Forty Years in Earth’s Gravity Well

On December 14, 1972, Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan climbed into their lunar module and lifted off from the surface of the Moon, rejoining Apollo 17 command module pilot Ron Evans in lunar orbit before embarking on their journey back to Earth. Since that day forty years ago, though many people have gone into space, no human being has left low Earth orbit. This is very unfortunate, and something that I hope will change soon, as I have remarked before. Though the Moon is in orbit around Earth, it is essentially outside Earth’s gravity well, in that a rocket capable of getting to the Moon would also be capable of going to places beyond the Moon. But while we have launched robot probes to various places in the Solar System, we have not launched humans out of Earth’s gravity well since the end of the Apollo program.

As I noted in my post on the death of Neil Armstrong, only a dozen human beings have walked on the Moon, and another dozen who went to the Moon without landing on it. These men (all of them were European-American males, true, but the lack of diversity was not their fault) are the only people to have left low Earth orbit or to have seen the Earth from a distance, as a small object in space (even from the space station it fills half the view). While most people are only familiar with Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, and maybe his Apollo 11 colleague and second man on the Moon Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, all of the astronauts who went to the Moon deserve recognition for their achievements and for their unique experience. Other than Apollo 11’s Armstrong and Aldrin and Apollo 17’s Cernan and Schmitt, the other people to walk on the moon were Pete Conrad and Alan Bean of Apollo 12, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14, David Scott and James Irwin of Apollo 15 and John Young and Charles Duke of Apollo 16. Those who went to the Moon without landing on it include the crew of the missions Apollo 8 (the first humans to go to and orbit the Moon), Apollo 10 (which also orbited the Moon and included later moon-walkers Young and Cernan), the aborted Apollo 13 (which passed around the Moon after the explosion that nearly cost the astronauts their lives) and the command module pilots for the missions that involved landings. In addition to Apollo 17’s Evans, they were Jim Lovell (Apollos 8 and 13), Frank Borman (Apollo 8), Bill Anders (Apollo 8), Tom Stafford (Apollo 10), Michael Collins (Apollo 11), Dick Gordon (Apollo 12), Jack Swigert (Apollo 13), Fred Haise (Apollo 13), Stu Roosa (Apollo 14), Al Worden (Apollo 15), and Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16).

Of course all of these men are quite elderly; those that are still alive, that is. Moon-walkers Armstrong, Conrad, Shepard and Irwin have died, as have Swigert, Roosa and Evans. Of the 17 men still living who have been to the Moon, the youngest are Schmitt and Duke, who are 77. Many of the others are now in their early 80s. Even if many of them end up living unusually long lives, it seems improbable that more than a few, if any, of them will still be alive two decades from now. So unless things change fairly soon, it’s possible that a day will come when there is no one living who has been to the Moon or even out of Earth’s gravity well. Such a sign of stagnation in humankind’s exploration of space would truly be regrettable.

There is still debate about what NASA’s medium-term and long-range goals should be, particularly where it should attempt to go first. One possibility that has been floated recently is building a space station at the Earth-Moon L2 point, the gravitationally-stable Lagrangian point beyond the far side of the Moon, a location from which spacefarers can operate robotic probes on the surface of the Moon and engage in radio astronomy, among other things. This is an intriguing idea, as is the idea of sending humans to an asteroid, back to the Moon, or perhaps best of all to Mars. The problem is that NASA has not received the funding to vigorously pursue any of these goals, and while private space ventures are making great progress, most of the really long-range journeys will probably require government involvement, at least for the next few decades. The exaggerated hysteria over the so-called “fiscal cliff” makes immediate prospects for increased funding for NASA remote. Still, while it is sometimes hard to be optimistic, I hope that by the time the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17’s lift off from the Moon comes around, humans will be preparing to go back there or on to another distant destination like an asteroid or Mars.