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| From Technology Review, July 1994 The High Art of Apollo XI . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO to the month, my family gathered around a black-and-white Admiral TV set to watch a man in a spacesuit make history. The images of Neil Armstrong's descent from the Apollo lunar module were so fuzzy and underexposed that we could have been witnessing a fat caterpillar inching its way down a tree trunk. But I was too giddy to care. The moment I had dreamed about for the better part of my 12 years—the anticipation of which had heightened my interest in science, given me an appetite for all the science-fiction books I could consume, and even inspired me to lose weight for my future career as an astronaut—was at hand. Just then, the phone rang. Flo, a friend of my mother's had picked this moment to call and say hi. "I can't talk now," my mother told Flo. "They're about to walk on the moon." "Oh," Flo replied, "are you watching that? We're watching 'The Flintstones.' " By that admission, Flo confirmed what I had often suspected: that she, her layabout husband, and her two sad, dull-eyed children were the most primitive people on earth—that they, not the Flintstones, were the modern Stone Age family. Granted, this was a harsh judgment for a sixth-grader to make about people who probably led hard lives and lacked the advantages of growing up in a family that valued education. But I stand by the underlying premise: an appreciation for space travel and all it embodies is a mark of civilization; the denial of those intangible riches is a kind of Philistinism. As it happens, the Flo episode was not the first time I made the connection between space and culture. Earlier that year, the Pasadena (Calif.) Star-News selected my sixth-grade class, apparently at random, to be the subject of an article on school kids and their interest in the Apollo project. "Their room is decorated with pictures showing the evolution of the rocket," the reporter wrote. "They talk about the moon the way that youngsters a generation ago talked about Antarctica." One can, if one is prepared to dip into the microfilm archives of the Pasadena Public Library, read little Gary Tracy's prediction that "in about 25 years the United States will be living on the moon." Beverly McCarter ventured that "with all the space traveling and experiments going on today, in approximately 24 to 50 years, other planets may be inhabited by beings . . . human beings." My own prediction was that by collaborating with other nations in space "we will find ourselves crawling out of our caves and starting the colonization of new worlds." The phrase "crawling out of our caves" was probably a dig at the teacher, whom I perceived to be a space Philistine of the first order. Mrs. Australopithecus (not her real name) showed no interest whatever in space exploration. All around her—in newspapers, on television, on the playground—excitement over Apollo was mounting, as each mission brought the world a step closer to that day in July 1969 when human beings would land on the moon. Yet Mrs. Australopithecus was unmoved. The rocket pictures the reporter mentioned had mysteriously appeared in our classroom the morning of his visit. We had had no class discussions, no science lessons, no essay assignments on space. At one point the teacher had gone so far as to tear up my drawing of a fanciful spacecraft, snapping, "That's not art!" That is precisely where she and other space Philistines are wrong. A spaceship is art, and the pathbreaking Apollo XI mission was art of the highest kind. The very names Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo are classical references of the sort that have dominated Western art for 2,000 years. The nod to Apollo was especially apt, as the Greek god was identified not only with sunlight but also with law, philosophy, medicine, poetry, and music—the finest achievements of civilization. The designers of the U.S. space program proceeded as all great artists do. They began with an improbable vision and, ignoring the high risk of failure, mustered all their intellectual powers to make it happen. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was once bare. Beethoven’s Ninth took shape in an empty notebook. When President Kennedy announced, “We choose to go to the moon,” the gulf between him and his destination lay stretched out like 240,000 miles of blank canvas. The gulf bridged by Project Apollo was more than just physical. Like other forms of art, space exploration has the power to speak across cultural and ideological divides. In the midst of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin’s first flight gave Americans a slap in the face, yet they could not hide their admiration and awe. The U.S. space program, launched in earnest by a Democratic president, reached its pinnacle under his Republican archrival. And on July 20, 1969, the impressionistic images from the moon found their way equally into living rooms in Tokyo and coffee houses in Ryadh. Those who watched on that day were treated to a work of art staged by an immense corps of talented performers. The preparation, the rehearsals, the synchronization of a million deft maneuvers were nothing short of ballet. And the presence of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, sympathetic but fallible human actors who at any moment could flub a line or miss a cue, gave Apollo XI an element of drama rarely seen outside of live theater. Art is about everything human beings do best. So is space. The inspiration, organization, courage, and technical skill embodied in both of these realms are a monument to all that we have learned in our several million years on earth. Unfortunately, artists and astronauts lead a similarly precarious existence. That is because the true value of what they do is difficult to measure in dollars. The more the U.S. space program is called upon to justify itself commercially, the more its fate will come to resemble that of arts funding in the schools. After all, the reasoning might go, if Johnny and Susie can do without violin lessons, they can certainly do without a trip to Mars. And indeed they can. It’s just that the world they will inherit is beginning to look a lot like Bedrock. db |