From the Moon to This Damn Virus

I started reading One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moonby Charles Fishman (Simon & Schuster, 2019) today. So far I found that the Moon smells, but that is a small part of the fascinating story of how we as a nation and as a species achieved the goal.

From the introduction:

"... when President John Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would go to the Moon, he was committing the nation to do something we couldn't do. We didn't have the tools, the equipment - we didn't have the rockets or the launchpads, the spacesuits or the computers or the zero-gravity food - to go to the Moon. And it isn't just that we didn't have what we would need, we didn't even know what we would need. We didn't have a list; no one in the world had a list. Indeed, our unpreparedness for the task goes a level deeper: we didn't even know how to fly to the Moon. We didn't know course to fly to get there from here."

In short, Kennedy challenged the country to do something that no one anywhere  in the world had a clue how to do.

As a kid, still in grade school, the space program fascinated me. As I grew older I discovered that my scientific acumen was nowhere near the level I would have needed to be an astronaut, but back in that classroom of my youth, I wanted the program to succeed.

I would stay home as late as possible, eyes glued to the television screen, on mornings of launches. Sometimes, when a launch was paused for whatever reason, I would head to school with my transistor radio with its single earbud. I would string the wire through my sleeve and lean on one arm with my hand cupped over my ear. I tried to look attentive to whatever Sister Mary Delores was saying, but my mind and thoughts were with the radio broadcast of a launch, hoping that she wouldn't notice me.

Those were the early days of the program. I was in college by the time we finally landed on the Moon, but I remember that night vividly - that first step, the words of Armstrong, the glee in the face of Walter Cronkite.

The thing about starting this book is that I know how it ends. We get there and we don't go back. The stuff of the Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (released a full year before we landed) is still the stuff of fantasy and dreams. I believe we should have and could have done much more, but we didn't. Now we don't even have the rockets or equipment to get there anymore, and we have to buy seats on Russian rockets that are barely modernized versions of the Titan rockets we used.





That brings me back to the words of the book's introduction. We are faced with a rapidly spreading corona virus. As I write this today, 40,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. As I write this, my wife's father is in an ICU with it. As I write this, some people are protesting the stay at home orders in many states, demanding that those orders be lifted.

Meanwhile, the President of the country is blaming everyone else for the slow response of his administration to this virus. He is blaming governors for not doing more testing when the machines for testing don't have the materials for testing. He is blaming the previous administrations for a depleted stockpile of supplies when his team has had three years to replenish that stockpile. He is blaming Democrats for not passing legislation when the GOP controlled Senate is not voting on bills passed by the House. He is blaming the press for asking tough questions and not praising him enough.

Countless scientists and care givers are combating the virus. Hospitals and doctors and nurses are trying new things to what works best for treatments. People are working on vaccines around the globe. People are testing old and new medicines to discover efficacy and dosage levels.  Some have even suggested that perhaps the answer lay in the often used and perfectly safe oral polio vaccine.

The point is that, like the beginnings of the space endeavors, nobody has a clue of what to do or how. This is going to take a coordinated and constant effort similar to the trials and failures that lead to countless discoveries and advances in space. The point is that humans can and will find a way to get past this, to get back to work, to find a new normal in our lives.

Without the space program of the 60s, we would't have the lives we have today. The drive to get to the Moon opened the digital age in which we have grown comfortable. Integrated circuits, telecommunications, weather services, GPS in our cars, all the things we use and take for granted. The space program gave us the normal we have today.

The concerted effort to find a a way to, if not cure the virus, at least live with it is necessary. It was a concerted effort to cure polio that found a vaccine. It was a concerted effort to get to the Moon. Our normal lives understand we have to get vaccinated so that polio doesn't come back. Our normal lives understand the devices with which we live and on which we have come to depend.

It is time for this country to come together, not complain about having to stay home. Let the experts and scientists get us ready to launch again.