It has been almost 50 years since that warm, sunny day on 16 July 1969 when I saw Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins walk down the ramp in their white spacesuits, headed for the Moon.
While almost five decades gives us some historical perspective on the event, the true significance may not be clear for perhaps a century after Apollo 11 – the year 2069.
Today’s teenagers will be retirees then and a whole new generation of potential space explorers will arise.
Where will we be in space in 2069? One possibility is that given the huge costs of space exploration and the huge budget deficits of our time, human space endeavours will largely be limited to unmanned satellites and human-occupied, Earth-orbiting space stations.
The expensive SLS rocket, with current NASA budgets (about $19 billion yearly in constant dollars), will be available only once a year, not enough to support a Moon base or to land astronauts on Mars (as opposed to orbiting the planet). Under this pessimistic scenario, human exploration beyond LEO (Low-Earth Orbit) will be limited to lunar orbit flights without landings or a surface base.
A round-trip to rendezvous with one of the Martian moons might occur in the 2030s, but there would not be enough funds for a human Mars lander and Earth Return Vehicle. Space travel in Earth orbit would remain a curiosity, available only to rich space tourists. NASA would cede the means of Earth orbit access to commercial companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin, but would retain a tight hold on activities beyond Earth’s orbit.
If this bleak but realistic scenario plays out, then space exploration will become an endeavour just for scientists, the wealthy and ‘space geeks’. It will not play a major role in the national consciousness, but rather remain a sideshow sandwiched in between the latest fictional movies and popular music culture. It will not inspire young people, for whom space travel is a relatively routine event and landings on the Moon are all but ancient history.
The opposite viewpoint was best expressed by Wernher von Braun at the press conference I attended just before the Apollo 11 launch. When the rocket scientist was asked about the significance of the upcoming event, he compared it to “aquatic life crawling on land for the first time.” This optimistic viewpoint sees the Apollo program as the first step in the human species expanding its existence to a whole New Frontier in space.
The ‘holy grail’ of space development and settlement has been to involve commercial companies, with their access to the large amount of capital required to develop a space infrastructure for mining and other commercial activities. It is significant that huge profits from the relatively newborn internet have been the source of much of this recent commercial space business development.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen and other digital billionaires have provided good business sense and hundreds of millions of dollars in seed money to the commercial space sector. Other entrepreneurs, such as George Bigelow and Sir Richard Branson, have taken profits from other industries, such as lodging in Bigelow’s case and music and airlines with Branson, to fund start-up space ventures. With NASA budgets unlikely to increase very much beyond inflation, commercial space companies will likely be the prime movers for making space a place for tourism, and for economic development such as mining the Moon or asteroids.
Humanity has come to a fork in the road and either our civilization will remain Earth-centred, or men and women in the distant future will look upon Apollo 11 as the start of human expansion beyond Earth and into the solar system – perhaps eventually even to the stars.
It was a life-changing experience for a young teenager, just turned 19, to be an eyewitness to the historic events of Apollo 11. I was privileged to meet brave astronauts like Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin, who all would later walk on the Moon.
I was fortunate to see firsthand the remarkable facilities NASA had constructed and perfected at Cape Kennedy in Florida. I was honoured that mankind could truly see how small the Earth is in relation to the rest of the Solar System, to the Milky Way galaxy we inhabit, and to the cosmos itself.
David Chudwin is a medical doctor and space enthusiast who, as a teenager, covered the Apollo 11 launch from Florida as a college journalist. The above is an edited extract from his book: I Was A Teenage Space Reporter: For Apollo 11 To Our Future In Space which is available to buy now from LID Publishing for £9.99
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