To a Rocky Moon - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 164

To a Rocky Moon
The Right Stuff
On the fourth of October 1957, the Shoemaker family in the Hopi Buttes and
the rest of the world awoke to the beep-beep of the eighty-four-kilogram Russian
satellite Sputnik sailing far overhead. Homo sapiens had left its home planet and
taken its first step toward the stars. Not only was Gene Shoemaker unprepared;
so was nearly everyone else in America. The United States had no space program
and, as would shortly become all too apparent, no reliable rockets with which to
launch anything into space. As to the most obvious target of a space program—the
Moon—no one knew much about it. Almost everything they thought they knew
would prove wrong.
A month after Sputnik , America's sense of post-World War II complacency and
dominance was further shattered when the Russians successfully launched anoth-
er satellite, this one carrying the ill-fated dog Laika. Before the United States had
barely awoken, the Russians appeared poised to loft anything they liked, including
perhaps a hydrogen bomb, over American heads.
Americarespondedbyacceleratingtheexistingworkonrocketrythathadbegun
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and by creating the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration. Then on May 25, 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
challenged his nation to send men to the Moon and return them safely “before this
decade is out.” 1 The Moon was not only the most obvious target; it was the only
sufficiently dramatic goal that NASA could achieve in a reasonable time and at an
affordable cost. Mars was too far away: a journey there would require at least six
months in space, with who knows what toll on the astronauts. To find the nation's
sea legs on JFK's new ocean of space, it made sense to take a short voyage first.
Almost two years before JFK's speech, the Russians had sent Luna 2 crashing
into the rim of the crater Autolycus. Surely they intended more missions to the
Moon, some of which would likely land cosmonauts on its surface. But as of 1961,
they had not yet done so, leaving the door open for an American to take the first
prestigious walk on the Moon.
But simply beating the Russians to the Moon was not a sufficient reason, or at
least not one that politicians could defend publicly, to justify the expenditure of
billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. A scientific reason was needed as well, and sci-