CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FINAL FRONTIER
(1970–1979)
PAN AM AIRWAYS was taking reservations for passenger flights to the Moon. There were no scheduled departure dates, the price was undetermined, and placing a reservation didn’t require a down payment. But by the summer of 1969 they had issued more than twenty-five thousand personalized and numbered First Moon Flights Club cards to interested customers. Pictured on the back of the card was the space shuttle from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in the film displayed a prominent Pan Am logo on the outside of the passenger compartment.
California governor Ronald Reagan, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Walter Cronkite were all reported to be among the card-carrying members of the First Moon Flights Club. For many Americans, there remained little doubt that the future depicted in Kubrick’s film would happen in their lifetime. Humanity had just put its foot on another world. It seemed assured there would be human settlements on the Moon and Mars before the end of the century.
Yet just a year after Apollo 11, there was little such talk in the White House. Vice President Agnew no longer spoke of going to Mars. Instead, he gained new prominence by delivering alliterative attacks on the administration’s critics in the media and on college campuses. In his role as the administration’s hatchet man, he derided political pundits and academics as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” The vice president’s performance as the voice of the conservative “silent majority” soon overshadowed his position as the National Space Council’s chairman. Agnew’s brief infatuation with the Red Planet was soon forgotten.
Officially, the White House continued to assert that President Nixon was a committed space activist who favored “a vital and forward-thrusting space program.” But after the United States’s third mission to land men on the Moon, the president’s attitude toward the Apollo program had changed. Along with the rest of the world, President Nixon was caught up in the drama as Houston’s Mission Control toiled over four suspenseful days in April 1970, attempting to bring the crew of Apollo 13 back to Earth safely after the command-and-service module was crippled by the explosion of an oxygen tank.
Despite the mission nearly ending in disaster, Apollo 13’s safe return was celebrated as an astounding triumph of human ingenuity, bringing deserved attention to the resourceful teams of NASA flight controllers and the engineers in Mission Control. But it was a story that neither NASA nor the country wanted to dwell upon, and Apollo 13 was conventionally regarded as “the flight that failed” for the next quarter century—until it was retold for a new generation in commander Jim Lovell’s bestselling memoir, which subsequently served as the basis of a popular Hollywood film.
For President Nixon, Apollo 13 was a traumatic turning point in his relationship with the space program, one that had been ironically foreshadowed nearly four months earlier when he invited the crew of the second Apollo moon-landing mission to stay overnight at the White House. During the visit, Nixon entertained the Apollo 12 crew and their wives in the White House screening room with a newly released Hollywood motion picture. Marooned was a stunning selection to screen on such an occasion: The space-disaster film, starring Gregory Peck, David Janssen, and Gene Hackman, was about the plight of three Apollo astronauts stranded in orbit as they slowly ran out of available oxygen. The wife of one Apollo astronaut later revealed that Marooned had given her nightmares.
During Apollo 13’s ordeal, Nixon could do little more than helplessly watch a real-life version of the movie play out on national television. He closely followed NASA’s efforts to bring the crew home but began worrying that if another accident occurred before the 1972 election, it would reflect badly on his administration and undermine his diplomatic overtures to Russia and China. Nixon’s changing attitude toward the space program even became apparent in the White House décor. The Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photograph, which had hung prominently near Nixon’s desk in the Oval Office for the past year, was removed from display and was no longer to be seen.
A Pan American World Airways “First Moon Flights” Club reservation card issued in 1969 featuring a picture of the Orion space shuttle from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on the back. So successful was the Pan Am promotion that their rival, Trans World Airlines, began taking customer reservations as well, shortly after the flight of Apollo 8.
NASA administrator Tom Paine had effectively won over Agnew during the early months of the administration. Despite the vice president’s later reticence to campaign for grand space initiatives, Paine remained hopeful the Nixon White House would eventually come through with a bold and expansive commitment to NASA’s future. With the successes of Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and the other four Apollo missions completed under his tenure as administrator, he believed the space agency had proven that it could deliver on its promise. In the months after Apollo 11, Paine went through rounds of frustrating negotiations with the White House’s money men concerning NASA’s upcoming budget, but with little resolution.
By 1970, NASA’s share of the federal budget had fallen to 2 percent, less than half of what it had been five years earlier. The country was in a recession, and concern about rising inflation was casting a shadow over all future spending. Internally, the White House explored a number of scenarios for NASA’s future, including a draconian option that would slash the agency’s allotment even further, close both Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the Marshall Center in Huntsville, terminate all piloted missions after mid-1970, and concentrate almost exclusively on uncrewed landers to Mars and probes to the outer planets.
Most Americans assumed the space program consumed a far greater percentage of every tax dollar than was actually the case. Three months after Apollo 11 returned, an opinion poll indicated that 56 percent wanted Nixon to spend less money on space; only 10 percent spoke in favor of increasing NASA’s budget. It was hardly the ideal moment for NASA to make the case for an all-out program to put humans on Mars by the early 1980s.
A few weeks before the launch of Apollo 11, Time Life Inc. had given Norman Mailer a contract to write a book about the first moon landing. Selections would be excerpted in Life magazine and the entire book published by the venerable Boston firm of Little, Brown. But when he submitted his finished manuscript in mid-1970—ten months past the deadline and more than twice its contracted length—Mailer and his publisher took stock of how much had changed in the past year. Little, Brown had just released First on the Moon, a first-person account by the Apollo 11 astronauts, ghostwritten by Life magazine staffers. The sales had been modest. In an understated internal memo written exactly a year to the day after Apollo 11 touched down, the publisher’s sales manager noted, “I don’t think that the moon landing is exactly the most commercial subject to write on these days,” and suggested cutting the size of the proposed first printing of Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon in half. Mailer was also mystified by the public’s apathy and speculated about a possible marketing angle for his book. “Could we advertise the book by hitting hard on the fact that there was extraordinary interest in the moon shot just a little more than a year ago and now there is close to total indifference to the subject?” he wrote his editor.
But in the NASA offices, Paine remained undaunted. He asked the space agency’s most persuasive spokesperson, Wernher von Braun, to leave his managerial position at the Marshall Space Flight Center and come to Washington to serve as NASA’s deputy associate administrator for planning. After more than two decades in Alabama, von Braun decided to move his family to Alexandria, Virginia. However, not long after his arrival, he sensed a changed mood in the country and even wondered whether the lavish Apollo budget hadn’t spoiled many of his colleagues. Reflecting on the current moment and his new assignment, von Braun confessed, “Too many people in NASA…are waiting for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet, like President Kennedy.”
In an effort to better determine NASA’s post-Apollo future, von Braun and Paine decided to hold a three-day off-site retreat where they would look ahead to the year 2000 and beyond. They chose as their venue a modest building on Wallops Island, one of the barrier islands on the Virginia coast, where NASA maintained a small but active research station and rocket-launching facility.
Prior to the gathering, Paine charged the twenty-five attendees to call upon their “swashbuckling buccaneering courage” and imagine the possibilities thirty years hence and all that NASA could accomplish by 2000. He cautioned his space-age band of brothers to “be careful of ideology, amateur social science, and economics,” and open themselves to “a completely uninhibited flow of new ideas.”
Von Braun asked his old friend Arthur C. Clarke to deliver the Wallops Island conference keynote address. The select group of attendees—not surprisingly, all men—included the directors of most of the NASA centers as well as another VIP, the most celebrated space traveler in the world, Neil Armstrong. It was the first time Clarke and Armstrong met each other, a moment that Clarke made certain was captured in a snapshot taken outside of the Wallops Station building.
The free-ranging discussions at the Wallops Island conference were more like something that might be overheard at a science-fiction convention than at a government-agency long-range-planning session. Moon colonies, giant space stations, and human settlements on Mars were projected by the year 2000. Also discussed were new types of nuclear-powered rocket engines that would facilitate human travel outside the solar system and the future of human evolution on other planets. When imagining life closer to home, attendees debated the feasibility of an intercontinental space plane, ways to free humanity from a dependence on agricultural-based food, and a combined global supercomputer and telecommunications network. The Wallops Station conference turned out to be the last hurrah of the grand visions seen in Collier’s, at the New York World’s Fair, and in the movie theaters where 2001: A Space Odyssey was still playing more than two years after its world premiere.
Paine enthusiastically submitted his Wallops Island report to the White House, hoping that these daring ideas would find supporters in the administration and lead to future discussion. But Paine had also seen the writing on the wall. The Wallops Island report was his parting shot.
Within six weeks of submitting his conference summary, Paine tendered his resignation and returned to work at his former employer, General Electric. But before he left his NASA office, Paine steered future development a bit closer by canceling two Apollo lunar missions—Apollo 18 and 19—thus saving 40 million dollars from the NASA budget and allowing the design and development for a space shuttle to move forward. (Apollo 20 had already been canceled the previous January to allocate its Saturn V to the Skylab space station program slated for 1973.) Paine’s decision was not popular. After the billions spent on Apollo, one astronomer expressed in frustration: “It’s like buying a Rolls-Royce and then not using it because you claim you can’t afford the gas.”
In Houston, news of the two latest Apollo cancelations did not go over well. Astronaut Tom Stafford, in a rare break with decorum, spoke frankly to NBC News. He speculated that some astronauts might quit, saying the decision suggested the United States could become a second-rate power. But in the new age of limits, this was necessary triage. Not only had Paine kept the development of a future space shuttle alive, but the cuts to Apollo enabled the channeling of resources toward less costly yet hugely ambitious robotic missions to the outer planets.
For those hoping to spend New Year’s Day 2000 at a hotel on the Moon, the dream ended in 1970. The following year, Pan Am quietly terminated its First Moon Flights Club promotion.
NINE YEARS LATER, the framed photograph of Arthur C. Clarke and Neil Armstrong taken at Wallops Station hung in a place of honor in the author’s study at his home in Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India that had removed all reference to its former British colonial name, Ceylon, in 1972. In the years since Armstrong and Clarke met, much had occurred, yet little followed the optimistic outline Clarke, von Braun, and Paine had envisioned at the June 1970 conference.
Not far away from the Wallops Island photograph on Clarke’s wall of memories was a black-and-white image of him standing with von Braun. In 1972, in his new advocacy position in Washington, von Braun had helped NASA obtain presidential and congressional approval for the space shuttle, which had been scheduled to launch its first crew before the end of that decade. Von Braun had often spoken of hoping to be among its first passengers, though most of its crew members would come from a new class of thirty-five shuttle astronauts enlisted in 1978. Among them were the first women and people of color in NASA’s history.
But by 1979 the first shuttle launch had been delayed into the early 1980s. Von Braun would never see it fly, much less ride on it. He died in 1977 at age sixty-five, shortly after leaving NASA. During his last years he served as vice president for engineering and development at Fairchild Industries, an aerospace firm. This had been the first private-sector job in von Braun’s career. No longer would he answer to dictators, generals, and government bureaucrats. But within months of joining Fairchild, he was diagnosed with cancer and would die four years later.
Arthur C. Clarke and Neil Armstrong meet at the NASA long-term planning session held at Wallops Island, Virginia, in June 1970. Although he had stepped on the Moon less than a year earlier, Armstrong attended the Wallops Island conference in a new role as a NASA bureaucrat, the deputy associate administrator for aeronautics. He held his administrative position for only a year, resigning to teach at the University of Cincinnati.
His death spared him further questions about his wartime past, many details of which were about to come to public attention for the first time. An investigative unit within the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, called the Office of Special Investigations, had been created to delve into the histories of former Nazis who had entered the United States under fraudulent circumstances. Soon there would be renewed interest in the Operation Paperclip Germans. In 1973, Arthur Rudolph, a key member of von Braun’s Saturn V team, who had overseen the production of the V-2 at the Dora-Mittelbau slave-labor factory, was forced to renounce his American citizenship and return to live in Germany.
The past had been shadowing von Braun during his final years. He had been called to testify as a witness at a German war crimes trial shortly before the Apollo 11 landing. When he met with journalists and news cameras on the day of his testimony, von Braun declared that his conscience was clear and he had nothing to hide. Not long after, he appeared on TV as a guest on the late-night Dick Cavett Show to speak about NASA’s future in space. But Cavett changed the discussion to ask a few pointed questions about his experience during the Third Reich, something that had never been raised during a television interview in the past two decades.
In the course of his short time at Fairchild, von Braun reconnected with his old friend Arthur Clarke, living in Sri Lanka’s commercial capital of Colombo. Von Braun’s initiative, in fact, eventually transformed Clarke’s home in the elite palm-shaded Cinnamon Gardens neighborhood. When Fairchild’s experimental ATS-6 satellite was positioned in a geosynchronous orbit over the Indian subcontinent in 1975, von Braun immediately thought of Clarke. ATS-6 was to be used in an international experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of beaming educational television programming to rural villages that couldn’t otherwise receive signals. The Indian government would give a number of remote villages their own satellite ground stations, a receiver, and a television monitor from which the local community could gather to watch the broadcasts.
Von Braun suggested that one of the receiving stations be given to the man who had first proposed the geosynchronous-communications-satellite idea back in 1945. Not long after, a crew of six engineers from the Indian government arrived at Clarke’s home, where they installed a sixteen-foot dish antenna on his second-floor patio-deck, transforming it into the only privately owned satellite-receiving station in the world. At the time Clarke also had the only working television set in the entire country; national TV broadcasting didn’t come to Sri Lanka until 1979.
After nearly a quarter century as a frequent visitor to the United States, Clarke had chosen to reduce his busy travel schedule. Now, financially secure for the first time in his life due to his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, the world came to him—both via satellite and whenever astronauts, authors, royalty, journalists, and other celebrities were passing through Colombo and wanted to say hello.
Over the years, Clarke had explained to journalists that he’d moved to Sri Lanka in 1956 for the skin diving. But as his friend the science writer Jeremy Bernstein later recounted, there were additional personal motivations behind his choice to relocate there. His decision came only a few years after the suicide of British mathematician Alan Turing, who had been convicted of gross indecency and given a choice between prison and chemical castration treatment as a supposed cure for homosexuality, then criminally outlawed in England. Clarke had been briefly married to an American woman in 1953, a decision he regretted soon after. Properly British and discreet, Clarke usually deflected inquiries about his personal life, occasionally making public comments that led listeners to infer he was heterosexual. But as he grew older he became less guarded. Reflecting on Turing’s decision to commit suicide in 1954, Clarke confided to Bernstein “that if he’d had the chance he would have urged Turing to immigrate to the island.”
Embedded in the tropical garden at the rear of Clarke’s house was a small marker noting the grave of his beloved German shepherd, with a name and ancestry that commemorated the early space age:
SPUTNIK
1966–1978
SON OF LAIKA:
GENTLE, LOVING, FRIEND
Whenever he was showing off his house and garden and the satellite receiving station, Clarke told his guests that within a few years they would have access to a far more varied selection of television broadcasts from around the globe than he could currently access with his satellite dish. He explained that the world was still in a semaphore and smoke-signal era of communications when compared with what was to come. Soon telephones, radios, newspapers, and televisions would be combined into a single portable device with a high-definition screen and a keyboard, allowing for two-way communication with anyone on the planet. Such a device, which could be as small as a wristwatch, would allow anyone anywhere to access the world’s great libraries. The integrated circuit that was used on the Apollo guidance computer a decade earlier had since been superseded by faster and vastly more sophisticated chips. In the United States the first personal computers were being sold to hobbyists, and Clarke was hoping to get one soon.
Though ever the optimist, Clarke was bothered by the recent resurgence of interest in paranormal phenomena and pseudoscientific fads in the United States and elsewhere. Books and television specials “investigating” ancient astronauts, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and psychokinesis had become the rage. For decades Clarke had enjoyed listening to such theories and had maintained an open mind, but he now feared cranks were littering the fringes of science.
Perhaps the strangest and most baffling of the new fringe ideas in the mid-1970s was promoted in a self-published book arguing that the Apollo moon landings were all an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the American government. Bill Kaysing’s We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle had been written in the wake of the release of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and other disturbing government revelations. Motivated by anger about the Pentagon’s deception in Vietnam, Kaysing decided to write something “outrageous,” hoping that it might prompt Americans to no longer blindly accept as truth the official word out of Washington, D.C. Ironically, this was one rumor the Soviet Union hadn’t tried to cultivate as part of their disinformation campaign against the United States.
At the time of the moon landing, few voiced rumors of it being a hoax, although as early as 1968 just such a secret government conspiracy had served as part of the plot of a darkly satiric BBC television drama, The News-Benders. Author Norman Mailer may have sensed the growing paranoia when he joked a year after Apollo 11, “In another couple of years there will be people arguing in bars about whether anyone even went to the Moon.” He was quick to dismiss any such “mass hoodwinking” because, he argued, to pull it off would entail an effort and genius greater than the feat of launching the Saturn V and landing on the Moon. But as memories faded and disillusionment about established institutions became more widespread, this infectious idea slowly gained adherents.
BY LATE 1979, America hadn’t launched a single crewed space mission in four years. During the same time period, the Soviet Union launched fourteen flights carrying cosmonauts into earth orbit, many taking crews to their Salyut space stations. America’s robotic planetary probes had taken over as the new stars of NASA. A pair of Viking landers transmitted the first color images from the surface of Mars in 1976, and three years later Voyager 1 began sending detailed images of Jupiter and its moons. It was followed by Voyager 2, which, like the first Voyager, traveled to Saturn, then, for the first time, headed out toward Uranus and Neptune. The Voyager program had originally been proposed in 1969 as a “Grand Tour” and would have included a visit to Pluto as well. But Congress’s efforts to constrain the space agency’s budget and NASA’s desire to divert funding to the shuttle had reduced the Voyager missions’ agenda.
Culturally, astronauts no longer held the iconic position that they had a few years earlier. Life magazine, which had published the astronauts’ exclusive personal stories since 1959, ceased publication the same month as the final Apollo moon voyage, in late 1972. That same year a report revealed that NASA had disciplined the Apollo 15 crew members for smuggling a packet of unauthorized collectible autographed postal covers onto their flight, with the implied suggestion that they had an unethical plan to enrich themselves. Appearing not long after the release of the Pentagon Papers and other journalistic exposés, the Apollo 15 postal-cover scandal fostered the cynical assumption that everyone holding a position of privilege and power covertly cheated to get ahead—even America’s most celebrated heroes. (In fact, the situation with the Apollo 15 crew was not entirely unique.) Indeed, the next year the first book was published that dissected and debunked the carefully crafted images of the astronauts long promoted by NASA’s public-affairs office and sustained by an adoring media.
By the end of the decade, the Apollo astronauts who had left NASA were appearing frequently in consumer advertising. Buzz Aldrin endorsed Volkswagen and its new computer diagnostics system. Frank Borman, now chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Eastern Airlines, became the public face of the company. Neil Armstrong, who had maintained a more private profile than most of his colleagues, surprised many by starring in an ad campaign for Chrysler at a time when the carmaker was experiencing serious financial trouble due to the energy crisis. Wanting there to be no lingering doubt about the identity of Chrysler’s spokesperson, the advertising agency not only had Armstrong introduce himself on camera, but they also made sure his name was superimposed in large type below his face. The fading fame of the Apollo moonwalkers even prompted a successful television commercial with a balding man dressed in a checkered sports jacket, asking the camera, “Do you know me? I’m one of the astronauts that walked on the Moon. When I walk in here to rent a car, they don’t always recognize me. That’s why I carry an American Express card.” Only later was the name of the third man to walk on the Moon, Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad, revealed in a final close-up of his credit card.
More and more of the Apollo-era astronauts were joining the private sector, as the new class of shuttle astronauts was altering the popular conception of NASA’s space voyagers. In public statements the generation of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, with years of test-pilot and combat-flying experience, acknowledged the transition as an inevitable sign of progress. John Young, who had previously entered space on four different missions, would be the only Gemini astronaut to fly the new space shuttle. But among themselves, the earlier generation regarded the new group of mission and payload specialists—astronauts assigned to oversee medical and engineering experiments or serve as civilian technical experts—as something different. One went so far as to refer to the new generation as “second-class astronauts.”
However, before the first shuttle left the launchpad, something appeared that strongly reinforced the popular image of the astronauts from the dawning years of the American space program. It came first, in 1979, as an acclaimed book and later as a popular Hollywood movie. Together, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Philip Kaufman’s screen adaptation became the dominant narrative of the early space age for generations of Americans.
Wolfe’s book arrived while the country was still suffering from the aftereffects of the Vietnam War and the conflicted emotions that surrounded it. In the months before the book was published, depressing newspaper headlines told of an energy crisis, gas lines, a nuclear-plant mishap at Three Mile Island, and the president’s concern about America’s “crisis of confidence.” The Right Stuff rescued the early jet test pilots and the graying Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo veterans from American Express commercials and elevated them as exemplars of a select, elite brotherhood, defined by the phrase that Wolfe appropriately chose as his book’s title.
Elegiac and nostalgic, The Right Stuff aimed to celebrate something many believed had disappeared in the decade since Apollo 11: a precious, elemental kind of heroic American masculinity. “The right stuff” at its core was personified by the career of test pilot Chuck Yeager, a man whose career and influence had become so pervasive that Wolfe claimed that it could be heard in the cadence of every commercial-airline pilot’s voice. A combination of rare skill and unwavering courage, “the right stuff” was what caused someone to willingly and repeatedly place his life on the line to fly an untested bit of machinery and push it to its limit. This was done humbly and without fanfare. The only accolades that mattered were those of their peers.
A leading practitioner of the New Journalism, Wolfe employed the tools of a novelist to reveal what he perceived as the essence of his story. His approach allowed him to examine the astronauts’ complex psychology—their driving ambition, recklessness, courage, and flaws—with a freedom that had eluded the previous journalists who’d attempted to chronicle their story. The men portrayed in The Right Stuff are all recognizably human. They range from an excessively sanctimonious Boy Scout to a profane and bullying womanizer. One needs to relieve his bladder into his space suit during a delay on the launchpad; one drinks too much the night before breaking the sound barrier. Wolfe’s high-achieving, brave alpha males live on the page in vibrant colorful vignettes that reveal how much was missing from the sanitized, colorless, and unrealistic portraits that appeared in Life magazine for more than a decade.
Yet Wolfe’s liberties with narrative and approach were not without controversy. Colleagues of the late Gus Grissom took offense at how the book depicted his near drowning during the second Mercury mission and how the test-pilot elite at Edwards Air Force Base reacted with ridicule. More problematic was Wolfe’s nostalgic celebration of a faded code of masculine meritocracy, seemingly in reaction to 1970s advances in gender and racial equality. The Right Stuff was written while the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the most decisive affirmative-action case of the decade, while the Equal Rights Amendment was awaiting state ratification, and as the first classes of women were attending the U.S. Air Force, Coast Guard, Military, and Naval academies. At the book’s conclusion, Wolfe specifically signifies the twilight of the age of right stuff with Ed Dwight’s experience at Edwards, presenting his story as a misguided early attempt at government-enforced affirmative action.
Released a year before the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, The Right Stuff appealed to readers eager to remember an America when a president could inspire the nation to take on daunting challenges—even beating the Soviet Union in a race to the Moon. It called to mind a time before the political assassinations of the sixties, urban riots, wars in Southeast Asia, and the erosion of confidence in national institutions, yet it viewed the past through a skeptical lens informed by the culture of the seventies.
Perhaps due in part to its wistful evocation of faded American values, four decades after its publication, The Right Stuff remains the most influential narrative of the early space age. Its memorable set pieces deftly balance the courageous with the absurd, while never trivializing what Wolfe referred to as his “rich and fabulous terrain.” The book’s shadow falls across the hundreds of books and films that have come since it was published. For those born after 1980, the space age could be said to have begun on September 24, 1979, The Right Stuff’s publication date.
THE ENDURING MEANING of the space race remains elusive half a century after it came to its end. Tom Wolfe’s reexamination, written only a decade after the moon landing, allowed him the opportunity to define the rare combination of ambition, courage, and endurance that personified the first men to venture into the high frontier.
A great deal less celebrated than the early astronauts are the space visionaries who looked into the future and whose youthful dreams instigated the race to the Moon. Fifty years after Apollo 11, the renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who knew both Arthur C. Clarke and Wernher von Braun, continues to actively contemplate our destiny as humans to migrate from the Earth into the cosmos. Though he played no role in Project Apollo, in the 1950s Dyson was intimately involved with the development of Project Orion, a research study that considered the feasibility of a large spaceship powered by a series of controlled nuclear explosions. A decade later, he briefly served as a consultant to Stanley Kubrick during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. A space visionary much in the spirit of von Braun and Clarke, Dyson now looks back on Apollo as a marvelous achievement but one that was ultimately a wasted opportunity.
While Kennedy’s challenge helped channel government and public support to meet a clearly defined decade-end goal, Dyson believes it would have been far more productive if the first missions into space had been delineated within the larger scope of space exploration over the coming centuries. Had this been the case, Dyson says, entering space would have been understood as merely an early step in humanity’s ultimate destiny in the stars, somewhat in the manner of Russia’s mystical cosmists at the end of the nineteenth century.
Dyson likens space exploration to the human expansion across the remote Polynesian islands of the Pacific and believes spaceflight should be regarded as a series of steps in a quest—of men and women accepting great risk to venture into the unknown. The spread of human settlements across the Pacific was not instigated by a pursuit of scientific knowledge or as a form of political persuasion. What propelled that exploration was an innate curiosity and the urge to move into new environments. “It was about taking chances—the essence of what makes life interesting.”
Though voiced by someone now in his tenth decade, Dyson’s audacious vision of humanity’s destiny in space may sound as startling to twenty-first-century ears as those of Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard did a century ago. But his thoughts follow those of Clarke, von Braun, and Tsiolkovsky, who metaphorically spoke of the Earth as merely the cradle of the human race.
Dyson believes there is no more essential reason to send life into the universe than to diversify the species. A need to live and function in non-earthlike environments will lead to adaptations that will alter and expand the branches of the human family. Rather than constantly using a space suit, humans may develop a skin suitable to their surroundings and lungs that will allow them to breathe freely in alien habitats. Colonists on Mars may develop a furry exterior, as living comfortably on the Red Planet will be easier with an appropriate fur coat.
And as biotechnology becomes more sophisticated, Dyson predicts this process of evolutionary adaptation will be engineered to happen much faster than in the past. Human transformation might occur within a few generations, possibly within one hundred years. The scope of evolutionary change he foresees won’t be confined to the human species alone. Entirely new ecospheres could be engineered, created to coexist in harmony with other creatures and flora developed for that environment.
It’s a vision very much from the pages of a science-fiction novel. In the course of the Apollo program, the human species became the first to walk, work, and even drive a car on an alien world. That journey to the Moon began, in part, as a result of the mystical ideas of the Russian cosmists, who predicted the spiritual transformation of the human race as it ventured into space. Freeman Dyson’s vision also foresees human transformation, albeit of a different sort, with biologically engineered intelligent life diversifying the species as it colonizes other planets.
Humans first ventured into space little more than half a century ago, and within a decade they stood on the surface of another world. Those who walked on the Moon didn’t regard themselves as the denizens of two worlds, but should transhumanism emerge as the inevitable legacy of space exploration, the moonwalkers themselves are likely to be considered its pioneers.