Tom Wolfe Has Me Rethinking the Space Program

Maybe Will Blythe had the best two sentences in yesterday's Book Review, Jess, but in Saturday's New York Times, I grudgingly admit, Tom Wolfe took the cake. To prepare us all for tonight's 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing—too bad the networks won't be running the original footage, since, as Sam pointed out, NASA taped over it—Wolfe wrote a little obituary for the space program. The moon landing, Wolfe argues, was both NASA's moment of triumph and "a real knee in the groin for NASA."

I've never been one of Wolfe's idolators—it's hard to appreciate the insane brilliance of writing so saturated with self-satisfaction. And I can't even talk about the white suit. But Wolfe was there in late sixties America—chronicling Radical Chic and all that—and I wasn't. So I read on.

What Wolfe's brief history of the Space Race really drives home is what a dude's race it was. The piece made me wonder whether, if there had been more women in charge in 1969, the moon would have become such a holy grail. I'm inclined to think not; I feel like a female president or congressional leadership would have found other things to pursue with our time and money, as Wolfe tells us the men in charge at the time did—just as soon as they touched that elusive pie in the sky (which was, incidentally, the classical emblem of virginity).     

But the end of Wolfe's eulogy also left me questioning whether the space program (which actually isn't dead—ETA Mars: 2030) is still just game for boys and their toys. I continue to think of affordable health care, reproductive rights, and finding new ways of sustaining ourselves on this planet as way higher priorities, but the ideas of the late NASA scientist Wernher von Braun, which Wolfe paraphrases (always dangerous), gave me pause:

"Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that ... will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars ... We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of."

Is it just me, or does von Braun's message have an almost maternal ring to it? With all of the drilling and burning and warming we do on Earth, maybe we should put more resources into finding an alternate home for our children's children.  Or is this just good ole' Tom once again flaunting his powers of manipulation?

Photograph of the lunar landing by NASA/Getty Images.

Comments

Death from above!

By: Vanessa | Tue, 07/21/2009 - 12:36

Long before the sun burns out we're due to be hit by a gigantic piece of falling rock that will make living on the planet mighty difficult. I've always thought that learning how to live on less habitable planets, and having backup populations that aren't stuck to this one globe, might be a good way to prepare ourselves.

Or we could try to end all human suffering first. Either way, really. Dying out would certainly be one way to end all human suffering quite definitively.

joy of flight

By: tnkabttnkn | Tue, 07/21/2009 - 02:05

Every comment I've seen about spending space program money on social programs and other issues on earth miss the point. Going to the moon was a technological problem. It's trivially easy to solve compared to social problems such as getting people to use birth control or achieving consensus that abortion is not only a woman's right but a good idea.

I ask you to consider as well that space flight is uplifting. It gives us something to aspire to not just for selves before descendents. I absolutely love the idea of an Independent colony (or 100) on the moon. I doubly love the idea of building a new branch of the human race on Mars terraforming the heck out of it. I welcome the idea of energy so cheap it's actually cost effective to bring raw materials from the asteroids back to earth/moon. These are the joyous fantasies spaceflight offers. Spending the same money on social programs might solve part of the problem but more often than not, you'll end up with the same depressing mess you started with. For example, LBJ's war on poverty. Had some successes but we still have a boatload of poor people, children living in shelters and even though it's just plain wrong, every attempt to fix it has failed.

So celebrate the uplifting, the acts of reckless abandon that inspire us to a brighter future. It's what makes us human.

The observation about the sun

By: bjan_1 | Mon, 07/20/2009 - 19:52

The observation about the sun is true as a matter of fact, but the timescales involved are so long that it is extremely likely that we would destroy ourselves in war or environmental catastrophe in the interim. Thus it seems that attending to worldly concerns, such as population growth control and peace, would be much more useful.

More puzzling to me is the "boys and their toys" discussion. I thought the whole point of womens' lib was to open up careers and lifestyles that had previously been open to men alone. Characterizing and judging grand projects on the basis of whether they are maternal or not strikes me as silly and irrelevant.