Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [75]
The Apollo program is really about politics, others told me. This sounded more promising. Nonaligned nations would be tempted to drift toward the Soviet Union if it was ahead in space exploration, if the United States showed insufficient “national vigor.” I didn’t follow. Here was the United States, ahead of the Soviet Union in virtually every area of technology—the world’s economic, military, and, on occasion, even moral leader—and Indonesia would go Communist because Yuri Gagarin beat John Glenn to Earth orbit? What’s so special about space technology? Suddenly I understood.
Sending people to orbit the Earth or robots to orbit the Sun requires rockets—big, reliable, powerful rockets. Those same rockets can be used for nuclear war. The same technology that transports a man to the Moon can carry nuclear warheads halfway around the world. The same technology that puts an astronomer and a telescope in Earth orbit can also put up a laser “battle station.” Even back then, there was fanciful talk in military circles, East and West, about space as the new “high ground,” about the nation that “controlled” space “controlling” the Earth. Of course strategic rockets were already being tested on Earth. But heaving a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead into a target zone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn’t buy much glory. Sending people into space captures the attention and imagination of the world.
You wouldn’t spend the money to launch astronauts for this reason alone, but of all the ways of demonstrating rocket potency, this one works best. It was a rite of national manhood; the shape of the boosters made this point readily understood without anyone actually having to explain it. The communication seemed to be transmitted from unconscious mind to unconscious mind without the higher mental faculties catching a whiff of what was going on.
My colleagues today—struggling for every space science dollar—may have forgotten how easy it was to get money for “space” in the glory days of Apollo and just before. Of many examples, consider this exchange before the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House of Representatives in 1958, only a few months after Sputnik 1. Air Force Assistant Secretary Richard E. Horner is testifying; his interlocutor is Rep. Daniel J. Flood (Democrat of Pennsylvania):
HORNER: [W]hy is it desirable from the military point of view to have a man on the moon? Partly, from the classic point of view, because it is there. Partly because we might be afraid that the U.S.S.R. might get one there first and realize advantages which we had not anticipated existed there …
FLOOD: [I]f we gave you all the money you said was necessary, regardless of how much it was, can you in the Air Force hit the moon with something, anything, before Christmas?
HORNER: I feel sure we can. There is always a certain amount of risk in this kind of undertaking, but we feel that we can do that; yes, sir.
FLOOD: Have you asked anybody in the Air Force or the Department of Defense to give you enough money, hardware, and people, starting at midnight tonight, to chip a piece out of that ball of green cheese for a Christmas present to Uncle Sam? Have you asked for that?
HORNER. We have submitted such a program to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It is currently under consideration.
FLOOD: I am for giving it to them as of this minute, Mr. Chairman, with our supplemental, without waiting for somebody downtown to make up his mind to ask for it. If this man means what he says and if he knows what he is talking about—and I think he does—then this committee should not wait five minutes more today. We should give him all the money and all the hardware and all the people he wants, regardless of what anybody else says or wants, and tell him to go up on top of some hill and do it without