Area residents find context in Apollo 11 achievement
By BRIAN SLUPSKI - bslupski@nwherald.com
|
| Adam Johnson (from left), Chris Calandrelli, Erick Miller and Connor Johnson create bingo boards using the names of the planets during a two-day summer camp at Challenger Learning Center in Woodstock. (Travis Haughton – thaughton@nwherald.com) |
Grace Moline remembers well the moment when man first walked on the moon.
“I stayed up watching it on TV,” said Moline, a college student at the time. “Our whole family was in awe.”
Over the years, awe over space exploration has faded. Now, news media attention is more predicated on whether something goes wrong, rather than on the missions themselves.
“I think it’s a shame,” said Moline, a Crystal Lake resident and exhibit curator at the McHenry County Historical Society’s museum in Union. “It still should be in the forefront of the public’s attention.”
This week marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which climaxed with Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface.
“People don’t understand what was gained,” said Bob Kaplow, a founding member of the Fox Valley Rocketeers and a JPL Solar System Ambassador, an outreach program for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“The biggest canard I hear is that we spent billions in space,” Kaplow said. “That money was not spent in space – not one nickel of it. It was spent here, in the U.S. economy.”
Kaplow said that one of the unappreciated legacies of the space program is in the technology that was developed in pursuit of solving problems associated with space exploration and landing on the moon. For example, Kaplow said, NASA turned to Black and Decker for help developing a cordless drill that could be used to extract core samples from the lunar surface.
On NASA’s 40th anniversary Web site for the moon landing, the feature “NASA benefits you on Earth” allows visitors to learn about the space program’s impact on everything from freeze-dried food to portable cordless vacuums to improved radial tires. And then there’s NASA’s influence on air travel, computers and even enriched baby food.
Steve Otten, executive director of the Challenger Learning Center for Science & Technology in Woodstock, said the space program has had a tremendous effect on our daily lives. He said the accomplishment of landing on the moon is even more impressive when one considers the technology that was available in 1969.
“The computer power of all of mission control was less than what you have in your PC at home,” Otten said.
Otten also said that people tend to forget the Cold War context of the space race in the late 1960s.
“What you had was the two big dogs on the street [the U.S. and the Soviet Union] and they wanted to see who could do it,” Otten said.
Woodstock resident Mark Bundick, whose father worked for NASA, is the former president of the National Association of Rocketry and the current president of the Fox Valley Rocketeers. He said that in retrospect the moon landing was driven by politics more than a true commitment to science and space exploration.
Bundick was a teenager and avid follower of the space program when the moon landing occurred in 1969.
“I did the prototypical American thing,” Bundick said. “I stayed up late and watched it on a small black-and-white TV. I thought it was great. People have become more jaded about it now. They take technology for granted. Back then, there was more of a mystery about it.”
Bundick said that in the broader context of human history, the moon landing will be viewed 500 years from now as a seminal event in the history of mankind.
“It was the first time mankind left his home,” Bundick said. “People still remember Columbus, and this event is a little bit better documented.”
