64. Not on the moon

40 years ago, three superbly prepared men, all with careers in the United States military, readied themselves to go the moon and to land two of them there. Many more military men that year readied themselves to lead boys into the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. They led them heroically, ineptly, bravely, heartbreakingly, pointlessly. All of them were less prepared.

The technology that would carry the three astronauts successfully to the moon and back "? the Saturn multi-stage rocket, the command module, and the lunar lander "? were remarkable examples of American creativity. And they were stunt technologies that had cost billions to develop but which were pointless as hardware for military or commercial applications.

[Update: Tom Wolfe in the NY Timesriffs on these themes in an op-ed piece]

The Pentagon was not interested in the moon, but in the sub-orbital "stratospheric bomber" dreamed up by a German aeronautical engineer in 1939. Its failed offspring became the Space shuttle.

The billions that NASA spent heroically on the moon were a fraction of the expenditures on which military contractors depended. Conventional bombers, fighter planes, ships, and weapons systems were a large part of the national cost, but unknowable billions went into secret budgets from which stealth submarines and stealth fighters and bombers emerged in the 1980s.

More was spent on the technologies of satellite reconnaissance. More was spent on the systems, software, and supercomputers that, even now, tap every conversation carried by microwave, fiber optics, and radio everywhere in the world where it is technically possible.

To the military and its partners, going to the moon meant less than going to Antarctica "? the moon's earthly analog. The Antarctic provided long-range weather forecasting for much of the Atlantic and Pacific, information needed for missile targeting and troop movement. The moon meant less than sonar mapping the deep ocean, information needed to dispatch silent submarines to the coasts of the Soviet Union and evade the Soviet's hunter submarines.

Going to the moon was our nation's fiery and heartbreaking gesture, wrapped up in hardly more than a dozen years. Other, greater works, colder and more calculating, pointed away from outer space to where we are now.

The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Hanuman. It was used under a Creative Commons license.