THE COUNTRY’S CELEBRATION of the astronauts’ achievement had begun almost the moment they returned to Earth, and it would continue for a good while. The astronauts met President Johnson in the White House and were awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. They were also invited to address the United States Congress, where Borman thanked the legislators for funding the space program and urged them to continue supporting it, saying, “Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit, and I hope we will never forget that.”
The astronauts were driven down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, in a motorcade while a great crowd of people waved and cheered. The astronauts’ families, who were invited to attend all the events, rode in trailing cars behind the motorcade.
Marveling at the throngs of people, seven-year-old Susan Lovell turned to her mother. “You’d think Dad was a hero or something,” she said.
“Well, Susan,” Marilyn answered, “I think he is.”
All three of the heroes got much the same treatment in New York the next day. There was a ticker-tape parade, with all of the street signs along the route changed temporarily to Apollo Way. As their procession crept along lower Broadway in a twenty-eight-degree chill, two hundred tons of confetti fluttered down on the astronauts.
In Houston, the technicians and Mission Controllers partied at a local restaurant. Leaving their cars parked up and down the four-lane stretch of highway, they swarmed inside. Those who couldn’t find even one of those barely legal parking spaces simply abandoned their cars on the median strip; the Houston police, for whom it was still just another regular night, ticketed them with abandon.
But at NASA itself, the work continued, and for some, it started just hours after Borman, Lovell and Anders splashed down when a team of flight directors began simulations for Apollo 9.
On March 3, 1969—just over nine weeks later—astronauts flew Apollo 9, which included a successful test of the untried lunar module. At long last, the spindly ship that had given engineers such fits was declared fit for service.
Apollo 10 followed two months later, and then, two months after that, the American space program landed two men on the moon. Apollo 11 was, as Neil Armstrong intoned, “. . . one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Taking seriously their duty as emissaries to the moon for our species, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind a few tokens of Earthly goodwill and international fellowship: medallions commemorating astronauts who had perished in the line of duty—two Soviet cosmonauts and the three Americans who died in the Apollo blast two years prior—and a disk bearing messages of peace from seventy-three countries for whatever extraterrestrial beings might stumble upon it someday.
Space and lunar exploration continued apace. The Apollo program launched another six lunar missions, and NASA invented new ways to leave our mark on the heavens. In 1981, it inaugurated its space shuttle program, which showcased a flying machine that could lift off with the help of rockets and land back on Earth like a glider. This unique design made the shuttle reusable, and its five orbiters were in heavy rotation for the next thirty years, logging over half a billion miles during 135 missions. The shuttle launched the first American woman into space as well as the first African American. In all, the shuttle program sent 350 men and women into space, where they repaired satellites and built the International Space Station (ISS), a football field-size lab that orbits the Earth every ninety minutes. Crews from around the world conduct experiments on the ISS, and if you look up into the sky on a clear night, even without using a telescope, you can see it fly by.
But over the years, the space program experienced tragic losses, too. In January 1986, the world excitedly watched as the space shuttle Challenger got ready to launch a crew that included Christa McAuliffe, a social-studies teacher. Astronauts were considered almost superhuman: physically fit math and science whizzes who were perfectly trained, cool under pressure and could defy gravity and fly at dizzying speeds. But Christa McAuliffe was one of us. This was the first time a regular teacher had been selected to join the crew, and she had spent months training for what was dubbed “the ultimate field trip.”
Bundled up in the stands on that cold January day were Christa McAuliffe’s parents and her sister; her husband and children were watching from inside a building nearby. They were joined by one in six Americans who tuned into the launch on TV, including millions of schoolchildren, cheering for one of their own.
And then, just seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the Challenger exploded in midair, killing its seven-member crew and halting shuttle flights for two years. While other shuttles had many successes, in 2003 tragedy again struck when the Columbia space shuttle broke apart as it was reentering the Earth’s atmosphere after orbiting the planet for two weeks. Once again, NASA lost seven crew members.
For all of NASA’s spectacular triumphs, the public and press tended to focus on its disasters, when they paid attention at all. Maybe people grew skittish about the risks of spaceflight. Maybe they were worried that NASA was wasting scarce government funds. Once America officially beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War in 1989, the urgency of the space race melted away. America was now the world’s one and only superpower, so why did we still need to pour billions into the space program? Don’t we have bigger problems to solve here at home, where our money could be better spent?
In the short term, the answer will always be yes. In our country and around the world, there are millions of hungry mouths to feed and homeless people in need of shelter. There are deadly diseases to cure urgently and unemployed workers who need immediate assistance. There are roads to be paved and bridges to be fixed today.
But what if all the resources we pour into rocket design and flight planning also make life on Earth better, more interesting, safer and healthier? The most famous by-product of the Cold War is none other than our beloved, unwieldy, babbling Internet, the platform that changed human engagement forever. No longer is communication just one-to-one, as it is through the telephone, or even the broadcast of a few to the many, as through TV and radio. The Internet has made it possible for all to speak to all and all at once, a revolution in the dynamics of power and community we are still trying to master as we ride this beast in our every waking moment.
Advances discovered in NASA labs have become a part of our daily lives, too. Rocket technology powers heart pumps, and infant formula is fortified with nutrients that NASA developed for long-duration spaceflight. Your sunglasses, baseball bat, tennis racquet and even the mattress you sleep on at night have been improved by the space agency.
But what if we got nothing at all from the research at NASA? No special sunlight filters for your shades, no added cushioning for your memory-foam pillow. Would all of it be worth it? The trips to the moon, the billions of dollars and countless human-hours spent contemplating, exploring the vast, endless night? The lives lost?
In 1961, President Kennedy nudged Americans “with the full speed of freedom” to shoulder the burden of a massive project. President Kennedy asked Americans to be bold and choose to go to the moon. In a speech before Congress, he clearly laid out the costs in dollars and time and resources and manpower and asked citizens to think hard about their willingness to take on the moon shot, acknowledging that “no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.” Certainly no one could predict that just two years after his call, he would be assassinated, and five years after that the country would bleed and burn in the fires of 1967 and 1968.
But he could predict that if Americans sent a man to the moon, we would all be able to bask in its glow for generations to come, that such a show of resolve and dedication, shared purpose and courage would offer a road map for future Americans who might again be faced with questions about how much we should all expect to contribute to a great leap for humanity, how seriously we take our responsibility to lead. “In a very real sense,” Kennedy said, “it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”