AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
July 1994

"25th Anniversary"
Apollo's Heritage Betrayed
Brenda Forman

	It's July 1994, the 25th anniversary of the first Apollo 
moon landing.  Assorted observances, celebrations and 
national self-congratulations abound.

	Am I the only one who's depressed??

	Tell me, folks, just exactly what are we celebrating?  
Sure, it was arguably the 20th Century's most phenomenal 
technological achievement, a stupendous accomplishment by any 
standard you care to mention.  But then we abandoned it!  We 
walked away and we never looked back -- except to 
congratulate ourselves every ten years or so on old glories, 
as if we could rest on those laurels for all time.

	Indeed, we did more than walk away from our Apollo 
accomplishments; we systematically trashed them, in some 
instances seemingly by intent.  We destroyed the Saturn V and 
we never replaced it.  So the bitter, humiliating truth is 
that we couldn't go back to the moon today even if we decided 
we wanted to because we don't have the lift capability.

	We even had a space station back then -- Skylab.  But we 
threw that away, too.  For ten years now, we've supposedly 
been trying to build a new and improved successor for it but 
the prospects look increasingly dim.  Odds on, we get yet a 
further weary parade of redesigns, more and more vugraphs, 
plus a tedious infinitude of empty political rhetoric.  But a 
real space station?  Don't bet on it.

	I get even further depressed when I watch the remaining 
Apollo astronauts convene for various Apollo commemorations.  
Don't get me wrong -- I admire these guys enormously!  
They're impressive by any yardstick imaginable -- 
intellectual energy, post-Apollo career accomplishment, not 
to mention just plain good looks.  But smart, accomplished 
and handsome as they may be, they're in their 60s now, folks!  
Some have even died.  The others are growing older along with 
all the rest of us.  And for nearly 25 years now, nobody else 
has had the chance to carry on what they so brilliantly 
began.

	Not, I hasten to emphasize, for lack of candidates.  
Indeed, if every person on earth who would jump at the chance 
to explore the moon had been given the opportunity to do so, 
the moon would probably be a pretty thriving crossroads by 
now.  But we've never given them that opportunity.  Worse 
yet, we've no intention of doing so in any foreseeable 
future.

	We're also squelching our kids' finest dreams.  It seems 
like every third kid in school wants to grow up to be an 
astronaut.  But face it, folks, they haven't a snowball's 
chance in hell of making that dream come true.  Why?  Because 
we've no intention of building on the mighty Apollo legacy 
upon which we're congratulating ourselves so smugly this 
month.

	Frankly, I sometimes wonder these days whether there'll 
even be a decent space program for these eager youngsters to 
inherit.  If these kids really understood how we have 
neglected and degraded the Apollo heritage, they'd be pretty 
angry at us.  For that matter, we ought to be pretty angry at 
ourselves.

	The bitterest part of the whole sorry story is that it 
lay fully within our power to continue that dazzling 
accomplishment in a crescendo of achievement that would have 
put us permanently on the moon by the end of the 1980's.  (In 
the early 1970's, former Deputy NASA Administrator Dale Myers 
confidently expected us to have a functioning lunar base by 
1989.)  But instead, we decided we had "won" the "space race" 
and so we could just forget about the whole thing.  Which we 
did.

	Do you begin to see why I find our Apollo jubilations 
not merely depressing but embarrassing almost to the point of 
pain?  If we truly wanted to honor the Apollo achievement, we 
should forget the hypocritical rhetoric and press forward on 
the great path that the Apollo astronauts blazed so 
thrillingly that quarter-century ago.  And if we don't intend 
to do that, we ought to admit our own fecklessness and give 
the whole thing a rest.

	The true message of this anniversary is that we are 
guilty of a sustained, deliberate and massive betrayal of our 
century's grandest achievement.  Celebratory speeches are an 
insult to its memory.  Public penance would be more to the 
point.