Moon Landing + 40

Forty years ago last Christmas, humans circled the moon for the first time. Forty years ago today they actually landed and walked around on the moon. We went back four more times then stopped. What happened?

Public interest waned quite a bit between the first and second moon landing. Part of it was inevitable. Being the second to do something is never as grand as being first. Worse, the entire world watched the first moon landing but on the second one the camera was briefly pointed at the sun and the lens burned out. Listening to a moon walk wasn't as exciting as watching one.

The drop in public interest was so great that none of the networks bothered to carry Apollo 13's live broadcast. Interest picked up when a fuel cell exploded and it was questionable if they would make it back to earth.

By Apollo 14, moon landings seemed commonplace. The astronaut's schedule called for them to go a lot further, out of range of the camera. Apollo 15 had a motorized vehicle and took the camera with them but it was too late to reignite interest.

There was another factor in our loss of interest - the Soviets had given up.

Starting with America's first manned shots, we called it the Space Race. Space exploration was a showy way of demonstrating technological might. If a country could orbit a man over your country, it could also drop a bomb on you. By this point other nations were joining the nuclear weapons club but the US and the USSR were the only two countries that could put a man in orbit. And the USSR was way ahead.

President Kennedy, acting on advice from his science advisers, changed the rules of the game. We couldn't catch up in earth-orbital flight so we would set a new, harder goal - going to the moon.

A lot of parallels were made between Columbus and Neil Armstrong. There was the assumption that setting foot on the moon was just the start. Everyone assumed that by now we would have at least one city on the moon and be well along on traveling to Mars. If would have happened, too, if the Soviets had shown any interest in doing it first. Instead they gave up.

By 1968 it was obvious to the USSR that we had an insurmountable lead. They always had better launch craft than we did but we pulled ahead in computers and other technical requirements. In early 1969 they tried a last-ditch effort to reach the moon first. If blew up on the launching pad and they never tried again. When Neil Armstrong landed, they announced that they were de-emphasizing manned space probes in favor of robotic craft. That doomed the moon program. No one wants to run a race by themselves. The space program was expensive and the economy was doing poorly. NASA changed priorities. They would build a space station and a space truck to supply it. Even this was cut back. The space station was cut and the space truck became the shuttle.

The Space Race was the bright spot of the cold war. It would never have happened without the competition between the world's two superpowers. There is talk of returning to the moon and continuing on to Mars but there is no urgency to it. Everyone knows that if the US doesn't do it then no one will so it can wait until we have the will on our own or a competitor.

It's one thing to