Apollo 11 anniversary

Today, July 20^th,  is the 44^th anniversary of Neil & Buzz first walking on the moon.

I’ve been following NASA and the U.S. Space Program for as long as I can remember. I still recall some of the grainy video of a few Apollo missions in the early 70s. I don’t remember exactly which missions, but the experience made an impression on me, even as a child.

I vividly recall the Apollo-Soyuz link up, and Skylab in the 1970s.  I remember the Viking missions to Mars in the U.S. Bicentennial year of 1976, and wondering if they’d find any evidence of life.  The Voyager 1 & 2 missions captivated me, and I eagerly awaited each of the “next stops” on their grand tour of the outer planets.  Later, I watched the prototype space shuttle Enterprise being released for glide and landing tests, and finally, the maiden launch of the Columbia in 1981. I was in Florida for the maiden voyage of the Challenger in April, 1983 and still get goose bumps when I think of how that felt from miles away… the physical rumble and sound, the power, majesty, and the visual of the craft emerging from the cloud of smoke, riding atop a column of flame into the heavens.

And, of course, I remember the heartbreak of losing the Challenger and later the Columbia, along with their intrepid crews.

So I’m a big fan of space exploration.

Recently, I watched a series of shows called Mars Rising on The Science Channel about a manned mission to Mars.  It goes into detail about a human mission to Mars, the engineering challenges, the dangers, as well as the psychological and physiological issues the voyagers will face.

Mars Rising video clips

Of course the timetable might shift beyond 2030, but I can’t help thinking that maybe we’ll just be throwing things and people up into the sky with no long-term plan, much like the Apollo moon missions. As awesome as they were, it was a contest in which the public eventually lost interest.

I think we need to seriously rethink this.  We should be planning for Mars, but first I believe we need to establish a permanent presence on the moon. We should pick up where we left off with Apollo 17 in 1972. We can learn how to live on another body, protecting ourselves from cosmic radiation, all the while learning to build and function in that hostile environment. Once we have a reasonable mastery of that, then we begin building a Mars craft in lunar orbit, and eventually make the leap to the red planet.

Perhaps someone is already thinking like this, but I have heard little of it.

I want each of our future steps into the cosmos to be firm and permanent, not like the lost colony of Roanoke Island where we are left scratching our heads and wondering what went wrong…