Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

October 3, 2013: An artist’s rendition of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, with his face visible, at the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Armstrong died in 2012 and was buried at sea. Only one-third of the men who walked on the moon are still alive.

I do not expect the United States of America to land on the moon in my lifetime.

Americans might return, eventually, but I think it’s likely they would be part of an international crew. But the nation that put so much from so many into making it possible for one man to take one small step doesn’t exist anymore.

It took just under eight years and two months from President John F. Kennedy’s call to Congress and the nation “to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth,” to doing precisely that.

It has been eight years, four months, and 11 days since the United States has been capable of putting a human being into orbit.

About the time I turned 9, I was told there was a plan of getting back to the moon by 2001 and Mars by 2015. So much for that.

For years, pundits and politicians asked, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we do [pet cause]?” No one should be asking that anymore, because the correct question is “If we could put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?”

A moon mission requires a lot of things from a nation. It requires invested leaders who can occasionally think beyond — or not worry about — the next election, and are willing to do some back-scratching with people they strongly disagree with to achieve a higher goal. It requires an ability to withstand, overcome, or suppress a descent into tribalism; a vow to select the best people with as little regard for other factors as possible; the support of the man and woman on the street (or at least, enough to matter); unsurpassed domestic manufacturing capabilities; and the ability to undertake massive civilian and military infrastructure investments that go from plan to shovel in a time frame closer to 10 months than 10 years.

But most importantly, it requires people who believe in both their country and themselves to the extent that pushing the boundaries of the possible is seen as both their duty and their destiny.

When a nation like that is ready to act, the rest of the world will be watching.

June 28, 2009: Apollo 11 command module “Eagle” at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC. The heat shield after re-entry kind of looks like the surface of the moon, doesn’t it?

The command module is the one piece of the Saturn V rocket, one of America’s greatest engineering triumphs, that remains at the end when the astronauts came home. I have seen at least four of them:

• Apollo 11 at the Smithsonian on June 28, 2009 (above).
• Apollo 12 at the Virginia Air and Space Center on July 10, 2008.
• Apollo 14 at Kennedy Space Center on May 29, 2009.
• Apollo 16 at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, October 27, 2016.
• Apollo 17 at Johnson Space Center in Houston on December 30, 2005.

I might have seen Apollo 8 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago when I was much younger.

Major parts of the National Air and Space Museum are closed for long-term renovations, crowding out a chance to mark the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing. We’re finally getting updates to an exhibition hall that, a decade ago, stopped the space timeline in 1981. (I covered some of this ground in a Des Moines Register column after Neil Armstrong died, but it has vanished into the ether.)

Consider the following.

July 20, 1869: The Transcontinental Railroad has been complete for 70 days.

July 20, 1919: The U.S. Army convoy taking the Lincoln Highway across the United States, “the largest aggregation of motor vehicles ever started on a trip of such length,” spends a Sunday rest day in Chicago. Over the next week it would pass through Iowa. The journey would take two months.

July 20, 1969:

January 20, 1982: It’s one-eighth of a century since the moon landing. About seven months before this date, MTV debuted using astronaut imagery. About a year after this date, the Apple IIe will be introduced and Time will name the computer “Machine of the Year”.

July 20, 1994: The space shuttle Columbia is on a mission above Earth. The first Power Macs are a few months old. Eleven weeks from now, the beta version of Netscape will be released, but you can already buy the first edition of The Internet Yellow Pages … in a book store, because Amazon.com won’t go live until almost exactly a year later.

January 20, 2007: Apple announced the iPhone 11 days ago.

December 30, 2005: Apollo-era Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Reused from this blog post.

Associated Press: Restored Mission Control comes alive 50 years after Apollo

Meticulously recreated down to the tan carpeting, gray-green wallpaper, white ceiling panels, woven-cushioned seats, amber glass ashtrays and retro coffee cups, Project Apollo’s Mission Operations Control Room never looked — or smelled — so good.

May 29, 2009: Outside a low-rise midcentury government building, Cape Canaveral, Florida. Iowa connection: James Van Allen.

I have been to just about every major installation related to the Space Race that isn’t in California. At both Cape Canaveral and Huntsville, I signed up for the longest, most extensive tours available. At both Cape Canaveral and Huntsville, I could have been nearly everyone else on the tour’s child. I wish I would have had a camcorder to tape the trip and what the guides said. But I have many, many photos of the structures, long past their time, that were used to propel the United States from before NASA began to when Americans landed on the moon. I saw control panels and consoles with lights and buttons and switches that would look at home in Star Trek, because Star Trek got its inspiration for lights and buttons and switches from the real world to create what today is the past’s vision of the future.

Pictures from Cape Canaveral can be seen in my photo album from my 2009 vacation to Florida. (The management is fully aware that the road trip photo galleries page is both neglected in promotion and not updated for a decade. — Ed.)