Some of us are of the age where we can remember July 20, 1969. My family and I were moving to Florida and we stayed up until the wee hours to watch Neil Armstrong land and walk on the moon. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the moment, the question has and does present itself: How would we have felt if the flag planted had been Soviet?
It’s a fair question. Several years earlier, perhaps until the middle of the Gemini program, the Soviets had a fair shot of beating us to the moon. But they didn’t and the world watched in awe as we planted our banner in that powdery soil. Today, both the Russians and Chinese have space programs that have advanced while ours has certainly slowed its pace, if not worse.
But, that’s about to change.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is the most powerful rocket ever built and, not long from 2018, will carry Americans on manned exploration missions to the moon and beyond. Its first flight slated for 2020, this super-heavy-lift launch vehicle built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, among others, will work in two stages and be able to handle a payload of up to 63 tons to the moon and 45 tons to deep space. Recall the monster Saturn V from the Apollo program? It’s larger than that.
This big bird will enable NASA to lift cargo and astronauts to low earth orbit, where it will launch the new Orion Crew and Service Module to the moon, Mars, and the outer planets. After an almost fifty-year hiatus, launching out of where it started, the Cape, we’re going back to space. For a kid from the 60s who grew up in Florida and worshipped the likes of Alan Shepard and Gordon Cooper, that means something.
As a young intelligence analyst in the 80s attached to the Pershing Brigade in Germany, I studied and became proficient on how those missiles flew and, more importantly, how they came down. It is a good thing they were never used in anger. But the look and feel of one, which can be experienced at Air & Space at the Smithsonian, still reminds me of even that small taste of U.S. rocketry. It was a thing to behold.
The 2020 operation, Exploration Mission I, will be unmanned and send the Orion capsule around the moon to deploy thirteen miniaturized satellites known as CubeSats. EM-II in 2022 will be manned. Americans not just in orbit, as two generations have grown accustomed and possibly blasé about, but a nine-day lunar flyby mission for four U.S. astronauts to return where Apollo 8 flew over fifty years from the EM-II launch date. Progressing at about a mission a year, the program will set up the LOP-G (Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway). This lunar base will serve as a communications hub, science lab, short-term dorm, and equipment storage facility. But it also has another use: it is our jumping off point to Mars. The Mars mission, scheduled for launch in hopefully little more than a decade, will run a 300-400-day training and shakedown cruise on the LOP-G before heading off on a proposed two-year mission to orbit the fourth planet. Yes, interplanetary flight, on hold for several decades, is actually slated for a GO. And the GO to the Red Planet, and to the Exploration Missions beforehand, will be powered by the SLS.
It’s also the only system focused on deep space. Others play for next week. SLS plays for the future.
But why go?
As the age-old gripe intones: “Why spend money on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth?” Well, logic reminds us that correlation is not necessarily causation. My Dad put it better. When my mom admonished me, circa 1965, to eat my peas because kids in Africa were starving, he responded, “Tina, if David eats his peas some kid in the Congo doesn’t rub his belly and say yummm.” Thus, starving NASA’s vital programs for funds does not automatically ensure earthbound endeavors will suddenly take a turn for the better, funding or otherwise. However, as the USAF aphorism goes, “No bucks. No Buck Rogers.”
And speaking of this planet, so many of the tools we use in our daily lives and have for decades, like Velcro and the microwave oven, came as a direct result of the space program. How many more consumer items will be household standard a dozen years from now when we set sail for the planets on the shoulders of the SLS? By experience, scores.
But, that is not the main reason we go. It wasn’t the reason Magellan crossed the seas, Conestoga wagons the plains, and Lindbergh the Atlantic.
We drive onward because we know, as a people, the most daring of us have always been pioneers. From the Scots-Irish who broke out of Kentucky to the West, to the tech lords of the Silicon Valley who push the digital envelope, projects like the SLS have challenged our natures to strive and discover what’s over that valley, that ocean, that realm of space.
We go because generations past call to us to raise the fallen standard of our manned space exploration program. Mankind does not progress by standing still. We can excel and surpass our own limits by launching our hopes and dreams far into the cosmos. Dare I say it, where no man has gone before.
As we do and we ponder on how we got there, the SLS will stand as the engine of those dreams and a reminder, what the best in us can achieve.
