We Have to Return to the Moon

There are very few people under age 50 today that actually remembers watching Neil Armstrong step off the lunar lander to make the first human footprint on a world other than the earth. That’s because it has been 40 years this July since that event took place.

It was a monumental moment in history. It was a giant milestone of human exploration. Every other place that intrepid explorers, from Magellan to Columbus to Lewis and Clark, ever set foot on for the first time was simply another region on this earth. Many of the places these great explorers discovered were actually already occupied by other humans. They were discovered for Europe, but not for the human species.

But the lunar astronauts were different. They went somewhere that no human being had ever before visited in the history of the planet. No other human had ever even come close. It was a whole new world – literally.

But that was 40 years ago. We haven’t been back to the moon in more than 35 years. That’s more than a generation. Nobody who is 37 years old or older was even alive at the time the last explorer lifted off the surface of the moon.

We have not been back to the moon since then. Very seldom throughout history have nations discovered new lands and then decided not to returned to build permanent settlements. What if, after English explorers came to North America for the first time, they had returned home and never returned?

There should be colonies of humans living on the moon now. There should be mining operations going full kilt. There should be periodic transportation to and from the moon for civilian workers and even homesteaders. But there has not been one single human footprint left on the moon since 1972. Why?

The short answer is that our goal of going to the moon was motivated by the politics of the Cold War. The political climate isn’t what it used to be. And, in 1972, Pres. Nixon had more pressing domestic matters to worry about. But, in the interim, someone in power should have realized that we had landed on a new world and had not returned. That is, well, unhuman.

The Bush Administration has set a timetable to return to the moon by 2020. That’s too far out. It took less than a decade for this country to go from launching its first satellite to landing a man on the moon. When Bush announced his timeline in 2005, he gave us 15 years to just get back to a place we’ve already been.

Incoming president Barack Obama wants to speed things up. He is considering the option of linking NASA, the civilian space agency, with the Department of Defense. Using some of the Pentagon’s budget to aid NASA would speed things along a bit.

But whatever means they devise to figure out the logistics, it needs to be done, and the sooner the better. This nation, the world, and the human species were meant to explore. We haven’t been doing a lot of that lately. We have been preoccupied with terrorism, the economy, and overthrowing minor regimes.

We can only move ahead as a country and a species if we go back to exploring our frontiers. Deep-sea exploration and the conquest of outer space are lagging. If we continue to let them lag, we will be in trouble.

Our early space exploration efforts have led to things we now take for granted. Worldwide communication, the Internet, cell phones, GPS devices, advanced medical technologies, calculators, imaging devices, night-vision cameras, weather prediction, Velcro, Tang, and digital technology owe their existence to early space exploration.

The future of our species utterly depends on our ability to go into space. As a species, our time on Earth is limited. Even if we don’t destroy the environment ourselves, there are natural events that will. Throughout Earth’s history, there have been major extinction-level events. There have been asteroid and comet impacts. There have been eruptions of super-volcanoes. There have been magnetic reversals.

All these catastrophic events have taken place repeatedly and it is with utter certainty that they will occur again. Most of the life on earth was erased in short order on more than one occasion in our planet’s history. It will definitely happen again. When it will happen is the only question. And if we haven’t started sending members of our species out into space to build a new frontier there, we will become extinct. That is a certainty.