Great Leaps Forward

Every generation has its “you know where you were when” moments. My dad used to say that there simply weren’t any Americans his age who didn’t know where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor or where they were and what they were doing when they heard that FDR had died. In a different age, that same comment would have been true with respect to Fort Sumter and Lincoln. But for people of my generation, the two “where you were and what you were doing” moments are definitely the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the precise moment Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I was ten years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. It was half past noon in Dallas when the shots rang out, so still early afternoon in New York. I was in Mrs. D’Antona’s fifth grade classroom on the second floor of P.S. 196 when our principal, Mr. Tauschner, came into our classroom and whispered the bad news to our teacher, who promptly burst into tears. Having no choice, the principal himself told us what had happened. And then someone brought a television into our classroom and we were allowed to spend the rest of the school day watching the news.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was sixteen. I was lying on my back on a blanket on the lawn behind the dorm at the University of Vermont in Burlington in which they housed participants in the special music program for high school students they used to run there each summer. Lying at right angles to my head was Lily Goodman, normally of Wilmington, Delaware, but that summer also spending her summer on the UVM campus in the same program I was in (and being much more talented a singer than I was a pianist). Between our heads lay my red transistor radio tuned to some local news station with the volume up as loud as it could go. We listened patiently to endless replays of the great man’s words of earlier that day: “Houston, Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed.” And then, just few minutes before eleven PM, we heard the man, now speaking from the lunar surface, say that he was taking one single step as a man, but that that step was simultaneously a giant leap forward for all mankind. And it was my memory of that specific experience that came right back to me last week when I read that Beresheet, a 1290-pound spacecraft owned and operated by Israel Aerospace Industries, had successfully lifted off on its lunar mission last Friday atop a Falcon 9 rocket owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. The plan is for Beresheet (appropriately, “Genesis”) to orbit the earth for a while, then to depart for the moon under its own steam and then, after a journey of about seven weeks, to touch down on the moon on April 11.

It’s a pretty exclusive club, the one to which belong nations who have done this: only Russia, China, and our own country have managed successfully to land spacecrafts on the moon. But the club is expanding: India is expected to become its fifth member later this spring, as is Japan within a couple of years. Still, it won’t be that big a club even after India and Japan join. And Beresheet’s, once it lands on the lunar surface, has another distinction worth mentioning because it will be the first private-sector landing on the lunar surface in history.

It’s not hard to understand why this club has so few members. For one thing, it’s a really long ways off—the moon is about 239,000 miles away from the earth. And it’s a journey fraught with dangers and difficulties. And it costs a fortune to undertake a project like this—the price tag for the Beresheet mission is a cool $100 million, and that is the least amount ever spent to send a landing craft to the moon. (Could that detail be related to the fact that this will be the first lunar landing not paid for by a government spending money it prints up itself? I wonder!) Of special interest to me personally, though, is the list of digitized items Beresheet is going to leave on the moon for future visitors—perhaps even some eventually not from Earth—to ponder: details about the spacecraft and the crew that built it, an Israeli flag, a copy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, dictionaries in 27 languages and all of Wikipedia, the memoirs of a Shoah survivor, a Hebrew-language Bible, recordings of the most popular Israeli songs, and some children’s drawings inspired by the mission. Just thinking about someone from a distant galaxy coming across this one day and trying to puzzle through all that data is intoxicating!

Things seem to be going well; the spacecraft sent home its first selfie just the other day, looking over its own shoulder at itself and the earth behind it from a distance of about 37,600 miles. (If you look carefully, you can see the outlines of South America and Australia.)

But all of this excitement regarding Beresheet has awakened another set of emotions in me as well. This summer will be the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Last December marked the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 8, in the course of which the first picture of “earthrise” was snapped when Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first human beings to leave low earth orbit, reach the moon, orbit it, and then return to earth safely. There’s a “Beresheet” moment in this story as well: Apollo 8 orbited the moon ten times, in the course of which they made their memorable recording of the first verses in Genesis and Astronaut Anders took his now famous picture of the earth rising out of the black of space. 

What happened to our need to discover? The incredible successes of the mid-twentieth century, which included Project Mercury, which sent the first American into space; Project Gemini, which first brought astronauts into space for an extended period of time; the Apollo program, which brought astronauts to the moon and back; the Skylab program, which put our nation’s first space station into orbit; the Space Shuttle program, which endured two terrible tragedies but nonetheless succeeded in bringing reusable spacecrafts into the picture—all of these were enormous scientific, intellectual, and cultural achievements. But somewhere along the way, we seem to have to lose our way.

NASA still exists, of course. We continue to play a leadership role in the International Space Station, although our astronauts travel there and back on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. There are all sorts of research missions underway to Mars and beyond. But the idea of human-led exploration itself—the principled willingness to send people to go where no one has ever gone and to do things that no one has ever done, thus to make more great leaps forward for humankind in the Armstrongian sense—that feels as though it has somehow vanished from the American psyche. The last American to stand on the moon, Eugene A. Cernan, was mission commander of Apollo 17, which went to the moon and returned in 1972. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled due to budget cuts.

Mentioning the Space Shuttle program makes me rethink my comment above about the “where we were and what we were doing” moments in our lives, because I remember—and clearly—where I was in and what I was doing in 1986 when Challenger broke apart just seconds after take-off and all seven crew members died and where I was on February 1, 2003, when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, which disaster took the life of all seven of its crew members as well. (There’s an Israel connection there too, of course, because the sole non-American on board was Colonel Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut.)

But those disasters only made us more eager to succeed and, indeed the Space Shuttle program continued until 2011, by the end flying off on 133 successful missions involving 833 crew members (including the fourteen who died on the Challenger and the Columbia). And then we lost interest. Or it feels as though we have. And that is why the launch of Beresheet, for all it excites me, also unnerves me a bit by forcing me to wonder where our American sense of pioneering, of derring-do, of courage in the face of incredible obstacles, of exploration of the unknown, where all that went to? I suppose lots of people can think of lots of better uses for all that money—and the expenses involved were, to use the term literally for once, astronomical. But what price tag can or should we put on the sense that we are actively engaged in setting out on new paths, including ones on which no human being has ever travelled? Or that we are not wrapping up the search for knowledge in the universe, but only beginning to fathom what it is we don’t know about…everything? Underlying the need to explore, after all, is a foundation of humility born of the conviction that knowing how little we know can and should energize us to step further into the seductive unknown rather than retreat into blissful unknowing like timid children.

On one of the Saturday nights after the appearance of the new moon in the nighttime sky each month, we at Shelter Rock gather outside to recite the ancient prayer called Kiddush Levanah, the Sanctification of the Moon. Taking the moon as the embodiment of the unattainable, we use the sight of its return to the nighttime sky as an opportunity to renew our commitment to seeking to know the Creator through the contemplation of Creation. As I look up at the sliver of moon in the dark, I occasionally think of that night long ago in Vermont when I lay on a blanket and looked up at the moon as the first man in history took some first tentative steps onto its surface. It’s that precise sense of courage mixed with awe and, yes, humility, that I wish we could summon up again in our American psyche to remind us that there really is no upper limit to what we can dream of doing.