{"id":1312596,"date":"2019-07-18T22:20:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-19T04:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-apollo-11s-achievement-still-dazzles\/"},"modified":"2019-07-19T14:33:50","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T20:33:50","slug":"will-column-apollo-11s-achievement-still-dazzles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-apollo-11s-achievement-still-dazzles\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzles"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WASHINGTON \u00ad\u2014 Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission 239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story the Irish author Frank O\u2019Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O\u2019Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, \u201cThey had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space.\u201d Kennedy said this on Nov. 21, 1963, in San Antonio. The next day: Dallas.<\/p>\n

To understand America\u2019s euphoria about the moon landing 50 years ago, remember 51 years ago: 1968 was one of America\u2019s worst years \u2014 the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated, urban riots. President Kennedy\u2019s May 25, 1961, vow to reach the moon before 1970 came 43 days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to enter outer space and orbit the Earth, and 38 days after the Bay of Pigs debacle. When Kennedy audaciously pointed to the moon, America had only sent a single astronaut on a 15-minute suborbital flight.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s goal was reckless, and exhilarating leadership. Given existing knowledge and technologies, it was impossible. But Kennedy said the space program would \u201cserve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.\u201d It did. The thrilling story of collaborative science and individual daring is told well in HBO\u2019s 12-part \u201cFrom the Earth to the Moon,\u201d and PBS\u2019s three-part \u201cChasing the Moon,\u201d and in the companion volume with that title, by Robert Stone and Alan Andres, who write:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe American effort to get to the moon was the largest peacetime government initiative in the nation\u2019s history. At its peak in the mid-1960s, nearly 2% of the American workforce was engaged in the effort to some degree. It employed more than 400,000 individuals, most of them working for 20,000 different private companies and 200 universities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cspace race\u201d began as a Cold War competition, military and political. Even before Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, jolted Americans\u2019 complacency in 1957 (10 days after President Dwight Eisenhower sent paratroopers to Little Rock\u2019s Central High School), national security was at stake in the race for rockets with ever-greater thrusts to deliver thermonuclear warheads with ever-greater accuracy.<\/p>\n

By 1969, however, the Soviet Union was out of the race to the moon, a capitulation that anticipated the Soviets\u2019 expiring gasp, two decades later, when confronted by the technological challenge of Ronald Reagan\u2019s Strategic Defense Initiative. By mid-1967, a majority of Americans no longer thought a moon landing was worth the expense.<\/p>\n

But it triggered a final flaring of postwar confidence and pride. \u201cThe Eagle has landed\u201d came as defiant last words of affirmation, at the end of a decade that, Stone and Andres note, had begun with harbingers of a coming culture of dark irony and satire: Joseph Heller\u2019s novel \u201cCatch-22\u201d (1961) and Stanley Kubrick\u2019s film \u201cDr. Strangelove\u201d (1964).<\/p>\n

Photos of Earth taken from the moon were said to herald a global sense of humanity\u2019s common destiny. Osama bin Laden was 12 in 1969.<\/p>\n

Stone and Andres say Apollo 11 was hurled upward by engines burning \u201c15 tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene per second, producing energy equal to the combined power of 85 Hoover Dams.\u201d People spoke jauntily of \u201cthe conquest of space.\u201d Well.<\/p>\n

The universe, 99.9 (and at least 58 other 9s) percent of which is already outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere, is expanding (into we know not what) at 46 miles per second per megaparsec. (One megaparsec is approximately 3.26 million light years.) Astronomers are studying light that has taken perhaps 12 billion years to reach their instruments. This cooling cinder called Earth, spinning in the darkness at the back of beyond, is a minor speck of residue from the Big Bang, which lasted less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second 13.8 billion years ago. The estimated number of stars \u2014 they come and go \u2014 is 100 followed by 22 zeros. The visible universe (which is hardly all of it) contains more than 150 billion galaxies, each with billions of stars. But if there were only three bees in America, the air would be more crowded with bees than space is with stars. The distances, and the violently unheavenly conditions in \u201cthe heavens,\u201d tell us that our devices will roam our immediate cosmic neighborhood, but in spite of Apollo 11\u2019s still-dazzling achievement, we are not really going anywhere.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u00ad\u2014 Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission 239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story the Irish author Frank O\u2019Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O\u2019Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, \u201cThey had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1312596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-20 23:44:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1312619,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312596\/revisions\/1312619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}