History of space travel: Artemis at the moon UPDATED

I watched quite a bit of the NASA YouTube channel during the ten day voyage of Artemis II to the moon and back. I’m a fan. I like all that space stuff.

But I’m old enough to remember – vividly -- the Apollo flights of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. A lot of Artemis looked … familiar.

Yes, of course the technology is light-years ahead of what they got by with in the 1960s. Good to see the capsule full of screens and digital readouts. The colour pictures and videos were great. The iPhones they carried had infinitely more computing power than everything on Apollo 11. Even the cameras they used to photograph the lunar surface had hundreds of times higher resolution than those of 1968. And in fifty years the crewcut can-do white-guy fighter jocks of Apollo have morphed into a diverse and laidback quartet who gushed affection and love back to the home planet. They probably set off with much more confidence about getting back home than Armstrong and Aldrin, too. So: much change.

But during their flight someone noted that the time from the Wright brothers’ first flight to Apollo is almost the same as the time from Apollo to Artemis. I can’t help thinking the first half delivered much more change than the second one. I guess those were the easy bits.

There is still no space plane. The space shuttle (that could at least fly down to an airfield) was a dud, and the space station is going to be “deorbited” long before a replacement takes shape. There is still no permanent facility either in earth orbit or circling the moon, and none spoken of. Elon Musk is no longer promising to go live on Mars. Just as their predecessors did, the Artemis crew went up on a pillar of flame and came down to bob awkwardly in rubber boats. Artemis III will make its moon landing with the same capsule-and-lander process that operated in the 1960s. Indeed the whole Artemis program seems to follow pretty much the well-worn flight path and landing methods of Apollo, and the astronauts still lack the relay satellites that would allow communication from behind the moon. Anything like routine space travel remains in the realm of science fiction.

I have never forgotten reading an observation, not long after Apollo, that the first trips to the North and South Pole were hellishly difficult and dangerous voyages. But when people went back there, those were routine journeys using new submarine and aircraft technology that made the poles an afterthought. I thought then it might be like that with the moon.  After the dangerous and risky and incredibly expensive flights of Apollo, the next people on the moon would just drop in as part of a general achievement of spacefaring.   

It’s still damn hard just to achieve earth orbit and return. No space planes, no liveable platforms parked above earth and moon, let alone Mars. It’s still absolutely cold and dark and airless everywhere up there, and we still live at the bottom of a deep gravity well that strongly resists us going up and out. Spacefaring is still a long way away.

Next time I dip into a galactic space war novel or a world-building epic of routine travel and trade across and beyond the solar system, I won’t be thinking that’s any closer than it was in the sixties.

Update, same day:  Molly Ungar responds:

Thank you for your excellent comments on the Artemis II mission. We are also fans, and as we watched the splash-down and crew retrieval, we decided then and there to re-visit two films: “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13”.  Both are as engrossing as when they were first released.

 

However, thus far I’ve not heard of any goal attached to the Artemis program other than that of mining for critical minerals on the moon, which of course reminds me of the movie “Alien”, and look how that turned out. I would say that the Cold War “space race” buoyed up government and public interest until the U.S. declared victory and departed the field.

Like yourself, we were interested in the changes you point out, and noticed how much was familiar.

History of Space

As they say, predictions are hard, especially about the future. Apropos of new projects for landings on the moon, and then ventures to Mars and eventually elsewhere in the solar system, and with the rapid development of private and commercial exploration of space (Space-X, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Rocket Lab, etc.), here's a few words from Werner von Braun I happened upon. In July 1969, a few days before Apollo 11 made the successful landing on the moon, he said.

"If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing ... we would certainly be history's biggest fools." 

Fifty-four years on, and the string of Apollo landings remain the entire history of human presence on the moon.  A few handfuls of soil and rocks has long seemed to be about what the world has to show from the von Braun era of space exploration.

But I once saw it noted that after the first few desperate, dangerous attempts to reach the North Pole, no one went back there for many decades. And when they did, it was because aircraft and submarines had developed to the point that the pole was no longer a destination but simply a point on the globe one might fly over or sail under en route to somewhere else. 

So maybe spacefaring vehicles are now beginning to approach the point that the Moon will cease to be a heroic challenge and become just one more place one might drop by. If it seemed worthwhile, if people really want to go.    

Deep history - the thing that fell on Tall-el-Hammam

How often does a history blog get to use scary images like this?

Ancient cities destroyed by fire are a common enough find for archaeologists. But excavators at Tall-el-Hammam, north of the Dead Sea in what is now Jordan, have determined that the catastrophe that obliterated their site 3600 years ago involved a fire hotter than the inside of a volcano. It fused materials in the ruins into diamond-hard fragments and flung chunks of debris into the next valley. Nearby communities, including historic Jericho, 22 km distant, were hit by a shockwave that toppled the walls and set the town ablaze.

After its destruction, the community was not rebuilt, and the area around it seems to have been uninhabitable for about 600 years after. The researchers report in The Conversation:  

It appears that the culprit at Tall el-Hammam was a small asteroid similar to the one that knocked down 80 million trees in Tunguska, Russia in 1908. It would have been a much smaller version of the giant miles-wide rock that pushed the dinosaurs into extinction 65 million years ago.

But it was big enough. Tall-el-Hammam, they conclude, is a human settlement from early historic times that took a direct hit from an asteroid and was entirely obliterated. They speculate about preserved memories of the event in Middle Eastern culture: 

It’s possible that an oral description of the city’s destruction may have been handed down for generations until it was recorded as the story of Biblical Sodom. The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea – stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires and city inhabitants were killed.

Other settlements destroyed by extra-terrestrial impact have been found,  they acknowledge, but those relate to an impact about 12,800 years ago that seems to have had global consequences. Poor Tall-el-Hammam is a real disaster-movie scenario: one city, one asteroid, boom. 

I note happily that the principal author of the article in The Conversation is Christopher Moore, a new entry among my occasional discoveries of my doppelgangers doing cool things. 

Update, September 23: The Tall-el-Hammam article appears in the American edition of The Conversation, not the Canadian one that comes up by default in Canada. The Conversation is an international consortium of national blogs subsidized by universities. They publish only accredited academics on matters of public interest. History is not one of the subject headings in The Conversation. In Canada, Active History seeks to fill something of the same academics-writing-for-the-public role for historical subjects.

 

Update on the Expo Spacemen

Further to our post below of August 6, I think we have wrapped up the story of the possible astronaut-cosmonaut encounter at Expo '67.  This inquiry began with a question to Canada's History magazine, and more about this story may appear there in time.

Many thanks to Halifax writer and historian Patrick Lacroix, a reader of this blog, who sent a La Presse clipping that show Richard Gordon, an American astronaut who flew one of the Gemini missions and later orbited the moon in Apollo 12, made an official visit to the American pavilion at Expo '67. No cosmonauts. A Devoir clipping he also sent shows that before Expo 67 there was some promise of an astronaut-cosmonaut presence at the opening ceremonies, but it seems nothing came of that.

And I got to chat with NASA chief historian Brian Odom -- put that on your list of cool historical jobs, maybe? -- who sent the following:

While there was a meeting of American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts in 1967, the meeting occurred at the 1967 Paris Air Show. The NASA History book SP-4209 The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (1978) discusses the meeting in chapter 9, section 3 “Rivals and Friends” which is available online at https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4209/ch9-3.htm (the entire book is available online in PDF format at: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4209.pdf). While both the U.S. and USSR had pavilions in Montreal, there is no record in our collection of any meetings by members of their space agencies.

I also came across this awesome video on the US pavilion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brjEzryqjEo  Very cool stuff.

Agreed about the US Pavilion. Shame about the cosmonauts. 

I used this image as a desktop when such things were called screensavers, I think. So I was not a latecomer to the Apollo rediscovery of recent days, even though this post is.  Well, fifty years ago Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were still returning to earth

And yes, this is the image taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in December 1968.  I'm still not convinced humanity's destiny is out there.  But Apollo 11 still seems like a big deal: as someone said, maybe the main thing people will know from the 20th century if we have a 30th century.