"One small step for a man. One giant moondoggle for NASA."
Fifty years ago today, I did not watch Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon. About 650 million people did.
It was not that I forgot about it. It was that I walked out of the room where the TV was broadcasting it (sort of).
The world was waiting to see the first man on the moon. The TV commentators kept chattering. No one knew when Armstrong would emerge from the module and walk down the steps to the moon. I kept waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. The commentators chattered.
It was a Sunday evening. My future father-in-law, R. J. Rushdoony, was scheduled to give his Sunday evening lecture at a home in Pasadena. I accompanied him to that meeting. His family was in attendance.
We all sat there, watching the screen, waiting for something to happen. The commentators chattered on and on. They had to fill empty airtime. They, too, were waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
Rushdoony was not a fan of the moon project. He thought it was a hugely expensive publicity stunt by the government. He eventually ran out of patience. He announced that he was going to give his talk. So, we all politely followed him into the patio area where he gave his presentation. I do not recall what he said. I do remember what he did. He walked out on the biggest TV event in history. So, I missed this.
It didn't bother me at the time. It doesn't bother me today.
Rushdoony said at the time that no one would remember any further moonwalks or moon walkers. He was right. Do you really remember any of these people? Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, James Young, and Charles Duke walked on the moon. Can you name the last two men who walked on the moon? One of them was Gene Cernan. If you remember his name, it may be because he was one of the seven Mercury astronauts. He was mentioned, but had no lines, in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff. He was on the final flight in 1972. His fellow moon-walker was Harrison Schmitt.
The only Apollo flight that anybody remembers is Apollo 13, the flight that had the accident. None of those three astronauts ever walked on the moon. It was a snafu that made Apollo 13 memorable. (For younger readers, a snafu was the equivalent of a fubar.) Tom Hanks made Apollo 13 even more famous -- the same actor who immortalized the word "fubar."
One moon walker whose name you probably do remember is Alan Shepard. That is because he was the first American to go into space. That was in 1961. He was heavily featured in the movie. He was played by Scott Glenn.
NASA'S BUDGET
In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Apollo project cost $288 billion.
A few months after Apollo XI, I wrote an article for The Freeman about the entire project, and what lay behind it. I began with this observation.
The flight of Apollo XI was probably the most stupendous technological achievement of the decade. (Unquestionably, it was the most stupendous bureaucratic achievement of the decade: scheduled for 1969, it actually took place in 1969!) Editorials in every paper in America, I suppose, have lauded the flight as the monument to the capacities of mankind to conquer nature and order our affairs, the assumption being that the ability to fly a rocket implies the ability to organize a society, in theory if not in practice.
That was the problem, I said. People confused central economic planning with decentralized free-market planning. These are not the same. A government bureaucracy can plan and execute a narrowly focused technological project. That is completely different from integrating all of the plans of free men by means of voluntary exchanges on a free market. For this kind of planning, there is no narrowly defined goal.
In the late 1960's, we kept hearing about "spaceship earth." Defenders of centralized planning kept referring to the world as a spaceship. But a spaceship is run by a captain. It is a military command system. It has a narrowly defined goal. The earth's inhabitants are not riding on a spaceship. There is no military chain of command. There is no single bureaucratic goal. There is no guaranteed government funding that is financed by compulsory taxation.
I quoted William Pollard, a defender of spaceship earth's imagery, who was part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. He wrote this in 1967:
Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civilization could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently necessary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be permitted.
While there were a few more Apollo flights, the novelty had worn off by 1972. NASA could no longer get enough support from politicians to send any more astronauts to the moon and back. The great theme of The Right Stuff came true: "no bucks, no Buck Rogers." That was the end of the moondoggles.
CONCLUSION
Today, there is talk about sending a man to Mars. NASA needs that. One estimate is that this will cost $230 billion. This assumes no cost overruns. That would be for the first trip. There would, of course, be more trips. "More bucks, more Buck Rogers."
I close with a performance of "Mr. O'Reilly" by my friend Steve Gillette, who wrote it. The sound is not great, but the message is.
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