Artemis II

I woke up one day this month at 4AM. Outside our window was a nearly full moon which illuminated the room. None of that is unusual except this time, four brave astronauts, the first to leave Earth's orbit in 54 years, were about to pay a visit to our nearest celestial neighbor. Obviously, I couldn't see them, but I knew I was looking straight at them.

And the thought thrilled me beyond words.

I'm not proud to admit this, but I didn't start paying attention to the Artemis II mission until a day or two before they lifted off from Cape Canaveral on April Fool's Day. How different it was back in the sixties and seventies when not a manned space flight went by without my undivided attention. Perhaps it was my young, impressionable age, or the thought that I was witnessing something that no one had ever done before which was the case with every space flight in that era, that made it all so compelling. 

I guess since we've been there and done all that, this time around was not quite the same.

And yet, maybe it was even better this time.

Artemis II crew clockwise from upper left:
Astronauts Koch, Glover, Weisman and Hansen.

Despite and perhaps because of all the mishegoss going on in our world today, this mission was bloody fantastic. 

The moment I laid eyes on the Moon early that morning, I've had several  questions about the mission and manned space flight in general, some of which have been satisfactorily answered online, others not. 

The first thing that occurred to me as I saw the nearly full Moon was this: if the Moon is full from our perspective, the side of the Moon that is perpetually opposite of us, sometimes mistakenly referred to as the "dark side", would have indeed been in darkness. As the astronauts would be flying around the Moon, why did they plan the mission to take place at a time when the part of the Moon not visible from Earth would be in total darkness?

The answer I got was painfully straightforward: observing the side of the Moon that never faces us was simply not an important part of the mission. We've been sending both manned and unmanned spacecraft there for nearly sixty years now, so its entire surface has been documented, although the Artemis crew did focus on specific areas NASA is interested in for future landing sites. But since the timing of the mission depended upon several factors regarding the relative positions of the Earth and the Moon, the illumination of the opposite side of the lunar surface during the mission was a non-factor.

The next question came up after learning that the Artemis II astronauts at one point in their mission, would break the record for the greatest distance human beings have been from the Earth. Wait a minute I thought, we've already been to the Moon, how is that possible? The answer came as I was watching the mission and learned the astronauts would break the record that was set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13. If you recall, that was the ill-fated mission aborted after an explosion in an oxygen tank knocked out the power in the main portion of the spacecraft, the Command Module. 

I remember it well. There obviously was no good time for the tank to explode but if it had to happen, it could not have come at a more opportune time. The spacecraft was on its way to the Moon meaning the Lunar Excursion Module, (the L.E.M. for short), a separate vehicle, was still attached to the disabled Command Module. Fortunately, the astronauts could use the engines aboard the L.E.M. to make the maneuvers necessary to safely return them to Earth. Had the explosion happened as the crew were heading back to Earth after the L.E.M. had been jettisoned, or during the time two of the three astronauts were on the moon separated from the Command Module, all three would have been stranded in space with no chance of survival. 

Nevertheless, it was a harrowing experience as you know if you remember it, read about it, or have seen the movie Apollo 13, which from what I understand, was a reasonably accurate depiction of the event.

Anyway, with the main ship disabled, the crew couldn't just throw on the brakes, make a sudden U Turn and head for home. Rather, with the limited amount of power available to them, they were able to take advantage of the Moon's gravity to help send them back to terra firma. They did that by adjusting their trajectory to send them into a higher lunar orbit than the original plan. That meant instead of the ship being in a position to continuously orbit the Moon, in the higher trajectory the moon's gravity would have caught hold of the spacecraft changing its course but would not have been strong enough to hold on to it, thereby sending the ship back into space toward Earth.  *

That higher orbit explains why Apollo 13 held the distance record for manned space flight until this mission, a record the crew, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise certainly never intended nor hoped to break. 

But it was the intention of the Artemis II mission all along to make just one pass around the moon, using roughly the same trajectory forced upon Apollo 13, albeit just a little higher, accounting for the new record. Bragging rights aside, of all the magnificent accomplishments of the Artemis II mission, breaking the distance record had to be the least significant. **

We lost Jim Lovell last year but shortly before his death, the only astronaut to have been to the Moon twice without setting foot on it, recorded a heartfelt message to this crew, mentioning them all by name, and welcoming the four of them to "his old neighborhood." It was perhaps the second most poignant moment of the mission. *** You can hear the message here. 

Then of course I wondered, why only one pass around the moon instead of making several orbits as the crew of the first lunar voyage Apollo 8 (Jim Lovell's other trip to the Moon) did in 1968? It reminded me of my father who whenever we traveled anywhere, was content to get out of the car at our destination, have a look around for maybe a moment or two, then get back into the car and drive home. For him, just having been there seemed to be all that mattered. 

It turns out: the main focus of the Artemis II mission was to test the capabilities of the spacecraft, especially its life support systems in outer space, no small matter, so exploration was not the highest priority on the agenda. **** My father would have understood. 

Back to thinking about the recent passing of Jim Lovell who was without question my biggest astronaut hero as a child, I wondered how many of the Apollo astronauts are still around. I could only think of one, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin (Apollo 11), the second person to walk on the Moon. 

Here's the answer: Of the men who got to walk on the moon, in addition to Aldrin, David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) are still alive at this writing. Mentioned above, Fred Haise was denied the opportunity because of the aborted Apollo 13 mission but got a good view of the Moon. Unfortunately, he was probably too busy wondering if he'd make it home alive to appreciate it. He is still with us, as is Russell Schweickart who was aboard Apollo 9, which featured the first test flight of the L.E.M., but did not leave Earth's orbit.

Which got me thinking about how long it's been since we've been to the Moon. Surely it occurred to me, none of the crew of Artemis II were born yet when Harrison Schmidt and Chicago's own Eugene Cernan were the last people to date to have walked on the moon. Making myself feel really old, I was right.

Here is the crew of Artemis II who have returned to the good earth from their magnificent journey, listed in order from youngest to oldest:

Mission Specialist Christina Koch - 46.

Pilot Victor Glover - 49.

Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen - 50.

Commander Reid Wiseman - 50. 

All spring chickens. But not really, the average age of the Apollo astronauts when they went into space was slightly less than 40. I guess 50 is really the new 40.

Another difference is the racial and gender makeup of the space crews of yesterday and today. The Apollo astronauts sent into space, as well as those of the Gemini and Mercury programs before it, and those to follow for another decade, were all white men. That would not change until 1983. On June 18 of that year, Sally Ride became the first American woman astronaut to go into space. On August 30th of that year, Guy Bluford became the first black American astronaut to go into space. Since that time U.S. space crews have typically been a mixture of genders, races, and nationalities that reflect kind of sort of, the population of this country.

Perhaps the two most notable space missions of the Space Shuttle program were sadly the ones that ended in tragedy, Challenger in January of 1986, and Columbia in February of 2003. Aboard both those two doomed missions were women and people of color who gave their lives for this country, for science, for education and for the passion of exploration. 

One would think in this day and age, hardly anyone would bat an eye, as I didn't, that this mission included one woman and one black man. 

Here I couldn't have been more wrong, people did notice. The issue of D.E.I. in space (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) indeed came up as the current administration has mandated that all U.S. government agencies abandon efforts of hiring based upon gender and race. This means that NASA is now prohibited from even discussing the race or gender of upcoming or future crews that have not yet been assigned. 

It would not surprise me that since the Space Shuttle Program, race and gender have been issues considered in the selection process for space missions for many reasons, not the least of which has been PR. But here's the thing, PR has always been a significant part of NASA's mission, ever since its inception in the 1950s. 

Perhaps if the original scientists of NASA had their way, there would be no astronauts at all as most space exploration, as we've seen over the past seven decades, can be carried out quite nicely by machines that don't place such great demands both physical and emotional on the program that human beings do. Plus, you don't have to worry about returning them to earth.

But nothing captures the public's attention like sending people into space, and to cover the enormous cost of space exploration, NASA needed to get the American public behind it.

It was President Eisenhower who decided that the people who represented this country by risking their lives going into space would be military test pilots. Today that seems like a no-brainer but early on, NASA administrators had all sorts of ideas of what kind of people would make ideal astronauts. The most important qualification in their minds was not being averse to risk. To that end, race car drivers and circus performers were early candidates to be our first astronauts. 

As the early manned space missions were controlled from the ground, the first occupants of spacecraft were essentially just along for the ride, hence there was no requirement of flying skill. I wonder how many people today realize that our country's first astronaut (so to speak) sent into space was not Alan Shepard, but Ham, a four-year-old chimpanzee in January of 1961. Incidentally, Ham didn't get his name until after his groundbreaking flight as the first American great ape in space. That was because NASA officials were worried that if the chimp had a name rather than just a number (No.65), the PR would be much worse if he were killed during the flight.

Naturally, sending highly conditioned and trained military pilots with massive egos to do the work of a chimp, did not sit well with the men who would be our first human beings in space. The seven Mercury astronauts, Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper, insisted in no uncertain terms that they would have at least some amount of control of their spacecraft (a term insisted upon by the astronauts over the word "capsule" coined by the scientists) as well as a window, not in the original design. Knowing full well their PR importance to the success of the entire space program, the astronauts threatened to go public with their concerns and the NASA administrators ultimately acquiesced. 

It may surprise you that women were indeed considered to be among our first astronauts. Here's a piece I wrote in 2021 about "The Women in Space Program", inspired by Wally Funk, the pilot who had it been another era, may have gotten her chance to have been among the Mercury Seven. 

Spoiler alert, she didn't get that chance because of PR.

Since we live in a much different era. today it should be a no brainer that we have crews that represent our diverse nation. I would challenge anyone to look at the resumes of Koch, Glover, Hansen and Weisman, and not be completely blown away by their pre-mission accomplishments. And I would challenge anyone to assess the three Americans' performances during this mission and not be exceptionally proud to have each of them representing the best of our country. The Canadian people are equally proud no doubt to be represented by London, Ontario's own Jeremy Hansen.

If the anti-DEI crowd is truly sincere that only the most qualified people should be selected for space missions, it will be interesting to see their reaction when a future crew of a high-profile mission consists entirely of women and people of color. 

Finally, beyond PR, why do we send people into space?

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of reasons, but here I'm going to give one example that is both mundane and mind blowing at the same time.

It is a photograph. 

Earthrise from the moon. NASA photograph by Bill Anders,  December 24, 1968

Planet Earth had already been seen and usually photographed from space on every manned mission flown by U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts. So when the Apollo 8 astronauts set off on their mission to be the first humans to orbit the Moon, all their attention was focused on our natural satellite or as I prefer to think of it, our companion planet.***** While Moon bound, the astronauts didn't look back, there was no camera mounted behind their spacecraft and naturally, no rear-view mirror. 

Of course they were blown away being the first humans to set eyes upon the side of the Moon we never get to see from Earth, and set about to photograph it in great detail. But they weren't prepared for what they were about to experience. As they flew sixty miles above the lunar surface, Astronaut Bill Anders described the color of the lunar surface as resembling "dirty beach sand." Mile upon mile upon mile of unrelenting dirty beach sand. Then it appeared on the horizon.  

The one spot of brilliant, glorious color in the midst of seemingly endless dirty beach sand and the vast, complete blackness of space.

It was Earth, our home as no one had ever seen it, the entire planet seen from outer space. 

The mission was planned down to the minutest detail but one thing they did not expect was the astronauts' reaction upon seeing Earth from outer space for the first time. This wonderful piece from 2018 includes a recording of the three Apollo 8 astronauts as they first caught sight of our planet. In the recording you can hear three straight shooting 1960s military men, acting like little school kids on Christmas, which indeed it was. 

The crew was equipped with cameras which were intended to photograph the lunar surface. Being film cameras. the number of pictures they could take was limited to the amount of film they had on board. So, when Earth first appeared to them unexpectedly above the lunar horizon, Bill Anders knew he had to fumble around to find the camera loaded with color film while the fleeting moment still presented itself. 

I think we can all relate. 

Then on the recording you can hear Commander Frank Borman, the straightest shooter of them all tell Anders not to take that picture: "it's not on the schedule" he says. From his tone I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure he was joking.

That photograph would prove to be perhaps the most important photograph ever made. Allow me to quote myself:

For the first time we saw our planet exactly as that, a small, fragile, finite world floating in a see of nothingness. We haven’t seen our planet the same since. We once thought of the earth as a bountiful place with infinite resources. Today at least the reasonable among us, see this beautiful planet as our home. I don't think that it was coincidence that the environmental movement gained tremendous steam after we saw those photographs. The last man to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan said: "We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth".

Had the crew of Apollo 8 been robots instead of human beings, that "unscheduled" photograph would probably never have been made, and no one would have been there to testify to one of the most humbling experiences imaginable. 

And wouldn't you know it, it would be Frank Borman of all people, the man of few words and fewer platitudes who was once described by a psychologist as the "most uncomplicated man he ever met",  who stated the experience of seeing the Earth from the Moon in the most profound and dare I say, poetic of terms: 

It's 240,000 miles away. It was small enough you could cover it with your thumbnail. The dearest things in life were back on the Earth-- my family, my wife, my parents. They were still alive then. That was, for me, the high point of the flight from an emotional standpoint.

And now we're back to the Moon and we have a new set of pictures. As someone who knows a thing or two about photography, I'll use a term that I hope isn't too technical here.

Those pictures are fucking unbelievable.

Honestly, I could write a book about the hundreds of photographs I've seen so far made by the Artemis II astronauts but fortunately there's a video that does a better job than I could.

Here it is. Watch it, it's well worth the 30 or so minute run time.

And now we have a new generation of explorers, one that isn't afraid to let down their guard and show their emotions. A good place to witness that is this link to the crew's appearance in Houston on Saturday, April 11, 2026.

I've gone on way too long here but I'd like to close with something Christina Koch said during that appearance the day after they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean last Friday:

Several years ago I was giving a speech and I was doing my usual talk about crew and crewmates and teamwork and someone asked the question: "What makes a crew? What is different about a crew from a team?"

 And I was like, I got this, I open my mouth confidently to tell then everything I knew about being a crewmate, and everything that came out of my mouth was completely without value....

But the last ten days I've gotten a little bit of a better answer on that question.

A crew is a group that is in it all the time no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, but gives grace that holds accountable.

A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, (here she turns around to look at her three crewmates on the stage), beautifully, dutifully linked.

So, when we saw tiny earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn't necessarily just earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly in the universe.

(At this point she pauses briefly to gather her thoughts after being overcome with emotion.)

So, I may have not learned -- I know I haven't learned -- everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there's one new thing I know, and that is Planet Earth, you are a crew. Thank you.

So, to answer the question posed above, machines are perfect tools for gathering data to better learn about our universe. We send people into space to bring back art and poetry, to better learn about ourselves.

NOTES:

* I made it sound simple, but that correction in trajectory required a precise series of engine burns to get the spacecraft into the correct position to first enter the Moon's orbit, then be "slingshot" back to Earth. It took ten minutes for an IBM 360 mainframe computer the size of a room and then some, to come up with the set of instructions for the correct sequence of engine burns which had to be fed one burn at a time in order for the astronauts to manually execute them correctly. Of course, I had to see how that would compare to a modern computer. Care to guess how long it would take my cellphone to make the same calculations? A small fraction of a second. We may not have been to the Moon in 54 years, but we've done a few other things in that time.

** I was watching live coverage of the mission on NASA's YouTube channel at the time the Artemis was supposed to break Apollo 13's distance record. The time until breaking the record was displayed on the upper left corner of the screen and I wondered what would happen once that clock counted down to zero. The answer is nothing, not one of the crew nor anyone at Mission Control in Houston seemed to mention it. What did happen was this...

***Unquestionably the most poignant moment of the mission was when Jeremy Hansen announced that three members of the crew decided to name a previously unnamed lunar crater Carroll, in honor of the late wife of the fourth astronaut, their commander Reid Weisman.  

**** Nonetheless, there was still a good amount of exploration putting the astronauts' valuable time in space to good use.

***** Of the nine known planets in our solar system (yes, I'm counting Pluto), six of them have moons, or celestial bodies that revolve about them. All of the moons, except ours, are significantly smaller than the planet they orbit.  Our moon is about one quarter the size of Earth meaning that if you were to view the Earth and our moon together, say from Mars, the two are close enough in size to appear as a double planet. 

Wally Funk

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, but he did one incredibly cool thing regarding his trip into space last week aboard his own rocket ship, he invited Wally Funk to join him,

Wally Funk

In case your feelings about the current  billionaires' race to space range from blase to shitting bricks pissed off and you haven't been paying attention, Wally Funk is a pilot who in the early sixties was chosen to be part of a group of women who were tested to see how they would fare during space flight. The tests ran concurrently with the Mercury Program, the United States' first foray into manned space exploration. 

I guess it's appropriate to use the term "manned" here because in the end, the program that Ms. Funk took part in was ignobly scrubbed and the United States wouldn't send a woman into space until 1983 when Sally Ride climbed aboard the space shuttle Challenger for her first of two missions, both aboard that ill fated spacecraft. Ride joined NASA after seeing an ad in her college newspaper soliciting women to become applicants for astronaut training.

Much like everything during the early days of the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, the USSR was way out in the lead as their first female Cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova ventured into space inside her Vostok 6 capsule in June of 1963. Having orbited the earth 48 times in just shy of three days, Tereshkova logged more hours in space than all seven of the American Mercury astronauts combined. She remains the only woman to have flown a solo mission. 

The group of women which included Ms. Funk, took part in a privately funded  initiative called "The Women in Space Program" which was conceived in order to test whether women would make good candidates for space travel. It all began when the program's founder, Dr. William Lovelace who designed many of the tests that NASA used on their candidates for the Mercury Program, invited the highly decorated pilot Jerrie Cobb to take those same tests, all of which she passed. Lovelace's friend, Jacqueline Cochran, another noted pilot and businesswoman, agreed to finance a project that would test more. In all about 25 women, all elite pilots in their own right, were recruited for the project. Thirteen of the women passed the same insanely rigorous tests as the seven men who were chosen for the Mercury Project.

That is until Phase III of the tests which would have been held at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine. After Jerry Cobb took and passed all those as well, the Navy cancelled the tests as NASA, who was not  involved in the project, refused to sign off on it. 

There were a plethora of reasons why NASA might have been reticent to include women astronauts. Some were legitimate concerns (all subsequently put to rest) about how the female anatomy would handle space travel. Along those lines, probably the number one concern was menstruation in a weightless environment. I know that sounds ludicrous, simply a pretext to exclude women, but in space, an environment where even farting is cause for concern, no stone can remain unturned. Another cause for concern was how space would affect a woman's fertility. Apparently it doesn't. Then there were the  typically male concerns such as whether a woman's natural temperament, especially during her period, might prove problematic during a space flight.

On the other hand, the chief motivator for the study of the Women in Space Program, was the idea that there might be several advantages of having women astronauts over men. For example on average, women are smaller then men, they eat less, and consume less oxygen. As prosaic as that sounds, all that adds up to a significant reduction in cargo weight, meaning less fuel required per astronaut, a precious commodity in space travel. Women were also found to do better than men in isolation tests suggesting that they would fare better on very long missions such as a trip to Mars.

But all that would be way in the future and NASA had in the early sixties one and only goal, to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade as President Kennedy proposed during his speech before Congress on May 25, 1961, and no obstacle was going to get in its way.

Perhaps the biggest red flag of all for the ever PR conscious space agency was public opinion. I don't have the stats to back this up, but my guess is that despite the tens of thousands of young American women or maybe more at the time, tingling to get a chance at becoming an astronaut, the very real prospect of sending a woman to her death on a space mission, even if she willingly accepted the risk, would have been unacceptable for the majority of Americans at the time, and almost certainly would have killed the program. 

Pretexts aside, all that was moot. NASA's ace in the hole for not allowing women in space was the requirement imposed on them by President Eisenhower, that candidates for the astronaut corps all be selected from the ranks of elite military test pilots. By elite I mean jet pilots and guess what? The military did not allow women to fly jets in those days. 

Now it must be pointed out that in reality, at least during the Mercury program, there was little flying involved on the part of the astronauts as the flights were controlled remotely from the ground. The original astronauts in fact had to lobby for systems inside their capsules that would enable them to control the spacecraft, if ever so slightly. As I pointed out in my last post, the very first Mercury astronauts were chimpanzees, both of whom I'm guessing never flew planes, let alone jets. Truth be told, the original astronauts didn't need to be pilots at all, (Valentina Tereshkova wasn't) let alone jet pilots. Like practically everything involved with the space program in those days, the jet pilot requirement was pure PR. 

But rules are rules.

However there was another requirement that was waived for one of the male astronauts, a college degree, something John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, did not possess at the time.

Cobb and her fellow astronaut hopeful Janey Hart hoping to take advantage of that Glenn exception, appealed to President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson (who oversaw NASA) and the issue was brought before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics who examined the possibility that gender discrimination may have played a role in the matter, (ya think?). 

Among those testifying before the committee against having women astronauts was none other than John Glenn himself.

 At those hearings, Glenn said:

The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.

As unenlightened as those words sound today, Glenn, definitely a man of his time, wasn't too far off base, at least in describing the social norms if not necessarily the reality of 1962 America. If you're not old enough to remember, take a look at the way popular culture prescribed gender based roles for men and women. It was a world filled with women who served predominantly as homemakers married to professional men. They had names like June Cleaver, Laura Petry, and just plain Jeannie whose fictional partner whom she called Master, was an astronaut. 

Perhaps the baddest pilot of all,
Jerrie Cobb, who when all was said and done,
in William Lovelace's rigorous astronaut tests
finished in the top 2 percentile of all
potential astronauts, male and female. 

What you never saw on TV or in the movies movies in the late fifties and early to mid sixties were bad ass female pilots with names like Myrtle Cagle or Wally Funk, or physicists turned astronauts named Sally Ride. That name did however serve as the refrain to a very cool soul tune from the era made famous by Wilson Pickett called "Mustang Sally."

But it wasn't just pop culture where women's options were limited. Check out this video of clips of John F. Kennedy press conferences and see how he dismissive he was of the woman reporter who sincerely questioned him about promoting equal rights for women in this country.

That reporter, Mae Craig, a highly respected veteran journalist who marched with Suffragists in the twenties, implied in her question that despite working hard to promote the rights "of others", the Kennedy administration was doing little to advance the rights of women. As you can see from Kennedy's response, the issue of equal rights for women was simply not taken very seriously by him, or for that matter mainstream America in the early sixties.  

Mae Craig's question to the president turned out to be prophetic insofar as women astronauts were concerned. While Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin and should have opened the doors for women astronauts, it didn't. It would take another eight years when an amendment was added to the title which granted women the right to legal representation in their quest to become astronauts. Consequently in 1978, NASA dropped its requirement that astronauts be jet pilots and started recruiting female candidates for the corps, precisely the time Sally Ride found the brochure that would change her life.  

Since Sally Ride's first mission in 1983, as of a week ago, 51 American women astronauts have flown into space.

Last Tuesday, Wally Funk raised that number to 52. Coincidentally that day was the 52nd anniversary of the first "manned" lunar landing, 

At age 21, Funk was the youngest member of the Women in Space program and one of the 13 who passed all of the astronaut tests given to them. She also passed equivalents of the Phase III tests, having taken them privately, outside of the naval facilities.

Her background was similar to that of her fellow Women in Space members in that she fell in love with planes and aviation at a very early age, in her case at about the same time that she learned to walk. She had her first flight lesson at nine, and received her pilot's license, AND became a professional pilot at 19. 

Wally Funk was thwarted from pursuing her dreams to their fullest her entire life because of her gender. Perhaps it started in high school when she wanted to take electives in shop and technical drawing but was told she could only take home economics classes. So she did what any sensible person would do, she left high school early and enrolled in a college where she would thrive. I guess you could do that in those days. 

Later when she applied for a job as a commercial airline pilot, a position she was more than qualified for, she was rejected on the pretext that there were no rest rooms for women in their training facilities.  

And on and on. Yet despite that, up to this point by all accounts she has led a very rewarding life in the field of aviation including high level positions in both the FAA and the FTSB. 

I say up to this point because clearly she's not finished. As she emerged from the capsule after her brief encounter with space last week, she was clearly exhilerated but bemoaned the fact that the experience was way too short and couldn't wait to do it again. Long before Bezos asked her to accompany him aboard the maiden passenger flight of his spacecraft, Ms. Funk put down a deposit to fly aboard Richard Branson's spacecraft when it goes into service shuttling passengers for brief trips outside the earth's atmosphere. That spacecraft unlike Bezos's, is a space plane, controlled by two pilots who like the old Space Shuttles, guide their craft to a landing on a runway rather than a capsule parachuting to the ground.

As part of the competition between the two billionaires, perhaps Branson will top Bezos by asking Funk to take over the controls in one of his space planes. 

Now THAT would be sweet justice.

In that vein, John Glenn finally got the comeuppance he deserved for the words he spoke at that hearing so many years ago. For twenty three years he held the record as the oldest person, at 77, to have been in space. Wally Funk at 82 beat Glenn's record last Tuesday. Given the current push to send paying customers into space, I'm sure that record will not hold for long. I also wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Ms. Funk breaks her own record. 

Wally Funk's list of accomplishments in aviation as well as other fields is too numerous to list here but in case you're interested, as you should be, you can read all about them here.

Today she is only one of two surviving members of that elite group of pilots who participated in the Women in Space program who long after the fact, received the moniker "The Mercury 13". 

Ironically, most of the members of The Mercury 13 never met one another during the project as their tests were held separately. Many of them finally got together on the occasion of the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-63, the first shuttle mission to be piloted by a woman, Eileen Collins. Here is a photo of them taken at Cape Canaveral in front of the launch pad in 1995:

Seven members of the Mercury 13 from left to right:
Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Ratley,
Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman.

The total number of women of all nationalities who have logged hours in space is 65.* Needless to say all of them owe their careers to these pioneers of space and the rest of their remarkable bad ass comrades. 

Here in alphabetical order, is the list of the Mercury 13:

Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, her twin sister Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane Briggs Hart, Jean Hixson, Irene Leverton, Jerri Truhill Sloan, Bernice Stedman, Gene Nora Stumbough,  and Rhea Woltmann.

In reflecting on the women who could have been astronauts, Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter had this to say:

"NASA never had any intention of putting those women in space. The whole idea was foisted upon it, and it was happy to have the research data, but those women were before their time."

That's for sure.

* Sadly, Christa McAuliffe, NASA's first civilian on a space mission is not counted among the 65 because her one mission which ended tragically aboard the Shuttle Challenger, never technically made it into space.

Including McAuliffe, a total of four women have lost their lives during space missions. The other three are Judith Resnik, McAuliffe's crewmate aboard Challenger, and Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark, both of whom perished as a result of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. 

Tragic as the loss of their lives was, the lessons learned from the mistakes that led to the catastrophic accidents that caused their deaths have helped make space travel a little less risky for their successors. 

I have no doubt that to a woman, each of them would look at their ultimate sacrifice that way.

They and their crewmates who perished aboard Challenger in 1986, and Columbia in 2003, fourteen in all, will never be forgotten. 

Flat Earthers

The term "flat-earther" is figuratively used to refer to people who cling to out-dated belief systems and by doing so, reject commonly held ideas, principals, observations, logic, and facts. Who woulda thunk that approaching the third decade of the third millennium of the Common Era, that term would also be used to literally describe an ever growing number of people?

Yes Virginia, there are still people in 2019 who believe the earth is flat.

Well it seems they do anyway, it all could be an elaborate joke, a hoax if you will, but most people who study the Flat Earth movement think its adherents are serious.

But what about this photograph?

Photograph of Earth (allegedly) made by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972, during their (alleged) trip to the Moon. This remains one of the most reproduced photographs in history.

"Fake News!" say the flat-earthers. According to them, the space programs of the USA and the USSR in the fifties, sixties and seventies, and later other countries and private entities, are all elaborate hoaxes, part of an enormous conspiracy designed to keep the truth of the actual flatness of the earth away from the minds of the unsuspecting public. The photos allegedly made from space they say, are all fake, "Photo-shopped" (using contemporary terminology), to string along the gullible. No, we never went into space say the Flat-earthers because there is no such thing as outer space.

"Globalist" is the flat-earther term for those of us who buy into the conspiracy of scientists, governments, NASA, the airlines, and scores of other agencies and businesses to make us believe that the earth is round.  What we globalists call the cosmos,  the sun, the moon the stars and the galaxies beyond them, are all part of a self-contained enclosure, (my word not theirs), with the flat earth at the bottom, kind of like the gravel liner to a bird cage.

Their concept of the earth looks like this:

This is an illustration of the conception of the flat earth as published on the web site of the Flat Earth Society. As you can see, it is a disc centered upon the north pole with the longitudinal lines projecting outward from the pole. In this conception, Antarctica which is at the perimeter of the disc encircles the entire planet and as the theory goes, its 150 wall of ice encircling the earth is what contains the planet's oceans. It should be pointed out that this is merely one of several concepts of the flat earth. Some of them have the earth expanding outward infinitely. 

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, for argument's sake let's just say they're right about the conspiracy and we can't use the photographs as evidence. Without the photographs, might they have a valid argument that the earth is indeed flat?

Well let's just say they have a lot of splainin' to do.

The idea that the earth is a sphere is ancient, perhaps going back three millennia or more. It is assumed that the great mathematician Pythagoras around 500 BC, understood the spherical nature of the planet, but he was very unlikely the first. Two hundred years later, the head of the library in Alexandria,  a mathematician (among many other things) by the name of Eratosthenes, performed a simple observation to prove Pythagoras correct. Eratosthenes had been told that in Syrene, a city south of Alexandria, at precisely noon on June 21, the summer solstice, the day of the year when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun was directly overhead, and therefore cast no shadow. As this was something unheard of in Alexandria, after confirming the validity of the observation, on a subsequent cloudless summer solstice at precisely noon in Alexandria. Eratosthenes measured the angle of the shadow of the sun's light cast by a stick and found it to be seven degrees. There could be only two plausible explanations for this discrepancy. Either the two observers were not parallel to each other, which would indicate they were standing upon different portions of a curved surface, OR the observers were standing on the flat surface of the earth, parallel to each other. If the latter had been the case, the sun would have to be ridiculously close enough to the surface of the earth to create this discrepancy.

Not surprisingly, the flat-earthers who themselves are not ignorant of math, have calculated that the sun is only about four hundred miles from the surface of the flat earth, a little more than the distance between Chicago and Cleveland! By comparison, modern globalist measurements put the distance between the earth and the sun at about 93 million miles, a heck of a lot of trips to Cleveland and back.

Well that second idea probably didn't occur to Eratosthenes because by his time the Greeks had already figured correctly that the sun was much farther away than Cleveland, (even from Alexandria!). By assuming the earth is round and that the sun is significantly far enough away, taking the seven degree angle difference between the two measurements, and the distance between where the measurements were taken, by using simple geometry, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth. His results although not perfect, came within ten percent of present day measurements made with satellites, not bad for a stick, a protractor and some logic. Some centuries later, Arab and Indian astronomer/mathematicians independently performed similar measurements to much greater accuracy.

Flat-earthers argue that empirical observations are tantamount to our understanding of the universe, rather than relying upon logical constructs and theories made up by others. In other words, if the earth looks flat, it must be flat. But you needn't rely on easily repeatable experiments made in locations hundreds of miles apart to directly experience the curvature of the earth. For example, Chicago is located on the southwest shore of a large, but not enormous body of water, Lake Michigan. If you  stand on the edge of the lake just east of Chicago's Loop and look toward the southeast, on a clear day you can see the bend of the shoreline at the foot of the lake, and follow it until it disappears below the horizon. Beyond that, if the conditions are right, you can see the plumes of smoke from the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, but you can't see the mills themselves as they are below the horizon. If we look due east into the lake, we only see the horizon, not the shore of the other side of the lake some sixty miles away. Obviously if we got in a boat and sailed east, the Michigan shoreline would gradually appear  bit by bit on the horizon, Another example are the water intake cribs built about 2.5 miles out into the lake. From the shore, the cribs appear to be sitting directly upon the horizon. But from the vantage point of one of the tall buildings along the lake, say the John Hancock Building, one can see the lake extending miles beyond the cribs. Higher still from an aircraft, you can make out the entire outline of the southern shore of the lake.

Empirical observations such as these have been made for millennia, the ancient mariners whose lives depended upon an understanding of such things, quickly understood that the shore quickly disappearing below the horizon as they set out to sea did not mean that they were about to fall off the edge of the earth.

Another controversial opinion of the Flat-Earthers is that the earth is fixed in space and the celestial bodies we see in the sky move around above us.

One thing the ancients knew intimately were the stars. If there is a constant in life on this planet, it is the stars and their relationship to one other. Their random arrangement in our sky inspired humans to group them together into what they called constellations. The ancients derived meaning from the "pictures" drawn by these groupings. Many cultures used the outlines of the constellations to illustrate their own mythical creation stories, The ancient astronomers of Greece and Rome handed down to us their constellations which still have great meaning to people who follow the pseudo-science of astrology. But the constellations also continue to used be used by astronomers who use them as a road map to the sky.

Despite the fact that the stars are all moving at tremendous speeds, an ancient astronomer could be transported to today and would barely see any change in the constellations from his own day.  But there are objects in the sky that do not remain fixed in position as compared to the stars. The Greeks called them wanderers, or planets, and there were seven of them, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Sun and the Moon. From our point of view on Earth, these objects' positions change in relation to the stars but at much different rates. The range of the movement of the "planets" is restricted to the region of the sky that is roughly above the earth's equator. (This fact would become important in describing the true nature of our solar system). The twelve constellations that correspond to this region of the sky are known by astrologers as the signs of the zodiac. The brightest of these "planets" is the Sun, our own star. Over the course of one year, from our point of view on Earth, the sun "travels" trough each of the constellations of the zodiac. Obviously when the sun is "up" we can't see the stars nor the constellation the sun is in front of, but astronomers knew the sky so well that by inference they knew exactly where the sun is in the sky. The astrological "sign" of a particular time of the year corresponds to the constellation the sun is in front of during that time. For example at this writing. (I happen to know this because my birthday is this week), the sun is in front of the constellation Sagittarius*, therefore I am said to have been born under the sign of, well you get the idea.

The second brightest object in our sky, the Moon, moves through the zodiac at a much quicker rate than the sun, making a complete cycle through the constellations in roughly 28 days. The Greeks correctly surmised that just as nearby objects appear to be moving faster than far away objects when we look out the side of a moving vehicle, (the phenomenon known as parallax) the relatively fast motion of the moon compared to the sun means that the moon is closer to the earth than the sun. Due to pure happenstance, from our perspective the sun and the moon appear to be roughly the same size.  This combined with the fact that the sun is farther away from the earth, led the Greeks to correctly surmise that  the sun is much larger than the moon, 

The parallax rule applies to the other five planets as well, the relatively nearby ones, Venus and Mars move through the zodiac relatively fast while the more distant ones, Jupiter and Saturn take their sweet time. Finally Mercury which is always seen within close proximity to the sun (because of its position as the closest planet to our star), moves through the zodiac at the same rate as the sun. Not surprisingly, the Greeks were also able to figure the relative distances to the planets as well.

The Greeks were able to figure this all out using logic, they had no proof of course. There were even Greeks who came up with the crazy-radical idea for the time, that it was the Sun and not the Earth that was the center of the known Universe.  Aristarchus, a contemporary of Eratosthenes is credited as the first Greek to postulate the idea of a helio-centric universe, he also proposed that the Universe extended far beyond the solar system and that the stars were actually very distant versions of our own sun. From a globalist perspective, he was right. But the idea of helio-centricism had been kicking around for centuries before that. The earliest citation I could find goes back to the 9th Centruy BCE. Yajnavalkya, an Indian philosopher of the Vedic tradition wrote:

The sun strings these worlds – the earth, the planets, the atmosphere – to himself on a thread.

However no less a figure than Aristotle flat out rejected the theory of a heliocentric universe on the basis that it lacked the empirical observational data to back it up.

Aristotle's notion of a spherical earth at the center of the universe with all the celestial bodies revolving about it, would hold court for nearly twenty centuries after his death.

The controversial topic of helio-centricism was revisited by the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus in the first half of the 16th Century. It felt logical to many that the Earth really was terra-firma, a perfectly static (albeit globular) body in the midst of a universe that happily revolved around it. But there was a problem, the motion of the planets through the sky. The sun and the moon maintained a consistent forward motion through the constellations of the zodiac. But it was the motion of the other planets that was peculiar. Most of the time they too would move in the same direction through the sky as the sun and moon but at times their motion would slow down and reverse direction or retrograde. It was as if they had a will of their own. That idea was perfectly adequate for people who assigned metaphysical powers to the celestial bodies. But to the Renaissance mind of Copernicus, who many credit as being the father of modern scientific inquiry, that answer was not adequate, there had to be a rational explanation for the erratic motion of the planets.

That explanation was simple, the Sun was the center of the system of the planets. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all revolved around it, not around the Earth. Only the Moon revolved around the Earth while the two of them, essentially a double planet, also revolved around the Sun. It all made perfect sense, the Earth rotating on its axis roughly every 24 hours, half that time facing the sun the other half not, accounted for the cycles of day and night. The moon revolving about the earth roughly every 28 days accounted for its movement through the sky in that same period of time. The phases of the moon, new, first quarter, full, third quarter and everything in between could be explained by the daily change in the relation of the moon, to the earth and the sun. The apparent yearly motion of the sun through the sky could now be explained by the earth's revolution about the sun every year. The seasons are perfectly explained by the tilt of the Earth's axis with with respect to the plane of its orbit. And most significantly, the erratic motions of the planets as viewed from Earth can be easily explained by concentric orbits of each planet, including the earth. No they weren't going backwards and forwards, it was just our point of view depending upon the planets' relative position in their orbits that made them appear to move that way. This picture illustrates the occasional "retrograde" motion of Mars as seen from the viewpoint of Earth:

A diagram of the relative orbits of Earth (the blue dot) and Mars (the red one). To understand this better, it would be helpful to extend the bottom line at position "a" several inches to the right with a point on the end for a reference, representing a distant star. In position a, from the viewpoint of the earth, Mars would line up with that star. In the next two positions, b and c, Mars appears from Earth to be advancing to the left of the reference star. As Earth's orbit catches up with Mars at d, then overtakes it in position e, Mars appears to be heading backwards, right to left, back toward the reference star. Then as the Earth begins its more acute orbit in positions f and g, Mars now appears to be heading back in the direction of left to right.

Copernicus' solution, by way of Yajnavalkya and Aristarchus was elegant, simple and rational, who could possibly object?

Yeah right.

Copernicus understood the danger of making his theory public, so much so that he waited until he was at the end of his life in 1543 to publish his work on the subject, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, so as not to be charged with heresy by the Church.

More than a half century after the death of Copernicus, Galileo Galilei with the help of the new-fangled invention the telescope, whose design he improved upon significantly, discovered never before realized attributes about some of the inhabitants of the sky. As anyone with a new telescope or a pair of binoculars knows, after one gets tired of (or busted for) spying on the neighbors, one of the most interesting things to look at is the Moon. And you guessed it, in 1609, Galileo was the first person to have observed the craters of the moon. He next turned his telescope on the more distant planets and the following year he discovered four of the moons of Jupiter. He also discovered the rings around Saturn, spots on the sun, and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars, (not gas as was previously assumed). Perhaps the most significant thing he discovered, at least in terms of describing the true nature of the solar system, were the phases of Venus which cannot be detected without a telescope. The fact that we never see the entire disc of the planet, (except during a total solar eclipse), proves that the planet revolves around the sun and not the earth.

Galileo was a fervent and vocal advocate of the Copernican model of the solar system which was still widely debunked by both the Church and fellow scientists alike. To the Church, the idea not only conflicted with Scripture, but also lessened the significance of what it considered God's greatest creation, humankind, and its home. Scientists were also skeptical because if the earth revolved about the sun, then the visible angle of the stars (the ones that are visible year-round) would change every six months due to the change in position of the earth. As they could not measure any difference, contemporary astronomers such as the estimable Tycho Brahe, rejected the theory. What Tycho did not take into account was that the stars were much too far away for any such measurement to be made with the instruments of the time. It wouldn't be until the 19th Century before reliable measurements could be made six months apart that would confirm once and for all the earth's revolution about the sun.

But in Galileo's time, insisting that the sun and not the earth was the center of action was still grounds for heresy and in 1633, Galileo was charged, forced to renounce his findings, and ended up spending the remaining nine years of his life under house arrest.

Meanwhile, Galileo's contemporary, Johannes Kepler, also an advocate of heliocentricity, was hard at work in Prague, using his mentor Tycho Brahe's fastidious observations of astronomical events, to accurately calculate the orbits of the planets about the sun. (Tycho's own model of the universe was a combination of heliocentric and geocentric theories). These remarkably precise observations led to one of Kepler's greatest (he had many) contributions to science, his three laws of planetary motion. In case you're interested here they are:

1. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at a focus.
2. A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

It was Isaac Newton (bet you knew I'd eventually get to him!) who used Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion to help define his general laws of motion and the role of the unifying force of Nature that governs the laws of physics from the proverbial apple falling from a tree to the orbits of planets. He called that force, drum roll please, gravity. Newton's discoveries would be checkmate, a slum dunk, game, set and match for helio-centrism. Any argument that Newton's work was merely theoretical was put to rest in 1758 when British astronomer Edmund Halley used Kepler and Newton's formulas to successfully predict the return of the comet that would eventually bear his name. Neither Halley nor Newton would be around for that auspicious event, but it would cement their reputations for eternity. Newton's three laws of motion (you can look them up) would form the backbone of Physics for more than two centuries and they continue to be applied in the design of everything from pendulum ball toys to the launching of satellites. And they define in no uncertain terms how and why the earth and the planets revolve around the sun, and why the earth, the planets and the sun are all globes.

Naturally, to the Flat-Earthers, Issac Newton and his forebears were all hacks.

Typical Flat-Earthers, at least judging from their web site, are not stupid. They are well versed in science and everything mentioned above, they just choose not to accept it. And yes, they have counter arguments to many of the theories regarding the cosmos. Those they cannot argue, they choose to ignore.

The (flat) world view of the Flat-Earthers might be considered an example of motivated reasoning, that is, developing one's opinions based upon pre-conceived notions,  emotions or ideology rather than upon discernible facts, especially those that happen to be inconvenient. Motivated reasoning is the engine that drives all the conspiracy theories of the world, and the "Round Earth Conspiracy" has to be one of the most expansive and outrageous of conspiracy theories. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would be honestly motivated or passionate about the earth being flat. It could stem from a deeply religious conviction that mankind and the earth must be at the center of the universe. It is true that scientific discovery in the past three thousand odd years has continuously painted a picture of the universe growing bigger and bigger, while the earth keeps growing smaller and more insignificant.

Or it could possibly be simple contrarianism that drives them.

Whatever the reason, a lot of thought and work has gone into the herculean task of trying to convince folks that the world is flat. To that end the Flat-Earthers have found a formidable if unwilling ally to their cause, Albert Einstein.

Newtonian physics for all its brilliance in accurately predicting the mechanics of the universe has one serious flaw. It describes gravity as the unifying force that drives the motion of objects big and small, (albeit not too big nor too small), but it doesn't attempt to explain what gravity is, other than a mysterious force that attracts one object to another. Einstein who was a great admirer of Newton found a paradox in his predecessor's logic. It had to do with the speed of light which had been determined by the physicist James Maxwell to be absolute. Einstein added to this that the speed of light was absolute irrespective of the motion of the source that produced the light. This contradicted Newton's laws of motion. From this realization, he concluded that time was the missing ingredient and that time itself could expand and contract in relation to the relative velocity of an object. Einstein created an entirely new model of the universe including time as an integral dimension.

This four dimensional "space-time" model described in Einstein's theory of General Relativity described the effect of massive objects, such as planets and stars, warping space to such an extent that objects approaching the massive object entering the curved space fall toward the object. Consequently General Relativity negates Newton's assumption that gravity is a force (like a magnet) that acts upon falling objects, but rather that the "falling" object is simply following a path laid out by the curved space surrounding a more massive object.

"Voila!!!" I can hear the Flat-Earthers cry,"...we knew all along that gravity was a myth!" Thus did they latch onto General Relativity's theme that gravity is a non-existent force, (without accepting all that other complicated stuff). Their current concept of the earth-as-birdcage-liner model is that the entire bird cage-cosmos, flat earth, sun, moon, planets and everything else except the bird, is in a constant state of upward acceleration at a continuous rate of 9.8 meters per second squared (the rate of acceleration caused by gravity on Earth). This is what makes objects appear to be falling to the surface of the Earth when actually it is the other way around, the surface of the earth is rising to meet the object.

Minus the several steps of faulty logic it took them to get to this point, the scenario is somewhat plausible, (well at least the fake gravity part), even from the perspective of Newtonian physics.

On the Flat Earth Society web site, there is a link to this PBS video (complete with Flat-Earth commentary) which attempts to explain the "illusion" of gravity:




Relativity as its name implies, states that all motion is relative to the observer. In other words it is equally valid to say either that an apple is falling to the ground, or that the earth is (hard as that may be to imagine), rising up to meet the apple. This is the inspiration for the model of the flat earth accelerating "bird cage" model. At one point in the video, the narrator mentions that very scenario. And the Flat-earth commentator uses this to point how General Relativity supports the flat earth model.

But of course it does not. What the Flat-Earth commentator misses is the narrator stating in his very next breath: "but of course the earth is round."

Apparently the Flat-Earthers also missed the subsequent series of videos that go into more specific details of Einstein's concept of space-time, none of them compatible with any model of a flat earth, geo-centric universe.

Yet another example of inconvenient facts being ignored.

There is no room in any serious inquiry be it science, history, politics, philosophy, law, or any other field of endeavor, for motivated reasoning. Inquiry must always begin with a question. True that question usually is followed with a presumption, theory or hypothesis that can either be proven or disproven. It is the disproven part that is the most important, as any reasonable search for understanding must be accompanied by the acceptance that we might be wrong.

In a way, the Flat Earth Movement is a good thing because it encourages us to challenge even our most fundamental ideas and beliefs. It was after all. once taken for granted that gravity was a real force until Einstein showed that was not necessarily true. It was once taken for granted  that the orbits of the planets were circular with the sun at the center, even by Kepler who was very much driven by spirituality, until he challenged his deeply held beliefs when his careful observations proved otherwise. And of course it was once taken for granted that our terra firma, Earth, at the center of the universe, "stands firm, never to be moved" (Chron 16:30).

Scientific inquiry above all else is not sacred and should always be held subject to scrutiny, no matter how established it may be. So should the rebuttals. It's not good enough for example to state for example that "Evolution is merely a theory." It is not. There are well established empirical facts that clearly back up the evolution of the species. If one day we find new verifiable ideas or facts that contradict what we think we already know, then we can make reasonable decisions for or against, but not before. The same goes for climate change which is an established, verifiable fact. The extent of human contribution to climate change may be debated, yet there is a very strong likelihood agreed upon by the vast majority of the scientific community that what we do, does in fact affect the environment, again based upon verifiable observations and facts, not simply opinions. We are foolish to assume otherwise.

The problem arises when our inquiries begin not with questions, but with answers, followed by a relentless effort to find arguments to validate those answers at the expense of valid arguments that support conflicting answers.

The bottom line is this: question everything, and be open to everything. It's far better to evaluate what we don't know rather than to over-estimate what we do know, and especially, what we think we know.



* This statement actually needs to be amended. In the past two millennia, the tilt of the Earth's axis has shifted meaning that from this planet, the sun no longer is in front of Sagittarius on my birthday. I can't remember in which direction the shift has taken place but today the sun would either be in front of Scorpio or Capricorn. From some reason, modern day astrologers have failed to take this into account.

Lest We Forget...

Before we know it, we'll be upon the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned lunar landing. Funny, it seems like just yesterday that I commemorated in this space, the fortieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's four hour stroll on the surface of the moon. No doubt there will be worldwide observances of that momentous event on the 20th of July next year.

There was an equally momentous event in the history of the race to the moon, whose half century anniversary went all but unnoticed last year. Small wonder, it was not the glorious culmination of President Kennedy's daring pledge in 1961 to land a man on the moon within the decade, not to mention thousands of years' worth of human dreams.  The event was in fact, not a triumph at all, but an unmitigated failure which ended in tragedy, the loss of three astronauts whose ill fated mission, Apollo I, never even got off the ground.

Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee pose in front of the launchpad which surrounded the spacecraft
in which they perished on January 27, 1967. 

But most space historians agree that the lessons learned from the catastrophic accident that took place on Launch Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy on January 27, 1967 and took the lives of Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger Chaffee, (names that are forever etched in my memory), were essential building blocks that paved the way for the moon landing that took place just two and one half years later.

Long after his crowning achievement, Neil Armstrong would reflect upon what it took to reach the Moon:

The rate of progress is proportional to the risk encountered, ...the public at large may well be more risk averse than the individuals in our business, but to limit the progress in the name of eliminating risk is no virtue.

There is perhaps no better account of the early days of the U.S. space program than Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff, which was followed in 1983 by an equally inspiring Phillip Kaufman film by the same name. Both open with the story of the engineers, technicians and most importantly the pilots chasing a "demon" known as the sound barrier. Before it was done successfully, no one knew if it was even possible to fly an aircraft faster than 750 mph, the speed of sound. That demon lived somewhere above that speed, "when air could no longer move out of the way" making flight impossible, or so it was thought.

The names of those folks who sacrificed everything to chase that demon, military test pilots who during their typically short careers, (about one in four did not to live to see retirement), were unknown to the general public as their missions were classified and their exploits kept top secret. To a man, those who risked their lives on a daily basis had what Wolfe described as, you guessed it, "the right stuff." He wrote:

It was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life, any fool could do that. No, the idea seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go up again the next day ...

The man who piloted the first plane to break the sound barrier was USAF test pilot, Captain Chuck Yeager who accomplished the feat it in an X-1 rocket plane on October 14, 1947, taking off from what would become Edwards Air Force Base in California. The legendary Yeager as Wolfe's ultimate possessor of the right stuff, plays a huge role in both the book and in the film where he makes an uncredited cameo appearance beside the actor who plays him in the movie, the late Sam Shepard. You can see the real Yeager (who is still with us at this writing) working behind the bar in this scene from the movie.

Another prominent figure in the movie is Gus Grissom, who along with fellow Edwards newbie, test pilot Gordon Cooper, serves as a comic foil to the somewhat aloof Yeager, of whom the two men grudgingly stood in awe. When Grissom amd Cooper arrive for the first time at the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the watering hole that served as the focus of social life at the base, the clown-like Cooper, played by Dennis Quaid, brags that one day his likeness will join all the other portraits of pilots that adorned the bar. Cooper is brought down to earth (so to speak) by the formidable proprietor of the bar, Pancho Barnes, herself a notable aviator, who informed the cocky young pilot that those portraits were all of pilots killed on the job.

Once word got out that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first object into space in 1957, a satellite called Sputnik, the U.S. Government scrambled desperately to make up for lost time, and the space race was on. While today it seems obvious that our first astronauts would be chosen from the ranks of military test pilots, that was not always the case. Unlike aircraft that were under total control of their pilots, the new spacecraft could be controlled exclusively from the ground. The real men behind the machines and their success, at least in their own eyes, were the jet propulsion guys, rocket scientists if you prefer, who bristled at the idea that pilots would make good, and by that I mean, obedient passengers aboard their spaceships. For their part, the headstrong test pilots bristled at the idea of not having full control over what they insisted on calling, their spacecraft. Despite objections from the rocket scientists, at least according to the film, it was President Eisenhower who insisted that military test pilots become the first astronauts.

The much decorated Yeager would have been a natural choice, but his lack of a college degree made him ineligible as far as the space program's PR people went. Ever conscious of image, they wanted only America's best and brightest to ride our rocket ships into destiny, and while Yeager may have been one of not the best we had to offer, he wasn't one of the brightest, at least not on paper.

From the Edwards Air Force test pilot group, Grissom and Cooper were selected along with Deke Slayton. From the Navy, aviators Walter Schirra and Alan Shepherd were chosen. Rounding out the group of seven men selected for project Mercury to be America's first astronauts, were U.S. Marine Corps pilots Scott Carpenter and John Glenn.

If I have one criticism of The Right Stuff, the film, it is the extreme lengths it went to contrast the exemplary, goody goody public image of the astronauts that NASA tried to paint, with the real men. This is especially true for its depiction of Gus Grissom as played by Fred Ward. While every description I've read describes Grissom as an exceptionally capable, hard worker as well as an equally hard partier, the movie emphasizes the latter but barely touches on the former. The truth is that Grissom, whom many considered to be the finest pilot of the seven Mercury astronauts, would not have been in the running for America's first man in space, (he ended up being the second), had it not been for his exceptional skill and dedication. Grissom was also selected commander of the first Gemini mission, as well as the ill-fated first Apollo mission. I read somewhere that were it not for his tragic death, Grissom may very well have been selected to be the first man to walk on the moon, instead of Neil Armstrong.

Grissom's career was the most star-crossed of all his peers. His first trip into space on July 21, 1961, the second Mercury sub-orbital mission, went off without a hitch until splashdown. The plan had it for Grissom to remain put inside his capsule until a rescue helicopter arrived on the scene to help stabilize the craft. But before the chopper arrived, an explosive charge that enabled the hatch to open went off, causing sea water to rush into the capsule. Grissom exited the sinking capsule to escape the possibility of a watery grave. The first helicopter crew to arrive on he scene made a valiant effort to save the capsule but it was for naught, the water logged capsule sank along with its valuable contents. Grissom himself barely escaped death as he had to fend for himself in the choppy water as the chopper crew worked on saving the capsule. Grissom claimed that the hatch blew on its own, an idea that was disputed by the rocket scientists who suggested that Grissom triggered the hatch himself as he panicked while bobbing around inside the capsule as he awaited the rescue helicopter.

That incident prompted the following exchange in the movie where Edwards test pilots not selected for the astronaut program scoffed at Grissom and his fellow astronauts:

Jack Ridley: Pull that stuff on flight test, it's all over for him. I say he screwed the pooch, pardner. Plain and simple.
Chuck Yeager: Yeah, well, sometimes you get a pooch that can't be screwed, ya know?
Liaison Man: [chuckling] Exactly! Right now the President's got his own problems with the Bay of Pigs, he doesn't want the astronauts' image tarnished. Nothing these guys do is gonna be called a failure... But you'd think the public'd know that they're just doing what monkeys have done... (American's first living space traveler was indeed a chimpanzee by the name of Ham).
Chuck Yeager: Monkeys? Think a monkey knows he's sitting on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys, they know that, see? Well, I'll tell you somethin' - it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that's on TV. Ol' Gus, he did alright.

Perhaps it was sour grapes but Yeager and the liaison man in that exchange had a point. The race to beat the Russians to the moon was so intense that no obstacle, not even incompetence or the possible death of an astronaut, would have stood in the way of NASA's inexorable charge forward. In that vein, the public's perception of the astronauts had to be kept pure and no one, not even the press in those days would dare to openly suggest that Grissom might have "screwed the pooch."

Incidentally, Grissom's story about the hatch blowing on its own was corroborated by evidence unearthed years later.

As I mentioned above, NASA's opinion of Grissom was certainly high enough for him to be selected to command two subsequent missions, both of which were to be the inaugural flights of new programs.  Gemini, America's first two manned spacecraft would incorporate new techniques and maneuvers into the skill sets of the U.S. space program such as space walks, the rendezvous between two spacecraft, and extended time in space, and the Apollo program which would use those new skill sets to enable it land on the moon.

It was a quantum leap from Grissom's primitive first flight, which lasted only about fifteen minutes, to landing on the moon, which would happen almost exactly eight years later to the day. That fact was made tragically clear, 51 years ago today. Up to that point there had been sixteen NASA manned space missions with a few mishaps and partial failures, but no loss of life. The Gemini program had catapulted the United States ahead of the Soviet Union for the first time in the space race, and all systems were go, or so they seemed, for a trip to the moon. But Grissom and his crewmates on Apollo 1 knew better, they were skeptical that their spacecraft was ready. Design flaws were abundant and the crew knew that corners were being cut in the haste to get to the moon in a timely matter. Things got so bad that Grissom hung a lemon in the Apollo flight simulator.

In this picture, the crew posed in mock prayer with a model of their space capsule to illustrate their frustrations with the preparations for their trip, scheduled for February, 1967, the debut of the three man Apollo spacecraft. The picture was meant to be a joke, but it was a tragic harbinger for what in retrospect was the inevitable result of complacency and ill preparedness.

At 1PM EST on January 27, 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White, the first American to walk in space, and Roger Chaffee a rookie astronaut, climbed into their spacecraft for what was intended to be a routine "plugs out" launch simulation to determine if the systems inside the craft were working normally on their own. The test was assumed to be without risk as the rocket sitting underneath the capsule was not loaded with fuel. The astronauts were sealed inside their capsule with full flight conditions in place, spacesuits connected to a steady stream of pure oxygen. Things began to go wrong almost immediately as the astronauts detected a foul odor emanating from their suits. Then a communication problem took place which caused a frustrated Grissom to blurt out: "how are we going to get to the moon if we can't communicate two or three buildings over?" Delay upon delay took place to troubleshoot the problems.

In all the astronauts remained strapped into their seats in the confinement of the capsule for five and one half hours before a spark, probably from faulty wiring ignited a fire that was fed by the pure oxygen environment inside the capsule and the scores of objects made of combustible materials. At 6:31 EST, Grissom could be heard over the communications system yelling "Fire". A few other scrambled voices and screams from the astronauts could be heard in the subsequent seconds. A desperate attempt was made by them to release the ridiculously complicated escape hatch, ironic given Gus Grissom's problems with the hatch on his first space flight. In normal circumstances, it would take about ninety seconds to open the hatch from the inside of the Apollo capsule, much longer from the outside. It was estimated that the astronauts were rendered unconscious from the noxious gasses produced by the fire in fifteen seconds. Despite the desperate efforts of the ground crew who risked their own lives trying to free the men, the astronauts never had a chance.

The tragedy may have been a real eye opener to the American public and especially to the powers that be who ran the space program, but not of course to the astronauts who knew all along that they were putting their lives on the line every time they stepped into a spacecraft. After all the investigations, out of necessity, heads rolled, layers of bureaucracy were eliminated, and most of the kinks in the process were worked out. The spacecraft was re-worked, including eliminating most of the combustible materials, a complete overhaul of the hatch system and most importantly replacing the all oxygen environment with one combining oxygen and nitrogen. On October 11th the following year, the backup crew for Apollo I, Walter Cunningham, Donn Eislie, and one of the Mercury 7, Walter Schirra, blasted off from the same launchpad, atop the same rocket, the Saturn 1B, as their predecessors hoped to twenty months earlier. Apollo VII as it was dubbed, orbited the earth 163 times and was the first successful manned mission of the Apollo program. On December 21, 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, sitting atop a much larger Saturn V rocket, blasted off from Cape Kennedy. That rocket's size was necessary to enable the spacecraft to leave the earth's orbit, which it did later that day. By Christmas Eve, the three were orbiting the moon. In doing so, they became the first human beings to set eyes on the earth from outer space. This is how it looked:

Earthrise from the moon, December 24, 1968.  Photograph by William Anders.

Here is a fascinating account of the Apollo VIII mission.

As the late Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon said:

We went to explore the moon and in fact discovered the earth.

I don't think it would be hyperbolic to call this image, made by astronaut William Anders, the most important photograph ever made.  For the first time we saw our beautiful blue planet as it truly is, all alone, cast adrift in a sea of darkness and desolation. It certainly should come as no surprize that the publication of this and subsequent photographs of the earth made from the moon helped inspire the environmental movement and the idea that the resources of our lovely planet, abundant as they may be, are finite and worth preserving.

For a brief shining moment in the sixties, amidst all the turmoil of that decade, human beings undertook a seemingly impossible mission and accomplished it. Along the way we learned a lot, not only about space travel, but about ourselves. At that time it seemed that with hard work and sacrifice, anything might be possible.

Unfortunately, today we all know better.

Out of greed and convenience, the powers that be in our time, have all but rejected science and what we have learned about the fragility of our planet since we went to the moon almost fifty years ago. Some even go so far to say that the moon landing was fake news, that it was in fact, staged by Hollywood. The climate for ignorance and irrationality is so intense these days, there are even people who are proud to publicly proclaim that the earth is indeed flat.

We could go on and on about the merits of sending human beings into space. But given the current attacks, even from the very top on knowledge, science and even human intelligence itself, perhaps it's time to return to space, if only to awaken ourselves from the slumber of complacency, indifference  and ignorance. Because it wasn't slumber, indifference and ignorance that got us to the moon, it was hard work, sacrifice and perhaps above all, science.

Perhaps on this day, the anniversary of the death of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, we can honor them and their sacrifice* by re-confirming our commitment to hard work and sacrifice in the name of truth, knowledge and science, and the eradication of ignorance, be it self-imposed or not, especially where it concerns our beautiful planet, our one and only home.

I think they'd be OK with that.


* not to forget the last crew members of the space shuttle Challenger whom we lost on January 28, 1983:

Francis R. Scobee, Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
Gregory Jarvis, Payload Specialist.
Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, Teacher

and the last crew members of the space shuttle Columbia whom we lost on February 1, 2003:

Rick Husband, Commander

William C. McCool, Pilot

Michael P. Anderson, Payload Commander/Mission Specialist 3 

David M. Brown, Mission Specialist 1 

Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist 2 

Laurel Clark, Mission Specialist 4 

Ilan Ramon, Payload Specialist