Why We Are Never Going Back To The Moon…. or To Mars

At 10:56 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time, July 21st, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong opened the door of the Lunar Lander, turned around and slowly began to descend the steps to the surface of the Moon.

Some 240,000 miles away, nearly one billion people followed his progress; 600,000 of them watching on TV. It was the largest television audience in history, and with good reason. All over the world, people were watching the culmination not just of ten years of intense technological and scientific effort, but also the culmination of 10,000 years of dreaming and imagining walking on the moon. Now it was happening.

As it happened, something else was also happening in space at that moment as well, and also borne of technology.

Only a few weeks earlier, the Starship Enterprise had received a distress signal from the planet Camus II, the site of an archaeological excavation. Among the survivors were Dr. Janice Lester, a woman with whom Captain James Kirk had once had a relationship and Dr. Arthur Coleman.

By the use of an advanced piece of alien technology, Dr. Lester was placed inside Kirk’s body and Kirk was placed in Lester’s, and so it was Dr. Janice Lester, in the guise of Captain Kirk, who was now in control of the Starship Enterprise. Would the crew be able to figure it out before Captain Kirk (actually Dr. Lester) is able to carry our the death sentence her (his) hastily ordered court martial has handed down to Spock for mutiny?

Both the adventures of Commander Neil Armstrong and the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk were delivered to Americans though the same exact medium of a screen in their living room. One was real, the other fiction.

Without really realizing it, Americans in July of 1969 suddenly found themselves at the crossroads of their future. Would they continue to inhabit the real world, or would they opt to live in a world of images, illusion and fantasy? The lunar landing was the culmination of 10,000 years of grappling with the hard things necessary to accomplish real achievements. Neil Armstrong’s next step would be a step into the future, but not the future that he, nor many other people on earth might have imagined at that moment.

The ‘Space Race’ and television had been born together. They had grown up almost hand in hand. On October 4th, 1957, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite circle the earth. At the height of the Cold War, the Russians had taken a mighty technological leap over the Americans in what would come to be dubbed The Space Race.

By 1957, television had pretty well penetrated the American market. Almost every household in the country had a TV in their living room by then, and the news of Sputnik both captivated and terrified the nation.

Once it was newspapers, then radio that delivered news like Sputnik, but by the late 1950’s, television had begun to eclipse newspapers and even radio to become our number one medium of information. We began to experience the world through images on TV screens.

If anyone was a product of America’s embrace of television, it was John F. Kennedy. The young junior Senator from Massachusetts had almost no experience, but he looked good on TV. His televised debates with Republican Richard Nixon sealed the deal. The young, good-looking Kennedy may not have done so well on the radio or in the press, but for a nation just beginning to watch TV, he looked great on television, and that was enough to put him in the White House.

One month after the Russians put Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into the first manned orbit, Kennedy delivered America’s answer to the Soviet Union. In a speech before Congress, Kennedy declared that the country:

“should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

This was, at that moment, an absolutely astonishing thing to suggest. When Kennedy laid down the challenge of a flight to the moon, the US Space Program, such as it was, had only put one astronaut, Alan B. Shepherd, into a sub-orbital flight — essentially up and down just three weeks earlier. The whole thing had lasted a total of five minutes and twenty-two seconds. Now, to say that we would go to the moon, land and come back in essentially nine years must have seemed the height of insanity. Many people told him it was both ridiculous and impossible.

JFK to Congress — we will go to the moon

Yet Kennedy doubled down. At a speech at Rice University he said:

“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; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Kennedy, the nation’s first television President had committed the nation to achieving the inconceivable and almost impossible task. Yet, a mere 7 years after the Rice University speech, America had accomplished the impossible. Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the moon.

Placing a man on the moon was by any measure an enormous achievement. It was more than the culmination of a promise made only seven years prior. It was, in many ways, the fulfillment of a dream that had captured people’s imaginations since they first learned to walk erect and look up at the sky.

The moon had always been a tantalizing object. So close that you could almost hold it in your hands, yet so very untouchable… until Neil Armstrong put his foot down on the lunar soil.

The completed dream of leaving the bonds of the earth and touching the moon; of walking on it, felt, in those heady moments, as though we had all, as a species, crossed some kind of historical line. We would no longer be bound to the earth. We would begin the next great chapter of humanity, the exploration and ultimately the colonization of the moon, of Mars and all else that lay beyond. It was a remarkable moment.

Yet only a few short years later, on December 14th, 1972, American astronaut Eugene Cernan climbed into the Lunar Lander, shut the door, fired up the engine and left the surface of the moon. He was the last man to walk on the moon, a mere three years after Neil Armstrong had been the first.

As Armstrong had said on setting foot on the moon, “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”; Cernan’s last words as he stepped into the Lander were:

“And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return.”

But no one would return.

Ever again.

To this day.

Why is that?

Why is it that no one, man or woman has returned to the moon? What killed our passion for exploration and the unknown in such a short time; a passion that had once been so strong that we accomplished the seemingly impossible. What happened?

It wasn’t a matter of the cost.

The original Apollo lunar program had cost a total of $25 billion in 1969 or about $175 billion in current money. That was spread over 10 years, so even in current dollars, that would come out to a commitment of about $17.5 billion a year. Now, to put this into perspective, the current budget of the Department of Defense for just one year was $639.1 billion.

Even so, the vast majority of that $25 billion was spent in developing entirely new and hitherto untested technologies, processes and machinery. Think of it as sunk cost. Think of it as investment in the future; a future that was cut short. Learned knowledge. The specific trips to the moon and back cost only a fraction of that. And even that is a pittance when compared to the $5 trillion or so that has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, if we wanted to go, we could certainly afford to go. Any time we liked. But we did not want to go.

And it wasn’t a matter of the technology.

The technology that took men to the moon at the end of the 1960’s was about as sophisticated as your grandfather’s 1969 Chevrolet. Cutting edge in the day, but now really museum grade stuff. Your iPhone, for example, can perform functions 120 million times faster than the IBM mainframes that guided the Apollo 11 to the moon. The Apollo lander had 2K of memory and 32K of storage. Your toaster most likely has more computing power than the Lunar Lander.

The original Apollo program was supposed to go all the way to Apollo 20. Instead it got axed after Apollo 17. How come? Once we finally got to the moon, no one got killed. No one even got injured. Even with the exception of the notorious Apollo 13, which made a great movie, everything went off flawlessly.

What had gone wrong?

Like Armstrong, Shepherd and the rest of the astronauts, Gene Roddenberry had also been a pilot in the Second World War. He had flown B-17s over Europe. And when the war was over, like many pilots, he got himself a job working for Pan Am, the commercial airline. Following the war, commercial flying was just starting to take off. Roddenberry was so good a pilot, that in a short time, he was flying the longest routes that Pan Am had then, NY to Johannesburg and NY to Calcutta. Even thought he enjoyed flying and was quite good at it, his real passion had always been writing.

On June 18, 1947, Captain Roddenberry got into trouble. Today, plane crashes are rare, but in the 1950’s, the technology behind big planes was a good deal less dependable than it is today and Roddenberry had a problem on one of his long haul flight. His plane, the Clipper Eclipse, came down in the middle of the Syrian desert. Roddenberry survived the crash with two broken ribs, but even thought he was injured, he was able to drag passengers out of the flaming wreck. Fourteen people died in that crash and for Roddenberry, it was his last commercial flight. He resigned from Pan Am as soon as he got back and decided to finally pursue his long-time passion for writing. Little did he know that he would also fly into space, just like his companion pilots at NASA, only in a very different way.

Roddenberry took a rather circuitous route to his writing career. He joined the Los Angeles Police Department, not as a patrolman but rather as a Public Information Officer. He ultimately became the chief speech-writer for the LAPD’s Chief of Police.

His work at the LAPD led him to become the technical director on a TV series called Mr. District Attorney. In that capacity, he began to write TV scripts in earnest, selling a few story ideas. By 1956, he felt confident enough about his writing abilities that he quit his job with the LAPD to concentrate on writing full time.

Like all writers, he started slowly, but over time, as his abilities and contacts grew, his work become more and more well known. He started writing scripts for existing TV series such as Bat Mastersonand Jefferson Drum. Then, in 1958, a script he wrote for the series Have Gun, Will Travelwon him the prestigious Writer’s Guild of America award for Best Teleplay.

In 1961, he got an idea for a series a based on a multi-ethnic crew aboard an airship that traveled the world, but he was told that there was little market in the TV world for science fiction at that moment. The Race for Space would change all of that.

On March 11, 1964, he wrote up a 16-page treatment for a new series he called Star Trek. As with many Hollywood writers, he offered the concept to a number of networks and studios. Most turned him down. Finally, NBC agreed to finance a pilot. It was not so much science fiction as a kind of Wagon Train to the stars. The real space program was in high gear and all of the networks were suddenly looking for some kind of space related series. CBS commissioned Lost in Space, so NBC needed their own space drama.

On March 24, 1965, the first episode of Star Trek went into production. The pilot was so good that NBC commissioned a full season run of 13.

The same week that Star Trek went into production on the ground, astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young went into space for real, making the first Gemini space flight. They went for three orbits. The whole mission lasted just over four hours. The USS Enterprise was on a 5-year mission, not a 3-hour one.

Star Trek and the NASA space program ran concurrently on TV during the 1960s. They were kind of competitors.

Like Captain Roddenberry, NASA also went into the TV business. NASA had always understood that good television coverage of their missions was essential to keeping the agency funded. An audience that watched the space shots and fell in love with the astronauts and their families would mean that Congress, who voted the funding for NASA would be responsive to the feelings and passions of their constituencies. Thus, NASA made every effort to make the Space Race into prime time TV viewing.

I am old enough to remember when school came to a complete halt on launch days, and a black and white TV set would be rolled into the classroom so that we could watch the launch of whatever mission was heading off into space. The countdowns were great drama… 10… 9… 8… 7… 6… (we have ignition)… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1. BLAST OFF. And the great rocket would rise into the sky as we all held our collective breaths.

Great TV. In fact, in many ways, NASA invented the world’s first Reality TV shows.

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon for the first time, NASA made sure that his last steps onto the lunar surface would be beamed back to the largest TV audience ever. This in itself was in many ways as complicated as putting a man on the moon. No one had ever transmitted a live image from the surface of the moon. Everything had to be designed from scratch, including the camera.

By the launch of Apollo 12, however, national interest in watching the moon landings had waned considerably. As the New York Times reported “considering the intense national emotion spent on the first moon landing.” “You can’t get as excited the second time you kiss the girl,” one man said.

Apollo 12 Commander Alan Bean did not help matters by pointing the mission’s only TV camera directly into the sun, burning out the tubes. Left with live audio but no video, CBS cut to a studio on Long Island, where two actors, dressed as astronauts pantomimed what they assumed was happening on the moon. NBC used astronaut marionettes.

At the same time as NASA was losing TV audiences, despite stunts like having an astronaut hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon, Star Trek, the other TV space travel series was entering its third season.

While NASA TV was desperately trying to hold its audiences with stunts like eating jello in a weightless environment, Captain Kirk and his crew were cruising the universe at warp drive speed, fighting Klingons, firing off photon torpedoes, beaming down to planets with green slave women and outwitting computers that ran entire worlds. It beat weightless jello… by a lot.

Some fifty years after Neil Armstrong first touched down on the moon, no one has gone back. Some fifty years after James T. Kirk first took off on the Starship Enterprise, the original 5 years mission is still out there, somewhere, going strong. Star Trek has gone through innumerable iterations, spin offs, movies, cartoons, action figures, books and God only knows what else. And of course, on the heels of Star Trek came Star Wars, with its own cast of characters, action, adventure, space wars, The Force, Yoda, light sabres and a never ending franchise of billions of dollars worth of action and adventure.

Why is that?

Why did we, as an audience, as a nation, invest far more in Star Trek and their inter-galactic adventures than we did in NASA and it’s real life, real world explorations?

It’s because Star Trek, (and later Star Wars) was simply more exciting than the trips to the moon. Star Trek involved voyages to far off galaxies with dangerous Klingons or green slave women. Trips to the moon involved two guys jumping around in grey dust. Star Trek involved travel at warp speed, photon torpedoes, phasers on stun. Trips to the moon involved three guys strapped to a bench. Star Trek and Star Wars were endlessly exciting. Trips to the moon, as with most real science, and most real life as it happens, was often deadly boring.

And because the reality of going to the moon was ultimately visually boring, we all collectively voted to kill the Apollo TV series and extend the Star Wars/Star Trek franchises to infinity and beyond? Real trips to the moon made terrible television, and by the 1970s, we were starting to watch a lot of TV all the time. In fact, TV became our number one national pastime.

With bad ratings on TV, the Apollo program lost public support and because it lost public support it lost Congressional funding. And because it lost Congressional funding, it got killed, or cancelled, as we say in the world of TV.

American viewers watched the landings on the moon through the same screen that they watched Star Trek. For them, in a strange way, there was really no difference between the two. They were both people going into space. They were both offered as a kind of ‘entertainment. The fact that one was real and one was false, in the long run ultimately made no difference whatsoever. People are naturally attracted to the more entertaining event. And Star Trek proved far more entertaining than real life. So Star Trek won. Real life lost.

Did it matter?

Since 99.9999% of the people in America were never going to go to the moon anyway, what difference did it really make to them if the space shows that they were watching were fact or fiction? As it turned out, none. That’s what starts to happen when your whole experience of real life is perceived through a screen. You very quickly lose the ability to differentiate between reality and fiction. They tend to blend together. If I ask you about the Titanic, you immediately have an image of the ship in your mind’s eye. You know exactly what it looks like. You have, in fact, seen the Titanic go down.

Of course, you have not. You have seen the movie, but those images become a kind of reality for you. Dunkirk? You know exactly what it looks like. You’ve seen it. You’ve been there. Winston Churchill? Got it? Syrian refugees? Likewise. The War in Vietnam? Know it well! All of these ideas and images, and millions more, were not cast from real life, nor from real life experience. They were the product of TV or movies or video. Images. And this does not stop with movies and TV. The endlessly exciting and beautiful lives that people spend hours a day creating for others on Instagram or Facebook is but a more personalized representation of what Gene Roddenberry did for the banality of space flight in the 1970s. We live increasingly in a world of fiction, either created by Hollywood, or now created by ourselves. Most of it is no more real than Captain Kirk’s trip to the stars, yet just as compelling and capturing.

Today, the average American spends 11 hours a day staring at a screen. Our knowledge of the world comes to us through the screens. This is not our ‘window on the world’, it IS our world. And what is on those screens very much controls what we think, what we buy, how and where we work, what we believe for whom we vote, with whom we go to war and pretty much everything else out our lives and how we live them.

We are Screen Nation.

The world was not always like this. In fact, this is an extremely new and very frightening development. Not so many years ago, the idea of spending your day staring at a screen was not just unthinkable, it was completely unknown. But now, that act, that way of perceiving and learning just about everything completely warps our whole lives and all that we do.

Imagine if television or video had existed in 1492.

Imagine if Columbus, making his first exploratory trip to China, by sailing west across the Atlantic, had also been equipped with a live TV camera, so that the people of Spain could see, in real time, first hand, as he landed on the coast of China! What an exciting event.

Isabella, of course, had been under a lot of pressure once she made the commitment to fund the Columbus expedition. “What an utter waste of money,” the vast majority of Spaniards were saying. “All that money could be spent for better things — like a more expanded Inquisition, for example.” But her media advisors had told her that “The Mission To China” would make great TV, and that would win over the masses.

On October 12, 1492, Columbus sighted land, China he believed.

“Fire up the video camera,” he ordered. And all across Spain, millions of people sat riveted before their TV sets as Columbus landed on Watling Island, in the Bahamas.

Ever been to Watling Island? Ever been to The Bahamas? This was before Paradise Island. This was before The One and Only Ocean Club. Pretty much all there was was sand and scrub.

As a TV show, “Columbus Sails The Ocean Blue” was a ratings disaster, right up there with trips to the moon.

Boring.

So the Christopher Columbus Show also gets cancelled, and no one ever goes back to the New World again. What for? Oh, and Isabella’s media advisor? The auto-de-fe.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you were a native American), there was not TV in 15thCentury Spain. Decisions were made more or less on the basis of the reality, which in those days took a long time to figure out. Today, we no longer live in a real world, we live in a world of images, and those images are communicated to us on a real time, second by second basis on screens, via TV, your phone, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a million other devices and platforms.

As a result of this, as a nation, we are increasingly incapable of being able to distinguish between fact and fiction, between reality and imaginary events, between truth and lies. In a world in which fact and fiction comfortably co-exist, the line between them begins to erode. Suddenly, anything is possible, and that which is most entertaining, which garners the most eyeballs, which rates the best often becomes the foundation of belief, and often policy. Whether it is objectively true or not makes no difference. This is a result of 60 years of getting both our information and our entertainment through addictive, even hypnotic flashing lights on a screen. This has consequences.

The ‘Greatest Generation’, populated by people who actually did something, is increasingly being replaced by a younger generation who grew up solely on screens and who are also incapable, to a great extent, of differentiating real life from fiction. They live, to a large extent, in a kind of fantasy world which permeates every aspect of their lives from work to personal life. Imagining careers as ‘travel bloggers’ or ‘fashion bloggers’ that they attempt to make into reality. Facebook, one of the largest companies in the world now is really nothing more than a physical manifestation of a world constructed almost entirely of illusion. Facebook is nothing but a 24-hour global ‘reality show’ without the TV part. Instagram, with its 1 billion users, is no different, and neither is Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube or anything else for that matter.

Historians of the future, if there are any, may well look back on our own era as the point in time in which we collectively, as a civilization decided to turn our backs on the stars and to focus on the screens. How much easier and more fun it was to watch things as opposed to doing them, and in a world of screens, what difference did it ultimately make?

And this is why, in the end, we are never going to Mars either.

The movie was pretty good. The reality of Mars? As boring as the moon — just red.