NASA’s 60 Years of Exploration and Discovery By Edward Goldstein
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aving been born two months after Sputnik, and spent most of my professional career working for the agency, its contractors and the major aerospace industry trade association, I have a special affinity for NASA. One of my earliest historical memories is of the live television coverage of John Glenn’s Mercury Friendship 7 launch in 1962 – coverage that President John F. Kennedy approved over the advice of cautious aides who worried about the impact to the space program of a launch explosion. The magic of NASA, of course, is that its power to inspire reaches all Americans and billions of people throughout the world who aren’t intimately involved with the space program. You can see the impact of NASA in the many people one can view on public streets throughout the country and abroad wearing t-shirts or polos bearing the iconic NASA meatball logo. You can measure NASA’s influence on the public as a portal to scientific engagement by the 88 percent of adult Americans – 216 million – who viewed the August 2017 solar eclipse, often with guidance from NASA’s public outreach efforts. You can sense NASA’s power to inspire dreams of lives lived with great purpose by the record number of 18,300 citizens who applied for the 12 – yes 12 – slots in its latest class of astronauts. You are presented evidence that NASA is held within high esteem within the federal government by the fact that the agency consistently tops the list of the best federal places to work in the annual survey of the Partnership for Public Service. And you just know that NASA is more than an ordinary government agency, by the fact that practically everyone you talk to will tell you of where they were, and what they felt, when they witnessed an indelible moment spun from a bold NASA mission. For my generation, the sight of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong taking humankind’s first steps on an extraterrestrial body in 1969 was that moment. I’m more partial, however, to the incredible Christmas Eve of 1968 when the crew of Apollo 8
– Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders – live broadcast from lunar orbit the first close-up views of the Moon’s forbidding surface, reading from the Book of Genesis in a grace note to a year of war, assassination and civil unrest. And there was more. That same evening, in an unplanned moment, William Anders took the famous “Earthrise” photo that help spark the environmental movement, and a new consideration of our place in the universe. Anders told me when recalling the mission, “I think that one of the things that has not really emerged from that flight but one day will, is that our Earth is quite small, almost physically insignificant, yet it is our only hope. …I’ve thought and said it’s too bad we couldn’t put all the members of the U.N. in orbit around the Moon to look back at the Earth so that they could see how delicate our planet is, and we ought to quit fighting over it.” I was not alone in viewing Apollo 8 as a special moment in the pantheon of NASA’s firsts. When interviewing former President George H.W. Bush for NASA’s 50th anniversary, President Bush told me that his son Jeb was irked at having to attend Christmas Eve church services, but upon returning home and seeing the astronauts’ broadcast was profoundly affected. “It was a lifechanging experience for him,” the 41st president said. Over the decades, NASA has produced many such moments: • From 1969-1972, the visits of six astronaut crews to the lunar surface, including three missions aided by an ingenious exploration enabler – the 11.2 miles per hour maximum speed Lunar Rover. Over time, the demands of the Apollo program for advanced microelectronic circuitry for its spacecraft helped give birth to Silicon Valley. And throughout NASA’s existence, microelectromechanical systems, supercomputers, microcomputers, software and microprocessors were all created with technology developed by NASA. • The 1977 launch of Voyagers 1 and 2, the robotic spacecraft that jointly explored all the giant outer planets, 48 of their moons and the unique system of rings and magnetic fields those
Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. shown in the Mercury-Atlas (MA-6) Friendship 7 capsule during the first American orbital flight.
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