We’re So Over the Moon

While things have been going to hell here on earth, the moon has been having one of its best weeks ever.

On Sept. 15, hundreds of astronomers, photographers and, I reckon, enthusiasts of the Farmers Almanac gathered at Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park to witness the celestial reenactment of Ansel Adams’ famous “Autumn Moon,” his photo of a waxing gibbous moon rising over the Clark Range. The moon configures itself just so every 19 years. Tales of this occasion, retold in Homeric fashion, will enthrall dinner party guests for years to come. Or not.

Two nights later was the annual harvest moon, when--because of the angular geometry of lunar orbit--the full moon loiters near the horizon with an entrancing, Navajo stillness. And so it did. As I was driving home from dinner that evening, the moon, immense and ochre, impaled itself on the Los Angeles skyline. Hours later, at mid-sky, the moon was small and piercingly white, a lighthouse in an oil-spill night.

These astronomical doings roughly coincided with the Sept. 23 release of the Tom Hanks-produced IMAX film “Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3-D,” and if that wasn’t coincidence, well, some marketing exec ought to get a case of beer. Not everyone can turn God’s handiwork into cross promotion.

The day after the Ansel Adams moonrise, NASA briefed Congress on its 13-year, $104-billion plan to return Americans--pointedly not humanity--to the moon. This is an extraordinary development in the history of space exploration, first because of the harrowing cost and second because Americans don’t give a fig about space exploration. Oh, no? Quick, name the two astronauts aboard the ISS?

Quick, what is the ISS? For most of its five-year manned history, the International Space Station has hung lamely in space, a $100-billion earring hanging 220 miles above a blue and otherwise-occupied planet. The sidereal and synodic months come and go, the space station’s caretakers busy themselves on their exercise bikes, hamster-like, and few earthlings spare a second thought for them, except when a rich adventurer like Dennis Tito or Greg Olsen wants to pony up the $20-million fare for a ride on a Soyuz spacecraft. With the U.S. shuttle fleet in dry dock, the public has been pretty incurious as to what would happen to the ISS occupants if for any reason the Soyuz program came to a halt.

Good government and the ministries of the space program are not my area of expertise, but given that the shuttle program is hobbled and the future of the ISS is in acute doubt, and given that we have rung up federal deficits large enough to be seen from space, and given the mind-blowing success of vastly cheaper unmanned space exploration--from Hubble to the Mars rovers to the Chandra X-ray Observatory to the recent Deep Impact comet rendezvous--it seems fair to ask why we would send men to the moon. Again. Haven’t we been there, done that?

Reaching the moon is an achievement Americans can’t let go of, the win we can’t stop celebrating. It’s our technological Trafalgar. It defines us, and not always in a good way. “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t . . . “ and then fill in the blank with some lesser accomplishment gone wanting. Apollo is a synonym for concerted national will, and whenever a cause is championed--energy independence, for example, or rebuilding the Gulf Coast--people will invoke its name. Was there anything of its kind after Apollo, anything like the national unity and clarity of purpose? No. Whose fault is that? Only ours.

And so we remain Moonstruck. Hanks’ film is yet another veneration of the ‘60s-era space program, like “The Right Stuff” or “Apollo 13” and “From the Earth to the Moon” miniseries, when men in thin ties and thick glasses slide-ruled the heavens and saved the moon from Communist tyranny. I can’t be the only one who winces when I see some commercial roll the old footage of a Saturn V blasting off on a prong of fire. Even the MTV moon man has a sad antiquity about him.

It’s hard to see these plans for the moon as anything other than an attempt to capture faded glory, a pathetic slouching toward the sky. The scientific arguments for manned spaceflight to the moon all come down to a tortured anthropocentrism, loose talk about humans and their evolutionary push into the cosmos. Please. This is a little like going shopping while your house is on fire.

It’s midnight now, and I’ve stepped out of my house to look at the moon, high in the sky, as white as static. There are certainly more worlds to conquer, closer at hand, feats of hyper-technology that would boost national morale just as well. The moon is beautiful, but it doesn’t have any more answers for us. It’s only a light in the dark.