50th Anniversary of the Landing of Humans on the Moon, and the Human Adventure

The full Moon of July 16, 2019 

Today marks the 50th year since humans walked on the moon for the first time. The landing was an important part of my own life, and whenever I am reminded, I am taken back to my childhood. In 1969, I was at a scout camp high in the southern Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure whose screw-up it was that our troop was in the middle of nowhere at the moment of one of humanity's greatest achievements, but that was the way it was. I can remember walking through the pinyon forest between the dining hall and our campsite (they were pretty far apart). I was alone at the time, and I heard the camp loudspeakers crackle on (which was unusual; we usually only heard "taps" and other bugle calls, or the emergency alarm). I heard a scratchy voice say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", and I realized that humanity had just accomplished something big. Something that had never been done before. It had a profound effect on that scrawny kid in the pinyon forest at Circle B Scout Ranch.

I grew up in the early sixties fascinated by astronomy. But it was also frustrating that things were so distant and so unreachable by we earthbound humans. Our own moon seemed impossibly distant, despite the objective laid forth by JFK that we would reach it before 1970.

The other planets in our own Solar System were small disks in our best telescopes, and the moons that circled them mere points of light. At the time I had a postcard from the Palomar Observatory that had pictures of Jupiter and Saturn similar to those below. I spent hours staring at them with a hand lens and later on a microscope, hoping I could make out more detailed features to no avail. The other stars? They were so distant that even in our best telescopes they looked no different, just spots of light. The more I learned about the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, the more impossible it seemed that we could ever reach them. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins changed that. They are heroes of the best kind, courageous men who risked everything to do something that had never before been done.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins didn't build the Apollo Spacecraft, or the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket that sent them into space. They didn't navigate to the moon by themselves. There were thousands of engineers and scientists who did the calculations, designed the modules, and shepherded the spacecraft to the moon, and even more importantly, back home again. The vast majority of scientists and engineers were the product of an educational system that was the best the world had ever seen. And they were driven by a communal sense of purpose. They worked together towards a common goal, and their discoveries and innovations radically changed the world we live in.

Of course our cynicism allows us to point out that once we beat the Russians to the moon, the public pretty much lost interest in the space program. NASA started to fade from the public consciousness, but the system was in place that allowed a series of successful projects that have changed the way we view the cosmos and our place in it. We never sent astronauts to Mars, but we sent rovers. We sent the Voyagers to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In a wonderful case of over-engineering, the spacecraft outlived their expected missions by decades. Voyager 1 is in its 42nd year of operation...it is still sending data from 16.4 billion miles away (20 light-hours) with an onboard computer that is probably less powerful than one of those Commodore 64 models that I wrote my thesis on in 1985. It recently made a course correction using thrusters that hadn't been fired since 1980. Voyager 2 is also continuing to operate.

Today we see our Solar System in stunning detail, in a way that would have been unbelievable to that child of the sixties. We know the surface of Mars in more detail than we know the surface of our own planet. We've explored the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, discovering strange worlds with vast oceans hidden beneath icy crusts, volcanoes of molten sulfur, and lakes, rivers and oceans made of liquid methane. We've peered through the clouds of Venus, and just a few years ago, we photographed and analyzed the hidden side of Mercury that we missed on the first mission three decades ago. We saw Pluto up close for the first time only a few years ago, and we've orbited the two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres.

The Hubble Space Telescope was the other game-changer. It has shown us the rest of the Universe with a clarity that was unimaginable four decades ago. We can see star nurseries and nascent star systems that provide us visual evidence of how our own Solar System formed. The Hubble and other high-tech units have now seen objects that formed a mere half billion years after the origin of the Universe itself 14 billion years ago. And we are only a few years away from the launch of an even more powerful telescope, the Webb Space Telescope.

This is the heritage of a country that undertook an audacious program of exploration under the leadership of JFK, and which succeeded through the exploits of courageous men like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. What do our children dream of today? Is our education system inspiring them to strive for incredible things, or is it teaching them to be unquestioning automatons in a factory or office? Are we teaching them to be curious about the world, or teaching them how to take a multiple-choice assessment test?

I had the privilege today of offering a lecture on "Space Rocks" at the public library in Hemet, California. The audience turned to be mostly young women 6 to 9 years of age, so I changed gears and made it more of a talk about the adventures of scientific research, and how anyone, including them, could be the vanguard of our next journeys into the unknown.

We are in a time of even greater challenges as humans. We are entering a dark age where the US government is retreating into willful ignorance instead of the leading the world in the face of a planetary crisis. We are now living with the consequences of climate change that were predicted thirty years ago, and we are spiraling into even worse consequences in the near future. There are days when I feel absolute despair at the stupidity and greed of those in charge, and profound sadness at the gullibility of those who blindly accept the deceptions and lies of the present administration. I can't accept that our explorations are ending in a morass of corruption and lies.

In the words of the immortal folksinger Lee Hays (and no doubt others), all things, like a kidney stone, will pass. I believe that adventure still awaits us as a people. As I start a new school year next month, I am as excited as I have ever been to have the opportunity to introduce my students to an incredible Universe. And almost every teacher I know feels the same way.

This is a highly abridged and updated version of a post from August 25, 2012 marking the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong.

49th Anniversary of the Landing of Humans on the Moon: Science, History, and the Doing of Big Things

The Moon tonight, July 20th, 2018

Today marks the 49th year since humans walked on the moon for the first time. The landing was an important part of my own life, and whenever I am reminded, I am taken back to my childhood. In 1969, I was at a scout camp high in the southern Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure whose screw-up it was that our troop was in the middle of nowhere at the moment of one of humanity's greatest achievements, but that was the way it was. I can remember walking through the pinyon forest between the dining hall and our campsite (they were pretty far apart). I was alone at the time, and I heard the camp loudspeakers crackle on (which was unusual; we usually only heard "taps" and other bugle calls, or the emergency alarm). I heard a scratchy voice say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", and I realized that humanity had just accomplished something big. Something that had never been done before. It had a profound effect on that scrawny kid in the pinyon forest at Circle B Scout Ranch.

I grew up in the early sixties fascinated by astronomy. But it was also frustrating that things were so distant and so unreachable by we earthbound humans. Our own moon seemed impossibly distant, despite the objective laid forth by JFK that we would reach it before 1970.

The other planets in our own Solar System were small disks in our best telescopes, and the moons that circled them mere points of light. At the time I had a postcard from the Palomar Observatory that had pictures of Jupiter and Saturn similar to those below. I spent hours staring at them with a hand lens and later on a microscope, hoping I could make out more detailed features to no avail. The other stars? They were so distant that even in our best telescopes they looked no different, just spots of light. The more I learned about the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, the more impossible it seemed that we could ever reach them. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins changed that. They are heroes of the best kind, courageous men who risked everything to do something that had never before been done.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins didn't build the Apollo Spacecraft, or the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket that sent them into space. They didn't navigate to the moon by themselves. There were thousands of engineers and scientists who did the calculations, designed the modules, and shepherded the spacecraft to the moon, and even more importantly, back home again. The vast majority of scientists and engineers were the product of an educational system that was the best the world had ever seen. And they were driven by a communal sense of purpose. They worked together towards a common goal, and their discoveries and innovations radically changed the world we live in.

Of course our cynicism allows us to point out that once we beat the Russians to the moon, the public pretty much lost interest in the space program. NASA started to fade from the public consciousness, but the system was in place that allowed a series of successful projects that have changed the way we view the cosmos and our place in it. We never sent astronauts to Mars, but we sent rovers. We sent the Voyagers to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (in a wonderful case of over-engineering, the spacecraft outlived their expected missions by decades). Not even two weeks ago, Voyager 2 passed its 41th year of operation...it is still sending data from 9 billion miles away with an onboard computer that is probably less powerful than one of those Commodore 64 models that I wrote my thesis on in 1985. Voyager 1 is also continuing to operate.

Today we see our Solar System in stunning detail, in a way that would have been unbelievable to that child of the sixties. We know the surface of Mars in more detail than we know the surface of our own planet. We've explored the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, discovering strange worlds with vast oceans hidden beneath icy crusts, volcanoes of molten sulfur, and lakes, rivers and oceans made of liquid methane. We've peered through the clouds of Venus, and just a few years ago, we photographed and analyzed the hidden side of Mercury that we missed on the first mission three decades ago. We saw Pluto up close for the first time only two years ago, and we've orbited the two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres.

The Hubble Space Telescope was the other game-changer. It has shown us the rest of the Universe with a clarity that was unimaginable four decades ago. We can see star nurseries and nascent star systems that provide us visual evidence of how our own Solar System formed. The Hubble and other high-tech units have now seen objects that formed a mere half billion years after the origin of the Universe itself 14 billion years ago. And we are only a few years away from the launch of an even more powerful telescope, the Webb Space Telescope.

This is the heritage of a country that undertook an audacious program of exploration under the leadership of JFK, and which succeeded through the exploits of courageous men like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. What do our children dream of today? Is our education system inspiring them to strive for incredible things, or is it teaching them to be unquestioning automatons in a factory or office? Are we teaching them to be curious about the world, or teaching them how to take a multiple-choice assessment test?

Our teachers and professors are working in a toxic environment these days. How else to explain things like a political party in Texas in 2012 that added a plank in their platform that says "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."?  Is that what we have come to?

I refuse to believe that. I believe that adventure still awaits us as a people. As I start a new school year next month, I am as excited as I have ever been to have the opportunity to introduce my students to an incredible Universe. And almost every teacher I know feels the same way.

It is a sense of adventure that Neil Armstrong would have understood...

This is an abridged and updated version of a post from August 25, 2012 marking the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong.

The Doing of Big Things...Remembering Neil Armstrong (and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, and a cast of thousands)

My condolences to the family of Neil Armstrong, who died today at the age of 82. Hearing of his passing took me right back to childhood. In 1969, I was at scout camp high in the southern Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure whose screw-up it was that our troop was in the middle of nowhere at the moment of one of humanity's greatest achievements, but that was the way it was. I can remember walking through the pinyon forest between the dining hall and our campsite (they were pretty far apart). I was alone at the time, and I heard the camp loudspeakers crackle on (which was unusual; we usually only heard "taps" and other bugle calls, or the emergency alarm). I heard a scratchy voice say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", and I realized that humanity had just accomplished something big. Something that had never been done before. It had a profound effect on that scrawny kid in the pinyon forest at Circle B Scout Ranch.

I grew up in the early sixties fascinated by astronomy. But it was also frustrating that things were so distant and so unreachable by we earthbound humans. Our own moon seemed impossibly distant, despite the objective laid forth by JFK that we would reach it by 1970.

The other planets in our own Solar System were small disks in our best telescopes, and the moons that circled them mere points of light. At the time I had a postcard from the Palomar Observatory that had pictures of Jupiter and Saturn similar to those below. I spent hours staring at them with a handlens and later on a microscope, hoping I could make out more detailed features to no avail. The other stars? They were so distant that even in our best telescopes they looked no different, just spots of light. The more I learned about the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, the more impossible it seemed that we could ever reach them. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins changed that. They are heroes of the best kind, courageous men who risked everything to do something that had never before been done.

Of course, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins didn't build the Apollo Spacecraft, or the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket that sent them into space. They didn't navigate to the moon by themselves. There were thousands of engineers and scientists who did the calculations, designed the modules, and shepherded the spacecraft to the moon, and even more importantly, back home again. The vast majority of scientists and engineers were the product of an educational system that was the best the world had ever seen. And they were driven by a communal sense of purpose. They worked together towards a common goal, and their discoveries and innovations radically changed the world we live in.

Of course our cynicism allows us to point out that once we beat the Russians to the moon, the public pretty much lost interest in the space program. NASA started to fade from the public consciousness, but the system was in place that allowed a series of successful projects that have changed the way we view the cosmos and our place in it. We never sent astronauts to Mars, but we sent rovers. We sent the Voyagers to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (in a wonderful case of over-engineering, the spacecraft outlived their expected missions by decades). Not even two weeks ago, Voyager 2 passed its 35th year of operation...it is still sending data from 9 billion miles away with an onboard computer that is probably less powerful than one of those Commodore 64 models that I wrote my thesis on in 1985. Voyager 1 is also continuing to operate.

Today we see our Solar System in stunning detail, in a way that would have been unbelievable to that child of the sixties. We know the surface of Mars in more detail than we know the surface of our own planet. We've explored the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, discovering strange worlds with vast oceans hidden beneath icy crusts, volcanoes of molten sulfur, and lakes, rivers and oceans made of liquid methane. We've peered through the clouds of Venus, and just a few years ago, we photographed and analyzed the hidden side of Mercury that we missed on the first mission three decades ago.

The Hubble Space Telescope was the other game-changer. It has shown us the rest of the Universe with a clarity that was unimaginable four decades ago. We can see star nurseries and nascent star systems that provide us visual evidence of how our own Solar System formed. The Hubble and other high-tech units have now seen objects that formed a mere half billion years after the origin of the Universe itself 14 billion years ago.

This is the heritage of a country that undertook an audacious program of exploration under the leadership of JFK, and which succeeded through the exploits of courageous men like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. What do our children dream of today? Is our education system inspiring them to strive for incredible things, or is it teaching them to be unquestioning automatons in a factory or office? Are we teaching them to be curious about the world, or teaching them how to take a multiple-choice assessment test?

Our teachers and professors are working in a toxic environment these days. How else to explain things like a political party in Texas that added a plank in their platform that says "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."?  Is that what we have come to?

I refuse to believe that. I believe that adventure still awaits us as a people. As I start a new school year at an institution that is operating on 70% of the funding it had four years ago, I am as excited as I have ever been to have the opportunity to introduce my students to an incredible Universe. And almost every teacher I know feels the same way.

It is a sense of adventure that Neil Armstrong would have understood...

Cancel Columbus Day...or make it something better...

This picture and the "Cancel Columbus Day" caption landed in my facebook account, and I think it is a great sentiment. I agree there are better things to celebrate...not only was it the start of the near-extermination of a continent full of people who had already "discovered" the land, but the guy was on a commercial venture. The holiday is an outmoded tradition that is meaningless to most people, and grossly insulting to many people. One could argue that we need a holiday for many reasons: religious beliefs account for a few (which also celebrates one group over another), and important national events are another (we celebrate Memorial Day so we can thank our family members and friends who served in the military). And in a capitalist country that has come to dishonor the workers who make the oligarchy rich, we still hang on to Labor Day. We remember the birthdays of people who brought out the best of our country: Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. I find this appropriate.

How about celebrating a true moment of national exploration? One that changed everyone's perception of the planet? It seems to me that if this country values science and technology as an accomplishment of the human spirit; conquering disease, improving standards of living, and journeying where no one has gone before, then we should have a day that celebrates our nation's greatest scientific adventure. My thought is that we should set aside the day we landed on the moon in 1969. Our country set a communal goal with JFK's speech at the beginning of his presidency, and against huge odds we succeeded. Admittedly, the race to the moon involved trying to outdo the USSR, but I doubt that fighting communism was the foremost thought of the scientists and engineers who got us onto our planetary neighbor. And the effort resulted in vast advances in science across many fronts (not the least of which was geology).

I don't care much for Columbus. We should be celebrating something truly meaningful, and I think science should have such a day. What do you think?

Geological Lunacy

The moon rises over Black Mesa in northern Arizona during one of my trips there in 2007.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of one of those seminal events in American history, the landing of humans on the surface of the moon (and getting them back!). It truly was a form of national lunacy, that in the 1960's we would put three men in a small metal cylinder on top of a massive rocket and send them into space. How many of you feel comfortable riding in even a 1960's vintage car or airplane, much less a giant rocket? The lunar module was designed with barely more than slide rules and human ingenuity!

Acknowledging that many of you were not born when these events conspired, it was a different world. We were in open competition with the USSR, and we had choices to fight the war openly, or doing it by proxy, such as, maybe, racing to the moon. It's a pretty poor reason for going to the moon, but scientists of the time were pretty comfortable with the bargain. It felt a lot better designing rockets for space travel rather than for delivering nuclear warheads. And the rewards were legion, not just in scientific knowledge about the origin of the moon, but also all the advances in technology that had to be invented from scratch to make the whole thing work.

I was born the year the first satellite was shot into space. As a child, I was fascinated with telescopes, with models of spacecraft, doodling rockets in the margins of my school work, and watching the adventures of the astronauts as each new milestone was reached.

Somehow, when the moon landing was about to happen, my scout troop had scheduled our summer camp week! I wasn't going to see the great event on television. We wouldn't miss it though. Luckily, the camp staff managed to find a radio station with a signal that reached Circle B Scout Ranch in the southern Sierra Nevada, and they patched the event through the camp PA system. I remember wandering through the pinyon pines, looking at the moon, and listening to coverage as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the first world other than our own.

Once we landed successfully, there was a new problem. For ten years, it was all about a race to be the first. It was about beating the Russians. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many people, the race was over, and we no longer needed to worry about getting to the moon, or much of anything else beyond our atmosphere. NASA started seeing huge cuts to their programs, and we pretty well lost our collective will to explore as a nation. It was enough that we got there first....

A lot of the people who cut their teeth on the moon shots stayed with the program, and the next decade included some incredible unmanned journeys that have continued the human journey. The Voyager missions stand out, with their incredible photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and their myriad moons. But there was far less interest on the part of the general public (and it is hard to give a ticker-tape parade to a satellite that was on the far side of Saturn).

And so today we have a real job to do, especially those of us in the teaching business. It isn't as easy to get kids excited about astronomy, and geology, and biology, and the other natural sciences, not when there are so many bells and whistles in the media, on their games, on their phones. But where would those cool gizmos have come from if not for space program, and the technological advances that came with it? And what is a life without that spark of curiousity that drives us to go further than we ever have before?