I just saw “First Man”, the Neil
Armstrong biopic. It was quite good, but there were moments that were hard to
watch. Because I was a boy who grew up in the 1960’s, I knew when the movie was
approaching a point where something bad was going to happen. The movie did a
good job making me like the characters (real people) so that made their deaths
hard to take.
People did die during the space race.
They died firstly, because space travel is inherently dangerous. There is just no
margin of error. NASA backed up whatever components that could be backed up, but there were many mission critical components
(components that, were they to fail, would result in the loss of the mission). Some
components simply could not be backed up. If your main engine shuts off: loss
of mission. If your fuel tank ruptures: loss of mission. They tried to plan for
everything they could think about, but that leads me to the second reason
people died during the space race: it was a race. You can do a good job
planning for known risks. It is hard to plan for unknown risks. If you are
trying to beat the Russians to the moon (or get to the moon by the end of the
decade as John F. Kennedy proposed), you are going to push the envelope. I
won’t say that NASA knowingly cut any corners, but if you have a deadline, it
changes your approach. You simply don't have time to test for every possible
contingency.
If you were methodically planning a
moon landing without a deadline, you
would probably do a lot more testing of systems. You would, as a logical
interim step, build a space station as a staging platform. You would also
probably just spend a lot more time in space, (and on the ground) learning what
the unknowns are. It probably would
have cost less too, or at least the cost would have been spread out over many
more budget cycles, instead of cramming all of it into an eight year period.
In any event, it worked. We did get a
manned mission to the moon before 1970. It was an enormous achievement. I don’t
think people who were not alive in the 1960’s can fathom the truly
awe-inspiring feeling that suffused the world when Neil Armstrong finally set
foot on the moon. They did all this without modern computers. Oh, they had
computers; clunky machines that took up whole rooms and probably had less
computing power than my phone. But they did it. The cost was high in dollars,
and the cost was high in human life. America lost three astronauts in the
Apollo 1 fire. The Russians lost cosmonauts during this period as well.
To be sure, history shows us that
space is still hazardous even when you are not racing. I continue to think that
space is worth exploring. It is our human nature to try to understand things
and you can only understand new things by exploring them. But let’s not race to
the Moon or Mars, or anywhere else. Let’s do it methodically and cost
effectively.
(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an
ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online
sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out
soon).
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