Preserving Lunar History

Museums serve an important purpose - preserving history.  It does seem strange, though, to visit a museum to observe what happened during your lifetime.

Today, my spouse and I (briefly) visited a museum in Binghamton, New York called TechWorks that celebrates our region's contributions to technology. Among other things, the flight simulator for Apollo 11 was built here. Now housed by the Smithsonian, it was available for view.

It's amazing what those designers had to work with, especially as we could only guess what conditions on the moon were like.  Some were afraid the lunar module would sink into hundreds of feet thick lunar dust, for example.

So I had to ask this question:  has anyone ever been back to the Apollo 11 landing site?  The short answer is "no" although many of us alive in 1969 are going there today in memory.

What would we find if we revisited the site?  We have a good idea, and it's interesting. 

The flag planted by the late Neil Armstrong is still there, although we know it was knocked down when the lunar module took off.  It is bleached white, we speculate.

There are even pictures taken from above the site, but you can't see much.

Have you wondered how the future will view the moon landing?  Futurama, a (sometimes) wonderful satirical cartoon, wondered, too. Fry (the man on the right) is from our modern era.  He was accidentally frozen and defrosted in 3000, and the series proceeds from there with his adventures.  Here, he visits the moon landing site with a resident of 3000 AD to find...well, watch and see.

So we really need to be careful speculating, because, right now we couldn't get there ourselves even if we tried.

In July of 2011 I wrote a blog post when the United States ended its space shuttle program. I've updated it some and added some more commentary.

The United States space program ended in July 2011 or so I thought.

I was a child of the Space Race.  In October of 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched.  Ever hear of it? Or the Soviet Union?  This may be history to you if you are young enough, so a quick refresher.

The Soviet Union was a "union" of Russia and a number of other nearby countries.  Their government was "communist", committed to the destruction of the capitalist system - and our country.  Or, so we were told.  Those were scary times.  When I was a toddler, being called a Communist could be enough to cause someone to lose their job.  There were special congressional hearings.  Blacklists.

When the Soviets launched the first satellite in October of 1957, our country was thrown into a panic.  We needed to get our children educated in the sciences, and quickly, so we could get into space with our satellite before the Communists took space over.   This drive accelerated even more quickly when the Soviets put the first man into space in 1961.



To make a long story short, we made it to the moon first.  Several more missions got to the moon (the last one in 1972) and then in the 1970's we totally changed direction.  We decided to have a program with partially disposable space crafts.  We haven't been to the moon since that decision.

In the middle of all this, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.  Probably a lot of the urgency disappeared with the Soviets.  We no longer had an enemy to compete with, at least a Russian enemy.

Then we realized it was way too expensive for the government to keep up the space program.  Private industry would have to take over, and that is part of the reason for what happened today.  The entire story is complicated, and this is a very shallow telling of the tale.  But the bottom line was, we lost our ability to get our own astronauts into space with our own equipment.

For the past few years, who have we depended on to get our astronauts to the International Space Station?

The Russians.

Now, that's irony.

Today's 50th anniversary of the moon landing is an important one. It may be the last major anniversary where anyone who walked on the moon is still alive.  As of this week, only four such men are left. Since 2011, there are glimmers of hope that we will return to space .  Space X and Boeing have been trying, but their efforts seem to be plagued by delays.

President Trump wants us back on the moon by 2024. He met with the two surviving Apollo 11 astronauts yesterday (first man on the moon Neil Armstrong passed away in 2012.).

But if we ever get there, will the original site be preserved in some way?  Actually, a bill was introduced in Congress on July 16, the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11.

Let's just hope that Futurama isn't too prophetic.