By Sandor Slomovits

Fifty years ago, December 1972, was the last time men walked on the moon. (Yes, it’s only been men. I’ll get back to that later.) Eugene Cernan, Commander of that Apollo 17 mission said then as he prepared to step off the moon for the last time, “… as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come—but we believe not too long into the future …”

In fact, it has been fifty years, quite a long time by human standards. It wasn’t until November of 2022 that NASA launched Artemis 1, an un-crewed flight to orbit the moon. Artemis, in Greek mythology, is the twin sister of Apollo, which was the name of the first NASA program that sent Americans to the moon. NASA’s plan is to follow Artemis 1 with a crewed mission in 2024 to also orbit the moon, and by the following year to again begin landing astronauts on the lunar surface.

Our nation’s reasons for returning to the moon now are very similar to the ones that animated our decision to go there when President Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon,” over sixty years ago. The primary impetus for those first Apollo flights was to get to the moon before the Soviet Union did. Now it seems that the US once again wants to demonstrate that our country is the world leader in space, this time competing against joint Chinese/Russian space ambitions.

But it’s not accurate to cynically attribute everything about the space program to geopolitical rivalry. (I’m choosing here to focus only on the moon missions. Of course, NASA and the space programs of a number of other countries have launched many other spacecrafts into, and even beyond our solar system, including landing probes on Venus and Mars.) There were, undeniably, many other reasons why we entered the space race, why we stopped focusing on lunar missions after 1972, and why we are once again planning on returning to the moon. It’s beyond the scope of this essay—or perhaps more truthfully, of this essayist—to list and fully explore all those reasons. Instead, I’ve been looking back along history’s space-time continuum and thinking about the echoes and resonances—encouraging ones as well as disheartening ones—between where our country was in 1972 and where we are today.

Fifty years ago:

Barely more than a month after the crew of Apollo 17 returned from the moon in 1972, the Vietnam war effectively ended in January of 1973, though the last American troops did not come home for a couple more months, and the fall of Saigon, in April of 1975, was still two years in the future.

Today:

The Afghanistan war, America’s longest, (Vietnam was our second longest) ended in August of 2021 a little more than a year before the first scheduled Artemis launch. Both the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars ended with massive and dramatic evacuations of troops and civilians, from Saigon in 1975, and from Kabul in 2021.

And although the US is not now fighting in Ukraine, we are very involved in the conflict, which still has the potential of flaring into a much wider conflagration. And the war is having a deleterious effect on our economy, and those of many other countries, as well as on food and energy supplies around the globe.

Fifty years ago:

Watergate began in June 1972 with the discovery of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and ended when Nixon resigned in August of 1974—though one could convincingly argue that the scandal’s damaging ripples and shock waves have not subsided even yet.

Today:

Well… suffice it to say that many events in the last six years have made Nixon and his gang of crooks appear as virtuous as the holiest of saints and made the Watergate break-in look like a grade school April Fool prank.

Fifty years ago:

The long overdue Civil Rights Act was barely eight years old in 1972, Martin Luther King had been murdered four years earlier, the Supreme Court had recently affirmed busing as a means of achieving integration in public schools, and the shameful Tuskegee Study was finally stopped, forty years after it began.

Today:

George Floyd’s murder in May of 2020, along with many other injustices, has prompted a renewed attention to racial disparities and social justice issues perhaps not seen since the Sixties.

Fifty years ago:

The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress in March of 1972 but was not ratified by a sufficient number of states to be included in the Constitution. On the other hand, Title IX was signed into law in June of 1972, and in January of 1973 the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling recognized the right to abortion.

Today:

In June of 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but the results of the November 2022 midterm elections clearly signaled that the majority of the country supports women’s reproductive rights. And NASA recently publicly committed to include a woman and a person of color in the first Artemis crew that will land on the moon. At present, half of the 18 astronauts training in the Artemis program are women and, while people of color are still under-represented among astronauts, they are there.

Which brings us back to the future, the prediction of which, unfortunately, is also beyond the scope of this essayist. But here are a few thoughts on, and hopes for, the future of humanity’s space programs.

One of the main objections many people, politicians and the public alike, have had about the US space program is its expense. Landing the first Apollo mission on the moon is estimated to have cost about 20 billion dollars. I agree that there were and are many other needs here on earth that were and are not being addressed with adequate funding. However, compared to the unfathomable waste of resources, not to mention the horrific loss of American and other lives in the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, or the cost of our political campaigns, about 17 billion dollars in just the recent 2022 election, even taking into account the comparative worth of 1972 and 2022 dollars, I know we can find funding for NASA, and many other things, by limiting some of those expenses.

Even though it’s been fifty years since we last went to the moon, Americans and all of humanity, face many of the same concerns—war, political upheaval, racism, and misogyny—that bedeviled us in 1972, but we’ve also added a couple—climate change and worldwide extinctions—that dwarf them all. It’s worth noting that it was partly the remarkable technological advances, especially orbiting satellites, that were developed by the space programs of the US, Russia, and a number of other nations, that enabled scientists to gather the data to comprehend the threat of climate change. It was James Hansen, longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who testified before the US Senate in 1988, and delivered perhaps the first warning of the dangers of climate change.

For a number of years now, some people have suggested that we should be going to the moon, Mars, and beyond, to colonize “spares” if or when our Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change or some other disaster, man-made or otherwise. I am willing to go way out on Earth’s gravitational limb to suggest that this hypothetical cosmic rapture plan seems profoundly Icarian, utterly untethered from reality, and unfathomably dystopian to boot. Creating small sustainable outposts on the moon and Mars will certainly become possible, perhaps even in the lifetime of some people already born. However, the idea of moving humanity (eight billion as of November 15, 2022) off the planet… I don’t think so. (If you thought the evacuations of Saigon and Kabul were desperate and chaotic! If we all don’t get to go—with our pets…)

Instead, I think that the best possible outcome of our space explorations might be the development of universal awe and gratitude for our home here on earth, and united and unanimous efforts to heal the planet’s ills. I also think that we need to fiercely strive not to repeat in space the innumerable and immense mistakes of our past earthbound colonizations.

In the 1950s and 60s the US and the Soviet Union each flew solo in their space programs, but even by 1967, with the signing of the Outer Space Treaty by the US, Soviet Union, and Great Britain, there was consensus that space was to be explored only for peaceful purposes, even if we hadn’t managed that on Earth. Since then, the vast majority of countries on Earth have signed that agreement, and in the past half century there have been many, many examples of cooperative ventures in space, including by countries like the US and Russia, that have had difficulty cooperating on much else. The Artemis program, for example, while headed by the US, is a partnership with the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and nearly two dozen other countries.

We can hope that this tradition continues and grows. We should hope that the current heightened tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine, and between the US and China over Taiwan, will not for long curtail cooperation in space, even if only in that one area. We can also hope that human beings will continue to “slip the surly bonds of earth” in space and, perhaps find a way to remove more surly bonds on humanity here on earth.

As Eugene Cernan, the last man on the moon in 1972 said when he stepped off the lunar surface for the last time, “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”