To Boldly Go Where No Man Had Gone Before

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"The mission was Apollo 11. It was the capstone of an extraordinary effort ... and while men could argue endlessly over whether it had been worth the cost, its success was undeniably an American triumph."

William Manchester

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When this day dawned 45 years ago, many things were true that would not be true anymore when the sun went down.

July 16, 1969 was a Wednesday. I don't know if Wednesday was known colloquially as "Hump Day" then as it is today, but millions of Americans got up that morning and went to work, just as they did every weekday morning. Some commuted great distances — as some do today.

It was summer, which meant that some families were on vacation road trips to landmarks, beaches, amusement parks or baseball games.

Wanderlust is deeply embedded in the American DNA, but, no matter how far any other Americans traveled in July 1969, the concept of travel would be forever changed by three men. Travel generally implies a destination of some kind, and those three men gave that word a makeover on this day.

Those three men — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — were the crew of Apollo 11, NASA's fifth manned space mission of the Apollo program.

In recent years, Americans had seen many manned space missions lift off in the Mercury and Gemini programs as well as the Apollo program. They knew the risks all too well, having witnessed the fiery deaths of three astronauts during a ground test for Apollo 1 a couple of years earlier. They knew there was nothing routine about space travel.

Except the destination.

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"Apollo 11, with its 36–story–high Saturn 5 rocket, was fired at Cape Kennedy's launch complex 39A at 9:32 on the morning of July 16, 1969. ... The Saturn's third stage put them into an orbit at a height of 118 miles. After a 2½–hour check of all instruments systems, they refired the third stage. This gave them a velocity ... sufficient to throw them beyond the earth's atmosphere and on their way to the moon, a quarter–million miles away."

William Manchester

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The eventual destination for Apollo 11 would be — as it had been for all space missions that had gone before — a splashdown. American missions splashed down in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and Apollo 11 was scheduled to complete its mission with a splashdown in the Pacific.

But in between the liftoff 45 years ago today and the splashdown eight days later, Apollo 11 did something that no other mission had done. It stopped somewhere — the moon. Two members of the crew descended to the moon's surface and walked around. They planted a flag to show they had been there.

And they left the first of several piles of space–travel debris.

On this anniversary, I suppose it is appropriate to wonder what kind of future, if any, America's space program has.

Aldrin has been an advocate of one–way missions for the first travelers to Mars.

And recently he revealed that he saw a UFO during Apollo 11's journey to the moon.

If that one–way trip to Mars materializes, the first travelers might expect to encounter a UFO as well — although Aldrin conceded that it could have been sunlight reflecting off panels from the spaceship. Since he does not know which panel, it qualifies (technically) as unidentified, and it was a flying object — just not, apparently, a flying saucer.

But Aldrin has also said that he believes there must be life somewhere else. If that is true, it seems at least possible that a spaceship from earth bound for Mars could encounter a UFO.

No one knows how long it will take a manned rocket to make the journey. So far, only unmanned probes have been sent, but it typically takes six months to a year for them to cover the 55 million–kilometer distance.

Surely they will bump into a real flying saucer during that time.

Ride, Sally Ride

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Nearly a year ago, Sally Ride, America's first female astronaut, died of cancer at the age of 61.

It's a shame she couldn't have lived another year because today is the 30th anniversary of her historic trip into outer space, and it would be fascinating to get her perspective on how things in general have changed for women in the last three decades.

Things have changed for both genders in terms of space travel; actually, things have changed quite a bit for the space program in general. The United States put the space shuttle in mothballs a couple of years ago. Once in awhile, there is talk of reviving the programs of traveling to the moon or just into space — or beginning work on the much more ambitious goal of traveling to Mars — but little has come of such talk.

And, in spite of some protests to the contrary, it is plausible to argue — in some quarters — that little has changed for women since that time.

I guess it depends on what one considers progress and how long one thinks it is reasonable to wait for it.

A woman had already been appointed to the Supreme Court by the time of Ride's historic journey into space. No women had been nominated prior to that; three more have been appointed and currently sit on the Court today.

Since this day 30 years ago, both major political parties have put women on their national tickets — the Democrats were first a year after Ride's flight, it took the Republicans two dozen years to do the same.

There are arguments to be made about how women are portrayed in the popular media, whether they are given more or less respect as a demographic group. And there are certainly arguments to be made about inequities in pay — although, in the economy we've had for the last 5½ years, it may be more relevant to compare unemployment and underemployment rates for the sexes.

But I wonder if it is appropriate even to discuss those things on this day. Ride's achievement was her own. It was never suggested, never even implied, that her accomplishment would change the lives of American women.

It may have opened some doors in the space program for women, but it certainly wasn't why Geraldine Ferraro or Sarah Palin were chosen to run for vice president — and Sandra Day O'Connor had been on the Supreme Court for nearly two years when Ride went into space so it makes no sense to say that Sally Ride influenced Supreme Court nominations.

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It was part of the steady drip–drip–drip of history that signals an inevitability of some kind.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was like that. It didn't cause immediate change, but, little by little, attitudes were changed and barriers were torn down.

That is often how history works. Change rarely comes as quickly as some people want, but eventually it comes.

Sally Ride made her contribution to the evolution of women's role in our culture 30 years ago.

But she was a very private woman. Few people knew of her long–term same–sex relationship or of her eventually fatal illness until after she died.

I don't feel she was motivated by a desire to be a role model at anything other than being a good and dedicated astronaut — which she was.

Some Random Thoughts About Mom and Freedom 7

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I have mixed emotions today.

Today is the 16th anniversary of my mother's death in a flash flood. It is always a grim anniversary for me, and I am always glad when it is behind me.

But today is a milestone anniversary of another sort. May 5 will always be a grim day for me, but it is less grim than usual today because of that other anniversary, the milestone.

Half a century ago today, I guess you could say that America really entered the space race.

There had been other events in man's reach for the stars — slightly more than three weeks earlier, Russia's Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and America had been dabbling in unmanned spacecraft for awhile — but it was on this day that Alan Shepard (in the Freedom 7) became the first American in space. It was a short flight, about 15 minutes, but it was really the foundation for U.S. manned space travel in the 1960s and 1970s. The lessons that were learned in that short time made everything that followed possible.

(I'm not sure how the space agency arrived at the name. The number 7, I have been told, came from the fact that the capsule that was chosen was labeled #7 in a group of capsules — but seven, after all, is considered a lucky number. Coincidence?

(As for the Freedom part of the name, well, I haven't heard any stories about how it was chosen, but that's one of those American–sounding words, like liberty and justice and democracy.)

Nearly a decade later, Shepard was the commander of Apollo 14 and became the fifth man to walk on the moon. He would have been the seventh man to walk on the moon if the previous mission, Apollo 13, had been able to land. But it was prevented from doing so by a design defect.

My mother had Shepard's pioneering spirit, I think. She was a community activist when I was a child — and she was part of the successful local movement to switch our county from paper ballots to voting machines.

The people who live there now probably take it for granted that they can cast their votes on voting machines, but it was not always that way.

When my family moved to my home county in Arkansas, paper ballots were still being used there, and the people who held office held all the cards. They knew all sorts of ways to manipulate votes with those paper ballots, and I remember hearing my parents speak with their friends about their wish to break "the machine."

Thanks to the efforts of my mother and her friends and colleagues, the vice–like grip that the old–fashioned kind of machine had on my home county was broken forever.

I think Mom would be pleased to know that her achievement has lived on and thrived. Elections there appear to be more open today than at any time in her lifetime.

I think she would be proud of that — and, if she could have chosen the day that she died, she might well have chosen the anniversary of the day that the first American traveled in space. I don't know.

I do know, however, that I'm proud of Mom. Always will be. And I miss her very much.