped earnestly into the mission by creating the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Space research in the country had begun earlier under the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, but received a big boost by the creation of a dedicated agency.
There is still collective enthusiasm and wide-ranging public support for space in India. But, in rest of the world, it has waned. The Cold War had provided much of the impetus for such big science projects. Like atomic energy, the public effort and taxpayer money were sustained by the Cold War competition. The desire not to be outdone by the other, the desire to better the other provided the propellant for such efforts. With the end of the Cold War, big science ran out of the fuel of national competition. Budgets were mercilessly slashed and vested interests and political infantilism almost froze the space and nuclear energy programmes.
The US government has shut down all NASA rocket development as a result of which the space giant is forced to use Russian or private space taxis. As a New York Times op-ed lamented, “One of the most important attributes of a manned space program is its ability to inspire young people to pursue careers in science…. Killing NASA’s storied manned space program and doing away with a timeline for space travel will snuff out much of inspiration and awe that has come to be associated with NASA’s endeavors.”
The modest space missions are now the norm, even at the European Space Agency. Grand plans for asteroid capture and inter-planetary travel are now effectively shelled as budget cuts have culled all such missions.
David Bowie’s haunting song Space Oddity best captures this mood of gloom in the NASA.
For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do
For the sake of the youth of the world, the US and the west must galvanise their efforts in space exploration. Only then will young men and women across the globe warp their minds into the future.