Artemis & Artifice

On Wednesday, NASA launched the Artemis Mission to the Moon. When Man first left behind the shackles of the Earth, and entered the Space Age, I was in Infant School. I grew up with the adventure of Torchy the Battery Boy, when my parents rented our first tiny black and white TV from Rediffusion. I was still at Infants School, when the USSR, put Yuri Gagarin into space, 65 years ago, in April 1961. By then, I had moved on to watching Supercar, and was fully committed to becoming a scientist like Professor Popkiss. At the start of Junior School, I was avidly watching the adventures of Steve Zodiac and the crew of Fireball XL5, and at weekends the missions of Space Patrol.

Anyone growing up at the time could hardly not be influenced, in some way, by the fact that a new age had begun. The other darker side, of course, was that the rocket technology that was sending humans into space, had first been developed as a means of delivering explosives, as a means of killing other human beings. The Chinese, centuries earlier, had developed the basic principles of rocketry, along with their development of gunpowder. Although the story of modern rocketry has focused on the role of the Nazis's V1 and V2 rockets, developed by Werner Von Braun, who was quickly snatched up by the US, and central to its rocket development, the first such developments came in the USSR, in the early 1920's. With the US, developing the technology at around the same time, led by the likes of Robert Goddard. The soviets, also, took back their fair share of former Nazi scientists.

So, along with the excitement of entering a new space age, came, also, the sheer terror of the same technologies, now, resulting in our own nuclear annihilation. Few people who grew up during that time, did not have similar dreams about nuclear warheads raining down on their heads, as they tried, in vain, to escape the explosion, especially as the memory of World War II, was still fresh. I remember, while at Junior School, in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, waking up, in the middle of the night, to a loud thunderous bang, and the curtains in the bedroom being brightly illuminated from without, thinking that this was it. Fortunately, it was only a very loud thunderstorm.

In that space race, despite the US having the most advanced economy in the world, and having the services of Von Braun, it was the USSR that led the way.

Key Soviet Space Firsts:

• First Artificial Satellite: Sputnik 1 (October 4, 1957).
• First Animal in Orbit: Laika on Sputnik 2 (November 3, 1957).
• First Spacecraft to Impact the Moon: Luna 2 (September 14, 1959).
• First Human in Space & Orbit: Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1 (April 12, 1961).
• First Human in Space for >24 Hours: Gherman Titov on Vostok 2 (August 1961).
• First Group Flight: Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich on Vostok 3/4 (1962).
• First Woman in Space: Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6 (June 16, 1963).
• First Spacewalk: Alexei Leonov on Voskhod 2 (March 18, 1965).
• First Robotic Moon Rover: Lunokhod 1 (1970).
• First Space Station: Salyut 1 (1971).

But, the soviets also had many other firsts, such as the first fly by of the Moon, and first photographing of the far side of the Moon, by its Luna Missions, in 1959. It was also, first in its missions to Venus, Mars and other planets. This was at a time, in the 1950's, and early 1960's, when despite the US being the most advanced economy, the USSR was industrialising very fast, and many in western governments seriously feared that its planned economy was soon going to overtake them. In fact, no such thing happened, because although the soviet centrally planned, and so bureaucratic, economy was good at directing resources to such heavy industrial development, as seen during WWII, it was, for the same reasons, poor at adapting, or meeting the needs of its citizens for consumer goods.

Nevertheless, it was enough for the US to see the need to outdo the USSR in that race, even if, as is the nature of US capitalism, to do so, at a superficial rather than fundamental level. JFK promised to put a man on the Moon by the end of the 60's, “not because it was easy, but because it is hard.” Exactly why you would want to put a man on the Moon, was not quite clear, because the soviets had already landed unmanned spacecraft on the Moon, as well as Venus and Mars by that time. It was artifice, as the US sought to capture the headlines.

In terms of why it was harder to send a manned mission, rather than an unmanned mission, that too was unclear, as I and a number of my school friends, now at secondary school, argued with our teacher at the time, who seemed to be concerned at the steady leftward drift of his students. Is it easier to have a human drive a car, or fly a plane, we asked, rather than have a robot do it? Given that 60 years later, we still do not have reliable self-driving vehicles, or planes, the answer to that question in 1967, was quite obvious, if not to our teacher.

Yet, the soviets had done the hard thing, focusing on unmanned missions to the Moon and elsewhere, perhaps because, in those first Luna missions, they had detected strong ionising radiation from the Sun, which is lethal to organic life, without the protection of the Earth's magnetic field (seen in the Aurorae), and of Earth's atmosphere. The soviets also pioneered the work on space stations, which, even with the development of the ISS, was invaluable. Even so, learning from those earlier observations in relation to the Solar Wind, as the crew spend months in space, it orbits below the Van Allen Belts.

When NASA landed men on the moon, in 1969, as JFK had promised to do, our teachers sat us down, as a school, to watch the virtually indecipherable, grainy black and white images sent back from the Moon. Given that only a few years earlier, TV pictures sent across the Atlantic, by means of the Telstar satellites, had only just occurred, pictures sent from a distance more than 80 times greater was inevitably grainy, not helped by the fact that we only had black and white TV's. To have coped with the vast differences in temperature on the Moon, between its areas of light and shade, and the problems of the solar radiation, with more or less just Kodak 70mm medium format film was quite an achievement.

The Moon landing was a major media event, in 1969, even though, in reality, it achieved nothing that had not been achieved years before, other than using a manned spacecraft. Even the fact that Apollo 11 returned to Earth, was not that significant. In 1970, the USSR sent its Luna 16 to the Moon to collect samples, and it successfully returned them to Earth. By the time, NASA sent Apollo 12 to the Moon, the public had already grown tired. It was no longer new. TV audiences for the first landing were estimated at 125-160 million in the US, and 650 million globally, whilst for Apollo 12, despite its much better image quality, they fell to around 11 million in the US. Only with the drama of Apollo 13, did interest recover, but quickly dissipated again, as TV screens, across the globe, were filled with the images of US war crimes committed in South-East Asia, for example the My Lai massacre.

In the immediate aftermath of Apollo 11, and, especially as the US and USSR began to engage in a period of detente, and cooperation in space, the Sunday newspapers filled with stories of imminent manned bases on the Moon, and manned missions to Mars to be undertaken by the end of the 70's, or early 80's at the latest. The same stories have emerged at regular intervals in the 50 years since then. So, although I watched the launch of the Artemis Mission with interest, I could not help feeling that, once again, this was more about artifice, given the current competition between the US and a dynamic China.

Someone commented on the TV, in one of the channels coverage of the launch, that it was something new, that the mission was to go to the other side of the Moon, but the USSR had done that in 1959, nearly 70 years ago, now. Someone else, commented that they were going deeper into space than ever before, but that is clearly not true either, even for manned flight, let alone unmanned flight. Given that in 1969, 57 years ago, we did not have even personal computers, and the power of a £2 million mainframe computer, was about the same as today contained in a microchip in a toaster, the current mission seems underwhelming.

In 1903 the Wright Brothers undertook the first manned flight. They did so in a plane that was basically held together by glue and string. By the 1950's, we already had passenger jet flights across the globe. By the 1970's, we had Concorde. But, despite the huge developments in technology, not least in computing power, this Artemis Mission still amounts to 4 humans “sitting in a tin can” to use David Bowie's description, on top of a huge fuel bomb! It is not even achieving a Moon landing, as happened nearly 60 years ago, in 1969. Even the advances made in the 1980's, with the Space Shuttle, are a distant memory.