Another Race to the Moon

The race to put a man on the moon is on. And in recent weeks, there was a lot of news about it. The U.S. simply has to get there before China does.

Our effort is called Artemis. We’d planned to have astronauts in Artemis II circling the moon by this November, then Artemis III landing a crew on the moon next year. The Chinese say they expect to put a man on the Moon in 2030. Heh-heh. So we will have beaten them.

Well, not so fast. To everyone’s horror, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced last week that the trip circling the moon would be delayed at least to 2025. And the landing on the Moon would be delayed until at least 2026 or even 2027.

In a test, gasses had leaked out of the spaceship and they don’t know why. There was trouble with the temperature. And the thermostat. And the ventilation system. And with the battery. And the heat shield.

On almost the same day as this announcement, a no-longer used 5,400-pound space capsule circling the earth began its journey back down through the atmosphere to soon crash-land on Earth somewhere. On land it seems. But not clear where. Uh-oh.

“The safety of our astronauts is NASA’s top priority as we prepare for future Artemis missions,” Nelson said.

After Nelson’s speech, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) spoke to his fellow congresswoman and congressmen.

“I remind my colleagues that we are not the only country interested in sending humans to the moon,” Lucas said. “The country that lands first will have the ability to set a precedent for whether future lunar activities are conducted with openness and transparency or in a more restricted manner.”

Ah yes. Democracy must prevail on the moon. No dictatorships allowed.

Wait a minute. Didn’t we already win the race to the moon? I seem to remember this. After we won, we sent astronauts to the moon six more times. Bt in 1972, we stopped going. And nobody else went there either.

I remember all this well. I was 30 years old when we first went to the moon. The eastern end of Long Island, with a whole lot of laboratories, research and manufacturing facilities, played a big part in this effort. Twelve years earlier, in 1957, the Russians sent off Sputnik I, an artificial satellite circling the Earth. This had never been done before. The next month they sent a dog in a satellite circling the Earth, and then Yuri Gagarin, a very short 5 foot 2 inch Soviet cosmonaut. This was a first for that. But the Russians had yet to get to the moon.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced we would land on the moon before the end of the decade. We would beat the Russians. I was 21 years old and living in Montauk when he announced this. And so I remember with great fondness what we here on the East End did to be part of this effort. We had Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory studying scientific theories.

We had Brookhaven National Laboratory, whose giant cyclotron could bang atoms together. We had Grumman building state-of-the-art jet fighters. Albert Einstein worked on his unified theory in a cottage in Southold. Now there was this new challenge. For the flight to the moon, NASA asked Grumman to build the lunar rover. And they did.

And so on July 20, 1969, the two American astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, walked around, then climbed up into the lunar rover and rode off into the sunset, the Earth sunset, for the, er, day. I remember that they planted an American flag. Then Armstrong teed up a golf ball and hit it. It went far. Gravity is less on the moon. Indeed, they spent many Earth hours, a whole Earth day, on the moon where, among other things, they gathered up rocks and dirt.

Meanwhile, high up, a guy named Michael Collins flew the rocket ship that got them there around and around the moon so it would be warm and ready for when Aldrin and Armstrong, after climbing into the moon lander, would blast off from the moon and fly back up to Collins for the trip home.

I always felt a little sorry for Collins. Went there. Never left the rocket. Never set foot on the moon. Then took those who did home. Ever hear of him?

The lunar rover, by the way, is still up there. Parked, I think, with the brakes set. The flag is still up there too.

Well, after we won, the Russians never did send anybody there.

Elon Musk says that Earth people should rocket to other planets and he’s up for it. But he also said he could build a vacuum-sealed machine to take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a New York minute. But that hasn’t worked.

Well, other countries, hearing the call, are sending rockets to the Moon. India, Japan, Russia (finally) and China. Hey! It’s rubble!

A hundred years from now, when global warming is reversed and everybody is out smiling and smelling the flowers, surfing the waves, climbing the mountains and communing with nature, they will remember that America won the race to land humans on the moon. As for what happened 53 years after that, they’ll think it was some blip in history, when everyone, obsessed with something called a cell phone, simply forgot what they’d already done all those years before.

Tsk, tsk.