The possibility of giving that speech scared the hell out of Nixon and helped shape some of his later decisions on follow-up Apollo missions and NASA in general. I've referenced the book on here before, but John Logsdon's After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program is a great book on the subject. It makes mention of this letter, and how those fears impacted the White House's budget battles with NASA.
Another good one is Safe is Not an Option by Rand E Simberg, with a forward by Ed Lu. It gets into the nitty gritty of why exploring space is dangerous and why we as humans should care little about that, and more about exploring it. No different than the explorers who sailed across the seas. Some humans died, knowing that they signed up for that before embarking. Exploring space should be seen no differently, however NASA and the government are only concerned with safety. Getting the opinion of ex astronauts on these issues is great perspective.
Why would you not? With >>99% probability, you are never going into space. What difference does it make if your surrogates are robots or other humans?
> assume that any human life is ever not at risk
The problem is not so much the risk per se as the cost of mitigating the risk. Sending humans into space is orders of magnitude more expensive than sending robots into space. Does sending humans produce orders of magnitude more value?
Unmanned missions are absolutely a part of space exploration, but there are a lot of limitations that tend to get glossed over in the "manned vs. unmanned" debate.
They're demonstrably less expensive on a per-mission basis, allowing us to reach further--both financially and technologically--than our manned capability would otherwise permit. They've allowed for a diverse set of scientific missions, including many rather creative ones that would otherwise be impossible for manned crews even if we had a more developed space infrastructure.
But sample-return missions suffer. And those are, arguably, some of the most productive missions space exploration efforts can undertake. In terms of scientific papers published with the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, the number of Apollo/Apollo sample-related papers far outweighs those for other robotic missions. More than that, the rate of publishing continues to outpace them even today, over forty years later.[0][1] We're still seeing a scientific ROI for Apollo. What's really interesting is that a lot of that research has gone in directions that the Apollo mission planners could never have imagined back then. And yes, I recognize that there are some very obvious flaws with this sort of basis for comparison.
By contrast, unmanned sample-return missions are incredibly difficult. There have only been a handful of them: the Soviet Luna program (specifically, Luna 16, 20, and 24), ODC, NASA's Genesis and Stardust, and JAXA's Hayabusa. And while there have been multiple Mars sample return mission proposals in recent years, no one knows how that's going to play out.
All of that aside, the biggest benefit of unmanned exploration in the post-Apollo years has been the simple fact that it's kept space science beyond LEO alive. As much as it pains me, and probably pretty much every single person on HN, major government-backed scientific funding is incredibly difficult to push through. There was never any political will for a massive, long-term push into space going all the way back to Kennedy, LBJ, and especially, Nixon. More than that, even NASA didn't have a post-Apollo plan in place until the very end. After that plan was killed (pretty much DOA), STS--one of the few pieces that was salvaged from it--survived Washington's budgetary battles long enough to reach production mainly because the intelligence community pushed for all sorts of complex and expensive capabilities they pushed onto the shuttle. Almost none of which were ever used.
Basically, manned missions were never really de-prioritized in favor of robotic ones; rather, we just didn't have the capability for extensive manned missions outside of LEO. And there was less than zero political will to replace or supplement STS to provide that capability. We had the shuttle. It looked good. And the electorate liked the pretty pictures, even if they didn't support space spending. There are a lot of reasons why the original retirement dates got pushed back from ~1996 to 2010. STS gets a lot of criticism, but the alternative wasn't another manned system, especially because such a system wouldn't have been able to get the intelligence community onboard. It was more or less STS or nothing.
For the most part, space doesn't seem real to people and politicians alike. Every single politician has a long list of pet projects they believe space-funding could be better spent on "here at home." That logic always seemed pretty dubious to me, precisely because the money was spent here at home. After all, NASA wasn't using stacks of cash as their payloads to spend at the Space Mall. But even in the weeks after Apollo 11, it was common thinking according to opinion polls. Part of me wonders if that sort of thinking would be different today had NASA tried to emphasize the potential long-term returns and the mind-boggling amount of mineral wealth in space. Dropping a few million dollars in precious metals would have gotten some political attention, even if it was nowhere near the cost of the mission that mined them.
In any case, it's pretty much inevitable that we'll see both used alongside one another in the future. Unmanned probes allow us to reach far beyond Mars, while current research into robotics in general will greatly increase the productivity of individual astronauts. They'll be able to do more, and investigate more thoroughly than manned crews could on their own. Plus, robotics will be instrumental for the commercialization of space: they'll help mine redirect and mine asteroids, build up a space-based infrastructure, and more.
The big question was the rocket that had to fire to return the LEM to the orbiter. It was packed in next to the retrorocket that was used to descend. It was vibrated and jolted by the landing, then sat for three days, and then it had work perfectly to get them off of the moon. There was no possibility of any redundancy or the ability to test it under realistic conditions.
I saw a quote by Buzz Aldrin once where he gave the rocket a 50/50 chance of working properly.
The Moon Machines documentary series states the rocket used to get off the moon could never be test fired to make sure that particular rocket engine worked due to the propellant used - the engine had to be rebuilt after each firing, so it was one use only for space vehicles. They compensated for this by using the simplest design possible with self igniting propellant (separate fuel and oxidizer sources).
... and the amount of risk was driven by the fact that a human was needed to land. NASA did a bunch of incremental tests before landing a human on the moon, but the amount of human interaction needed limited their ability to do unmanned tests. Future systems are likely to be a lot more autonomous, which will allow more unmanned testing.
> they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
This is such a subtly eerie line.
Reminds me of the mood in certain sci-fi or fantasy stories where a group of people sends reluctant incursions into a mythical, hostile region, or fragile havens surrounded by a bleak landscape.
An infinitesimal point of light on a backdrop of blackness.
On one hand, humans have so much internal strife and self-defeating bureaucracy that prevents us from discovering the truths about the Universe and realizing our place in it. Strife that is mostly in our heads (politics, religion) and doesn't make a difference to anything at large, and would probably look very ridiculous to other intelligences.
On the other hand, we would probably go insane from the infinite loneliness – and indifference – of the cosmos if we didn't have all these pointless distractions..
I wonder, when it says "at the point when NASA ends communication with the men", why did it say that ? Wouldn't it be possible to maintain communication until long after they would have died ? Would they cut it off beforehand ? Was there something like a movie to alleviate the boredom while the oxygen ran out ? Which one ?
Additionally isn't there more analysis ? What are some scenarios ? I mean crashing after a failed launch attempt on the moon would perhaps be less disastrous than on earth, but can you realistically hope to survive a fall of several kilometers ?
I had always assumed they brought cyanide pills with them just in case of disaster. I know that if I was stranded on the moon with no hope of escape, I wouldn't want to sit there for 2 or 3 days until dying of starvation. I'd rather just eat a pill and be done with it.
Whenever asked about cyanide, the astronauts always laughed, because if they wanted to kill themselves, there were about a million ways to do so. They didn't need cyanide.
> Additionally isn't there more analysis ? What are some scenarios ? I mean crashing after a failed launch attempt on the moon would perhaps be less disastrous than on earth, but can you realistically hope to survive a fall of several kilometers ?
I am not an expert, but I guess that the letter was mostly intened to cover cases where the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascent_Propulsion_System failed to ignite at all, or perhaps sputtered early enough that the astronauts had a relatively soft landing after failing to make orbit.
Agree about the case when APS fails to operate. There were emergency procedures that involved disassembling some part of it and directly wiring a power connection to the oxidizer and propellant valves. See the end of https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/LM11HandbookVol2.pdf
I think the latter scenario is virtually impossible: the ascent stage didn't have any landing gear and the engine wasn't throttlable, so even a relatively soft landing with fully operational APS would be impossible.
This makes the rounds every once in awhile, and yet I still end up reading it every time. It's a little spooky. Does anyone know of other, similar "just in case" speeches?
I always wondered if astronauts were given some informal information how to end their lives quickly, in case there is no hope for their recovery. I know I wouldn't like sitting on the moon waiting for oxygen to slowly run out...
Apparently, Carl Sagan was under the impression that astronauts were given cyanide pills, but NASA and actual astronauts have denied this, pointing out that poison is unnecessary when you can just open the hatch and depressurize your spacecraft.
I heard somewhere they had the choice between depressurizing the lander or "starving to death". This might have been in an interview with William Safire.
If true... that would imply their oxygen supply would have lasted a very long time.
Ironically, you wonder had the first mission failed. If the space fever of the 60s would have stayed far longer or not.
In other words, did the public just took it for granted that how difficult of feat it was and lost interest after a few successful (Apollo 13 the exception) moon landings?
Well, there was the Apollo 1 accident in 1967, which though gruesome did not stop Apollo 11. [1] Add to that many near disasters in the space program as well as the countless fatalities in the development of manned flight and you have to wonder what it would have actually taken to stop the space program.
Humans have accepted incredible risks to explore the unknown.
It gives one hope for the species.
> AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN
Jesus. It sounds like they'd tell the wives their husbands are going to die, and then pull the plug; why not let the men say their goodbyes themselves, and (at least) give them the dignity to end the communications of their own volition?
They'd probably survive for hours, if not days, wouldn't they?!
That completely depends on the nature of the failure. This speech was written for a broad range of possible causes.
Capsule explodes on takeoff from the moon? No last words. Discover that nobody remembered to refill the rocket fuel? Sure, they have quite a few days of life support.
Though I expect that, like the story of the doomed cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov (who was allowed to say goodbye to his wife privately as his capsule burned up as it careened, parachuteless, through the atmosphere) their last words might not be something that NASA or Nixon would want to broadcast.
"as Komarov sped towards his death, U.S. listening posts in Turkey picked up transmissions of him crying in rage, 'cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.'[26]"
You're reading too much into it. The astronauts are too far away to reliably monitor; NASA will eventually "end communication" on the presumption, but not the verification, of the astronaut's death.
> Outer space is just as effective a suicide agent as a cyanide capsule, perhaps even more so. Exposure to its empty vacuum often results in a blissful loss of consciousness in a matter of seconds. Death by asphyxiation usually follows within two minutes.
The one that got to me was the Lunar Module Ascent Engine. You only get one and the fuel is so corrosive that it couldn't be test fired. It works on the first try, or it doesn't.
Interesting bit about the clergyman going to "commend their souls to the deepest of the deep". It sounds like they weren't expecting them to go to heaven.
It's a nautical reference. When someone dies at sea, you can't bury them, and you can't burn them, so you commend their souls to the deepness of the water. Spacefaring borrows a lot of traditions from seafaring; the deepest ocean is the one above us.
Yeah, it says explicitly that the same procedure should be used as for burial at sea. But I thought in Christianity only the body was supposed to remain in the deep and the soul hopefully go elsewhere.
I think it's a misstatement. The body is normally committed to the deep; the soul is commended to God. But "commend" here means "entrust to", so there's a reasonable reading either way.
Safire probably just misspoke but it looks like the OG 1549 Book of Common Prayer somehow manages the full cartesian product - there's a commend of body and soul, the commend-and-commit phraseology often used today and a commit of soul.
Christianity maintains that the soul will be restored to the body on the last day, the day of resurrection. Jesus talks several times about raising people up on the last day, and he refers to his late friend Lazarus of Bethany as having "fallen asleep" before raising him. Paul speaks extensively, e.g. in 1 Corinthians 15, about how Jesus was the "firstfruits" of a more general resurrection, and about how a buried body is like a seed that will grow into an imperishable / immortal body. The Nicene Creed (the historic test-suite of Christian orthodoxy) speaks of "the resurrection of the body". Even Job claimed (19:26-27) that even after his body was destroyed in the grave, he would nevertheless see God with his own eyes in his own flesh.
This is why, for instance, Roman Catholicism forbids scattering ashes (and until recently forbid cremation at all). Of course no one claims that God is somehow incapable of resurrecting a mutilated, cremated, scattered, etc. body but can resurrect an ordinarily decomposed one. But the act of scattering ashes demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian burial practices. Human remains are placed in safekeeping for the last day, in expectation of resurrection on earth. It is not the case that the soul departs to heaven and the body becomes irrelevant, and that therefore doing something symbolic and/or environmentally responsible with the ashes is reasonable. Christian burial, under normal circumstances, involves putting the remains in some definite place and putting a headstone on it.
So in turn the traditional Christian burial rites have used text about committing the body to the earth, in normal cases, or to the sea, for sailors lost at sea, trusting the earth or sea with that safekeeping. Here's a 1789 Book of Common Prayer rite, which quotes a few of the passages I mentioned: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1789/Burial_1789.ht...
In particular, burial at sea involves the following prayer:
We therefore commit his body to the deep, looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working where by he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
That's the sort of prayer being referenced by Nixon's speechwriter.
I'm genuinely baffled at the popularity of the idea that your soul immediately goes and lines up at the Pearly Gates, and then you stay in either heaven or hell forever. It's possible to find evidence to support that model, yes; for instance a literal reading of the the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (no relation to Lazarus of Bethany) would imply it. But there's quite a lot of direct statements saying otherwise.
> The Nicene Creed (the historic test-suite of Christian orthodoxy) speaks of "the resurrection of the body".
I was too distracted by the test-suite point to notice that I should quarrel with this: it refers to "ἀνάστασι[ς] νεκρῶν" (Lat. "resurrectio[] mortuorum"), where νεκροί are the dead, not specifically their bodies (σώματα).
I don't see how? The view I am objecting to is that once you go to heaven, you stay there forever and your body is irrelevant. There's nothing in that verse stopping the repentant thief from having gone to Paradise that very day, where he awaits a return to his earthly body on the last day.
(It's true that some Christians who believe in the resurrection at the last day believe in "soul sleep" until then, and they'd answer you that the repentant thief will not perceive passage of time between death and resurrection and that's what "today" means; I'll gladly acknowledge that that's a shaky argument. But the concept of the resurrection is far more universal than the concept of soul sleep.)
The gender of objects depend a lot of the language you speak (and culture). For example in Spanish the Sun is male and the Moon is female, but in German the Sun is female and the Moon is male.
I asked someone who had a Catholic childhood, and they had the impression that the souls would go to heaven or hell after death, but on the day of resurrection they'd rise again on Earth to fight the final battle between the two teams (good and evil). What happens after that isn't specified, but probably depends on who wins.
