The Gift of Apollo*

The unexpected consequences of our expedition to the Moon.



 It’s a sultry night in July. You’ve fallen asleep in the armchair. Abruptly, you startle awake, disoriented. The television set is on, but not the sound. You strain to understand what you’re seeing. Two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets are softly dancing under a pitch-black sky. They make strange little skipping motions, which propel them upward amid barely perceptible clouds of dust. But something is wrong. They take too long to come down. Encumbered as they are, they seem to be flying—a little. You rub your eyes, but the strange tableau persists.

Of all the events surrounding Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, my most vivid recollection is its dreamlike quality. Yes, it was an astonishing technological achievement and a triumph for the United States. Yes, the astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, the last keeping solitary vigil in lunar orbit—displayed death-defying courage. Yes, as Armstrong said as he first alighted, this was an historic step for the human species. But if you turned off the sound, with its deliberately mundane and routine chatter, and stared into that black-and-white television monitor, you could glimpse that we humans had once again entered the realm of myth and legend.

We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built cities and set out to subdue the Earth. The Moon’s waning and waxing symbolized death and rebirth. Its phases correspond so closely to the reproductive cycle of women that it’s hard not to wonder if there was once some causal connection—as the word “menstruation” (Latin mensis = “month”) reminds us. Folklore and popular songs still celebrate a connection between the Moon and love. The word “month” and the second day of the week are both named after the Moon. Especially when we lived out-of-doors, it was a major—if oddly intangible—presence in our lives.

The Moon was a metaphor for the unattainable: “You might as well ask for the Moon,” they used to say. For most of our history, we had no idea what it was. A spirit? A god? A thing? It didn’t look like something big far away, but more like something small nearby—something the size of a plate, maybe, hanging in the sky a mile above our heads. Walking on the Moon would then have seemed a screwball idea; it made more sense to imagine somehow climbing up into the sky on a ladder or on the back of a giant bird, grabbing the Moon and bringing it down to Earth. But nobody ever did.

It was not until a few centuries ago that the idea of the Moon as a place, a quarter of a million miles away, gained wide currency; we’re new at figuring out what worlds are and how they work. And in that brief flicker of time, we’ve gone from the earliest steps in understanding the Moon’s nature to actually walking on its surface. We calculated how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance and much else. Then we sailed out into the sky.

The Moon is no longer unattainable. A dozen humans, all Americans, made those odd skipping motions they called “moonwalks” on the crunchy, cratered, ancient gray lava—beginning on that July day in 1969. But since 1972, no one from any nation has ventured there. Indeed, none of us has gone anywhere since the glory days of Apollo except into low Earth orbit—like a toddler who takes a few tentative steps outward and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his mother’s skirts.

Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?

The scope and audacity of John Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on “Urgent National Needs”—the speech that launched the Apollo program—dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to a world not yet explored—not even in a preliminary way, with robots—and we would bring him safely back, and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth orbit.

As a newly minted Ph.D., I actually thought all this had something centrally to do with science. But President Kennedy did not talk about discovering the origin of the Moon, for example, or even about bringing samples of it back for study. All he seemed interested in was sending someone there and bringing him home. Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, later told me he had a deal with the President: If the President did not claim that Apollo was about science, then he, Wiesner, would support it. So if not science, what?

There were arguments about “spinoffs,” contentions that Apollo was a way to pump American technology. They boiled down to something like this: “Give us $25 billion to put people on the Moon, and we’ll throw in Tang, a free cardiac pacemaker and a stickless frying pan.” But anybody could see that if we were after orange-juice substitutes or pacemakers or frying pans—or even mainframe computers—we could invent them directly; we didn’t have to spend $25 billion and send people to the Moon in the process.

I kept asking. The Apollo program is really about politics, I was told. This sounded more promising. Nonaligned nations would be tempted to drift toward the Soviet Union if it was ahead in space exploration, if the U.S. 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 a nuclear warhead halfway around the Earth. 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 talk in military circles, East and West, about space as the new “high ground,” about the nation that “controlled” space as “controlling” the Earth. Of course strategic rockets were being tested on Earth. But heaving a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead to a target zone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn’t buy much glory. Sending people into space, though, captures the 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.

There were six more missions after Apollo 11, all but one of which successfully landed on the lunar surface. Apollo 17 was the first to carry a scientist. As soon as he got there, the program was canceled. The first scientist and the last human to land on the Moon were the same person. The program had already served its purpose that July night in 1969. The half dozen subsequent missions were just momentum.

Apollo was not mainly about science. It was not even mainIy about space. Apollo was mainly about ideological confrontation and nuclear war—often described by such euphemisms as world “leadership” and “national prestige.” Nevertheless, good space science was done. We now know much more about the composition, age and history of the Moon and the origin of the lunar landforms. We have made progress in understanding where the Moon came from. (The best current idea is that it was produced in the collision of a giant asteroid or comet with the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.) More important, Apollo provided an aegis, an umbrella under which brilliantly engineered robot spacecraft were dispatched throughout the solar system, making a preliminary reconnaissance of dozens of worlds. The last of them, Voyager 2, will encounter the Neptune system this August. The offspring of Apollo are now reaching the solar-system frontiers.

If not for Apollo—and, therefore, if not for the political purpose it served—I doubt whether the historic American expeditions of exploration and discovery throughout the solar system would have occurred. Something similar is true for the pioneering Soviet efforts in solar-system exploration, including the first landings of robot spacecraft on another planet.


Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy and breadth of vision that did capture the imagination of the world. That too was part of its purpose. It inspired an optimism about technology, an enthusiasm for the future. If we could go to the Moon, what else was now possible? Even those who were not admirers of the United States readily acknowledged that—whatever the underlying reason for the program—the nation had, with Apollo, achieved greatness.

But since the end of Apollo, the American space program has been in decline. It has been given no coherent long-term purpose. Like all bureaucracies without real direction from above, NASA has attempted to make do—to maintain existing programs and field centers, to go by slow steps. Predictably, budgets were cut. Morale deteriorated. Other claimants arose for the NASA budget.

Shuttle was developed, although exactly why we need humans in low Earth orbit—when robots are so capable, so much cheaper and do not risk human life—was never made clear. Those whose parents witnessed humans walking on the Moon now thrilled that we were able to launch a shuttle to 200 miles altitude without mishap. An American space station was announced as “the next logical step”—but we heard nothing about where it was a logical step to. What exactly was its purpose? Could we perform those functions without a space station? No one was saying.

The United States, after launching dozens of trailblazing interplanetary missions in the 1960s and 1970s, had not launched a single spacecraft to the Moon or the planets in the last 11 years. This drought has just ended with the successful launch of Magellan, an orbiter for radar-mapping the cloud-shrouded surface of Venus. There is another long-delayed mission just coming out of the pipeline—Galileo to Jupiter—which (my fingers are crossed) is scheduled to be launched this October. Congress now has before it a critically important proposal to reinvigorate the unmanned planetary program called CRAF/Cassini—two spacecraft, one of them designed and paid for jointly with the European Space Agency, to rendezvous with a comet, fly by asteroids, orbit Saturn and send a probe into Titan, a moon covered with the building blocks of life. All this for the price of maybe three B-2 bombers.

Still, something is seriously wrong with NASA, and it’s not hard to see what it is: The U.S. space program bas lost its way. The responsibility lies fundamentally not at NASA’s door but at the President’s—several consecutive Presidents. NASA lacks a compelling political purpose of the sort that Apollo provided. NASA needs a Presidentially mandated long-term goal.

I’ve learned my lesson. Governments do not spend these vast sums just for science, or merely to explore. They need another purpose, and it has to make real political sense. The United States and the Soviet Union have by now amply demonstrated their ability to deliver nuclear weapons over long distances with ballistic missiles. There is no longer any politically coherent purpose for competition in space. What’s left? I think the answer is cooperation.

I’ve learned my lesson. Governments do not spend these vast sums just for science, or merely to explore. They need another purpose, and it has to make real political sense.
I proposed in these pages (Parade, Feb. 2, 1986) a long-term program for the exploration of Mars, a program that would culminate in a manned and womanned mission to that planet—spearheaded by the United States and the Soviet Union but including Europe, Japan and other nations. I believe it would consolidate the disparate constituencies of NASA, be technologically a smaller step than Apollo was in 1961 and represent a much smaller increment in the (now much-diminished) NASA budget than Apollo did. It would provide the aegis and justification for a wide range of other NASA activities, including robotic exploration of Mars and other worlds, long-duration human spaceflight and construction in Earth orbit. It would provide a reason for the space station.

But most of all, such an objective could serve an urgent political task: binding up the United States and the Soviet Union in a shared endeavor of historic proportions on behalf of the human species. It can be done in slow steps, with adequate protection by each side against a political change of heart by the other and without dangerous technology transfer.

President Gorbachev has now, on several occasions, invited the United States to join the USSR in just such an endeavor. The House of Representatives voted (in the 1989 NASA authorization bill) for Mars as the long-term focus of the U.S. space program. NASA’s new Office of Exploration has called for human exploration of Mars as a major NASA goal, as has the 1988 Republican Party Platform. Democratic Presidential aspirants, including Sen. Albert Gore and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, endorsed joint U.S./USSR Mars exploration. And the Planetary Society’s “Mars Declaration” has been signed by a group of Americans of strikingly diverse political persuasions, including six former NASA administrators and the crew of Apollo 11. All that human exploration of Mars needs—as did Apollo—is a Presidential commitment.

But why Mars? Why not return to the Moon? It’s much closer, and we’ve proved we know how to send people there.

Yes, but I’m concerned that the Moon is a long detour, if not a dead end. We’ve been there. We’ve even brought some of it back. People have seen the Moon rocks, and, for reasons that I believe are fundamentally sound they are bored by the Moon. It is a static, airless, waterless, dead world.

Mars, by contrast, has weather, dust storms, its own moons, immense volcanoes, seasonally varying polar ice caps, enigmatic landforms and ancient river valleys indicating that massive climatic change has occurred on a once-Earthlike world. Mars also holds some prospect of past or possibly even present life. None of this is true for the Moon. Nor is the Moon an especially desirable test bed or way station for Mars. The Martian and lunar environments are very different, and the Moon is as distant from Mars as is the Earth. The machinery for Martian exploration can better be tested in Earth orbit or on the Earth itself.

A healthy and successful NASA must broaden its constituency. For one thing, it needs to make a major international effort to monitor the Earth from space, to help preserve our small world. It needs to make a much more serious effort at robotic exploration of other worlds. This is not just a matter of catering to a widespread passion for exploration and discovery; if we didn’t have an ounce of adventuresome spirit in us, it would still be prudent and cost-effective to explore the planets (read more on this here).

But most of all NASA needs to make the connection of spaceflight with international understanding and world peace. I do not see any other activities—such as Star Wars (SDI), appeals to national prestige or promises of technological spinoffs—that can provide a political justification for NASA suitable for the 1990s. But protecting the environment, forging a common purpose with other nations—especially former adversaries—and re-exciting the exploratory imagination of people all over the world constitute a sufficient political payoff to justify a major, consistently funded American space program.

When you pack your bags for a big trip, you never know what’s in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their way to and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw. For the first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see our world from above—the whole Earth, the Earth in color, the Earth as an exquisite white and blue world set against the vast darkness of space. Those images have awakened our slumbering planetary consciousness; they provide incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet—our only home in all the solar system. They remind us of what is important and what is not. The Saudi Arabian astronaut Prince Sultan Salman al-Saud, after his observations of the Earth from the Discovery shuttle in 1985, recalled: “The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.”

We may have found that perspective just in time, just as our technology threatens the habitability of our world (read more on this here). Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired in Cold War nationalism it was, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected gift of Apollo. What began in deadly competition has led us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.

Travel is broadening. It’s time to hit the road again.

Copyright © 1989 by Carl Sagan. Originally published in Parade Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC