Another moon landing will take more than rocket science

By F D Flam

You don’t hear the phrase, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we…” much anymore. Perhaps that’s because it’s not clear that 21st-century America can put a person on the moon again.

The Wall Street Journal resurrected the expression in 2018, in a story about the cost overruns and bureaucratic snags hampering NASA’s Artemis program. The headline read, “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?”

It’s a valid question, considering the first lunar landing took place more than 50 years ago during the Apollo 11 mission, the realisation of a vision launched by President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy couldn’t have imagined the technological advances that have occurred since then. A common USB-C charger today has more computing power than the Apollo 11’s computer.

The last crewed moon landing was Apollo 17 in 1972.

There are many compelling reasons to return, including the prospect of establishing a scientific base on the moon and preparing for a crewed mission to Mars. Numerous scientific questions remain unanswered.

Several presidents have promised a return, but none have delivered. It was President George H.W. Bush who first proposed the US return to the moon, with the long-term goal of reaching Mars. That was back in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, but he couldn’t get Congress to back the idea with funding. President George W. Bush announced a renewed focus for the space program in a 2004 speech promising a return to the moon as a first step toward putting astronauts on Mars. Congress provided some funding, but when President Barack Obama took office, he pursued other goals.

President Donald Trump proposed Artemis during his first term, and since then, the project has been widely criticised for its delays, technical problems and escalating cost — already at $93 billion. To put that in context, the US spent almost $26 billion on the Apollo project between 1960 and 1973. That’s about $260 billion today, adjusted for inflation.

Things were much different when the first Apollo missions were launched, and technology wasn’t solely responsible for the program’s success. The US was in a race with the Soviet Union, both for strategic and technological dominance and national security. Americans and Congress were united in the cause. NASA had also inherited a wealth of talent from its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was created during World War I to help the US catch up to Europe in airplane technology before its mission expanded to include space flight.

“The United States and the Soviet Union were competing for the hearts and minds of the world’s public,” said Teasel Muir-Harmony, a science and technology historian and curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. It was no coincidence, she said, that Kennedy’s 1961 announcement of the program came shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, a failed CIA-planned operation to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Additionally, NASA has much more competition for talent than it did 50 — even 25 — years ago. Private space companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin can offer the same opportunities at salaries that dwarf those of civil servant jobs.

So perhaps the question isn’t what caused us to fall behind, but what was done right back then that allowed us to succeed?

A clue comes from the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. While the title suggests a focus on the space race, much of the book’s focus is on World War II and the Cold War eras, when NASA inherited both intellectual talent and experience solving gargantuan technological challenges.

Officials from the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, searched the local community for talented women to help improve the design of warplanes. Men were off fighting the war, which meant more jobs were open to them. Aeronautical labs needed mathematicians — “human computers” — as they were called. Langley directors advertised in newspapers and went on recruiting expeditions to women’s and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. They assumed people could learn about aeronautics on the job, as long as they were good at math.

Hidden Figures follows three Black women — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson — who are credited with making significant contributions to the Space Race. Johnson calculated trajectories for the first American in space (Alan Shepard) and the first American to orbit the Earth (John Glenn). Vaughan became an expert programmer in FORTRAN and the IBM mainframe computer. And Jackson, a computer (and later aerospace engineer), worked on wind tunnels and flight experiments.

Some of the hundreds of women who’d been hired at the lab left after the war, but many stayed to help with the new challenge: countering the threat of the Soviet Union, which was developing nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles.

While some estimates say 400,000 were working on the Apollo Program, Muir-Harmony says that’s an undercount. Those involved were devoted to the program and to being part of something big, she said. They worked around the clock.

There is still plenty to explore and reignite interest in moon missions. Much is unknown about the far side of the moon, which flyby missions have shown is lighter and has a thicker crust. China’s space program landed equipment there last year and brought back the first rock and soil samples. Both countries are interested in the location for its strategic importance — perhaps as a spot to build a permanent base.

The more we learn, the more scientific opportunities beckon. The first Artemis landing is aimed for the same region as the Chinese mission, an area called the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which scientists believe has stores of frozen water. The ability to extract water and other resources would facilitate the goals of building a base or scientific outpost. Water could also be used as a source of hydrogen to fuel missions further out.

Additionally, the relative silence of the far side would give radio astronomers the perfect perch for searching for signals from the early universe or even alien civilisations.

These projects could foster international cooperation and advance our understanding of Earth and the formation of our solar system. So far, they’ve yet to generate the same sense of urgency as, say, the fear of communism spreading during the Cold War.

We’ll surely go back, eventually, perhaps to build a scientific base or open the moon to tourism. But we might have to wait until the money, culture, politics and leadership all fall into alignment again.