The Southern Male Democrat

In 66 years mankind went from learning to fly to landing on the moon. The achievement is nothing short of extraordinary. The Apollo program has always fascinated me and this time of year always finds me glued to the latest crop of documentaries about our voyage to the moon.

American know-how devised not only a rocket ship to get to the moon - but a lunar lander which could undock, fly in the void of space, land on the surface of the moon and return to the mother ship. The footage is mesmerizing. We see the Eagle undock from Columbia and get smaller and smaller descending to the surface of an alien land. We hear the transmissions as Neil Armstrong counts off the altitude culminating in “Tranquilty base here, the Eagle has landed.” Walter Cronkite has to take a second and compose himself, he is so full of wonder.

I think it is time to ramp up not only our return to the moon, but also the voyage to Mars. I know, I know - “we’ve got so many more pressing needs here on Earth, why fly humans in space when we can send robots more cheaply?” That argument is not without merit.

There’s just something about going and seeing these places for ourselves, with our own eyes, that has an intrinsic value I can’t put my finger on. Looking at the news footage from the Apollo 11 mission, the whole world was united in pulling for our efforts. One of the members of the Apollo 11 crew, Michael Collins, has commented that as they toured the world after their return, admirers in many other countries constantly said “we did it,” as opposed to “you did it,” or “America did it.”

Can you imagine how the world would tune in to a lunar landing now that we have technology such as HDTV? And much like the world reveled in the wonder of this photo from Apollo 8 -

a fresh look at the Earth from afar may help people get in gear towards saving our planet.

There’s no doubt that all of this costs more money than we have. That seems to be a relatively small challenge. Heck, we could come up with some sort of private-public partnership that allows for a profit to be made. And while we’re at it, what’s wrong with putting a few corporate logos on the ship? If it gets us there, who cares? The benefits of trying outweigh the effects of not trying.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that the original achievement by Apollo was largely spurred on by the Cold War. We were in a race with the Soviets and winning seemed like the best way to achieve global supremacy in the eyes of the world. That enabled the United States to unite behind one purpose and fully fund the space program.

Is such a unity of purpose even possible in our modern political climate? I don’t know. As much as I believe that Barack Obama is going to break down many of the old divisions in our country, we have reached a point where our society is divided into a million more pieces because of technology. Even if Obama wins the election with an unheard of margin and gets a filibuster proof majority in the US Senate - there are always going to be many more active interests in our political system.

Let’s say that an Obama administration came up with a plausible plan to get us back to the moon sooner. There would still be the Association of Left-Handed Basket Weavers mounting a grassroots campaign to kill the program on the basis that it takes their funding away. (Yeah, yeah, I hear my conservative friends going - “don’t fund ANY of it.”    ) Multiply that one association times 1000 and you’ve got an idea of how Washington works.

Unless Al Queda starts their own space program, I just don’t see our modern political system having the capability to achieve truly great things that unite our country behind a common purpose.