Forty
years after the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, SPACE.com asked Apollo
astronauts and leaders of the space community to ponder the past, present and
future. Planetary scientist Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, forecasts that humans will make it back
to the moon in the coming decades and that space travel will be something that
everyone (even himself) will do:
SPACE.com: What do you remember of the Apollo
11 moon landing?
Stern: Well, I remember it very vividly.
At the time
of Apollo 11, I was a grade-schooler, and I remember every time an Apollo
mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I'd gather in front
of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother. And I just
remember thinking that this was larger than life; that it was unbelievable that
something of this scale of magnitude was taking place. Because even then, it
was clear even to a little boy that this was really historic and that, because
I was interested in science, that the potential for science was so great.
S: How
do you try to explain what this time was like to younger generations? Is there
any analogue for them?
Stern: I don't think there is an analogue.
I haven't seen something equivalent in its depth and historic importance and the
way that it could excite school kids.
I think if
you were between maybe 6 and 16 there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if
there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.
S: I was
going to ask if you thought there could be another Apollo.
Stern: I think that the oncoming
revolution in human
spaceflight, commercial human spaceflight, beginning with suborbital
tourism that will begin a year after next, will really open up spaceflight in a
whole new way. It's going to be much more accessible to individuals.
It's been
disappointing that despite all of the nominal accomplishments of what NASA and
ESA and others have done, that we are still so limited in our capabilities
relative to what might have happened following Apollo. Remember, following
Apollo, the discussion was to send humans to Mars by 1983, to have bases on the
moon, to have a space station with not
six people, after it's been expanded, but more like 60 or 100; for space
shuttles to fly nearly every week, as opposed to every other month, this being
a jam-packed year.
So the view
from the '60s and early '70s of this time now, 40 years later, was so
expansive, relative to where we landed. It's just amazing. I think that the
next 50 years are likely to be much more exciting than the past 40, because I
think there're so many different human spaceflight systems being developed now.
S: Why
did things slow down - why didn't we follow through on those original goals?
Stern: It was a very unique time; there
was a very unpopular and bloody war going on in Vietnam, there was a lot of
strife on campuses, a lot of social change taking place, a lot of recognition
of social needs that the country had at the time: war on poverty, war on
cancer, the birth of the environmental movement, the beginnings of programs
like Medicare. And so across the board there were social concerns, and there
was a strong backlash against military expenditures, and NASA sort of got
wrapped up in that, in a government that, at the time, was trying to balance
its books and having to make tough choices.
That's
really what became of it, and NASA has never, in fact, space exploration, has
never really recovered. It hasn't found an equivalent motivation. I'm hopeful
that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight
revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year,
and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are
large profits to be made.
S: Do
you think it should be more of a private venture now, in the sense that it has
more potential to motivate people?
Stern: Well, I actually think that it's
the government's job to break down the barriers to entry for private enterprise
and that a fine mission for a national space agency, in terms of human
exploration, would be to develop the technologies to the pathfinding
exploration. But for private industry to come behind the things that
government's already proven are possible and reduce them to practice. We're now
seeing that in sub-orbital
spaceflight and the beginnings of orbital, low-Earth orbit systems.
S: What
will make people excited about human spaceflight in the future?
Stern: Well I think the killer application
for human spaceflight begins with the suborbital industry. I think that when
anyone can fly in space, rather than just those that governments choose to send
in to space, it's going to really revolutionize, not only how we look at it,
but it's going to be an accelerant to the desires to have even more of that.
The prices start
off pretty high - it's tens of millions of dollars to fly in space, but those
prices will come down, and fly sub-orbitally, ticket prices are in the range of
a couple hundred thousand dollars, but those are going to come down a lot to I
think over time. I expect that 10 years from now, they'll be a fraction of
that.
And I think
in 2019, 10 years from now, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, sub-orbital
spaceflight should be ubiquitous.
S: Where
do you think spaceflight should be 40 years from now? And where do you think it
actually will be?
Stern: I think by 2050, there will be
research outposts on the moon, there will have been human missions to
near-Earth asteroids and
to Mars; that commercial space travel will be commonplace in Earth orbit
and the beginnings of commercial lunar tourism, for example, are likely.
Where we
could be, by contrast, could be much further. There's no reason that we
couldn't be sending human missions, from a technical standpoint, much farther
afield than just to Mars. Because once you develop the infrastructure to go to
Mars, it's not very different infrastructure required to explore the asteroids,
for example, in the asteroid belt, or even to send a human mission as far
afield as Saturn - while it's a stretch, it's not the same kind of quantum leap
we need today to go from shuttle to Mars.
S: If
sub-orbital space tourism becomes cheaper and more common in the next decade,
would you go?
Stern: Oh absolutely. I expect to fly
sub-orbitally a lot. As a researcher, I look forward to being able to do space
science in a space environment. After all, that's what the shuttle originally
promised, and that's something we expected for space researchers by the 1980s.
Ditto for orbital travel.
I really
don't think of it in the context of 'Will I fly?', I think of it as 'Will I fly
50 times, or will I fly 100 times?'
Forty
years after astronauts first set foot on the moon, SPACE.com examines what
wešve done since and whether America has the right stuff to get back to the
moon by 2020 and reach beyond. For exclusive interviews and analysis, visit
SPACE.com daily through July 20, the anniversary of the historic landing.
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