On my watch: Looking forward and backward on how we value space exploration – Greenwich Sentinel

The Webb Space Telescopes image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 includes thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects observed in infrared to date. The light in this image is 4.6 billion years old. Credit NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.

By Anne W. Semmes

It is a momentous moment with the extraordinary success of the James Webb Space Telescope bringing us images from so deep in the universe, it appears capable of looking back nearly to the beginning of time! With its mirrors, if they stay safe from cosmic detritus, it will surely stretch our understanding of the cosmos, with images of near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.

Watching the making of this telescope on Nova, I rejoiced along with the scientists seeing their joyful exuberance as they saw the success of their telescope unfold a million miles away, with some of those first images so colorful and strange they were likening them to the art of Salvador Dali!

But that was last week and now the Webb Space Telescope has fallen off the radar. In for a haircut over the weekend I asked the hairdresser what she thought of those images. What telescope, she asked. Its my guess that its only humans walking on the moon or Mars that will get that hairdressers attention.

And this year marks 53 years as of this July 20 that the first two men walked on the moon, in 1969. In the three years following 10 other men did so. And in 2025 more humans may well walk on the moon as part of NASAs $93 billion Artemis project. Well named as Artemis in Greek was Apollos sister, and this time women will be a part of the crew.

Thanks to the Retired Mens Association speaker series I was introduced to a marvelous book, The Mission of a Lifetime Lessons from the Men Who Went to The Moon, that explores the reflections from 50-years of lunar hindsight from some of those 12 moon walkers, and 12 others who have seen Earth from the moon from their orbiting spaceship. From that mystical perch, writes author Basil Hero, their minds were rebooted with an altered view of happiness, and the value of time, and above all, a newfound esteem for our home planet.

And now a favorite quote by British scientist Fred Hoyle, dated 1948: Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes plain a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

Such a photograph is Earthrise, taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 as crew member of Apollo 8, While circling the moon 10 times he took the iconic Earthrise photograph that he says changed his life.

But its the reflection of astronaut Jim Lovell, also orbiting on that Apollo 8 mission, that is the most mind-blowing for me, thank you author Hero. Seeing that earthrise, Lovell had concluded, We dont go to heaven when we die, we go to heaven when were born.Its a powerful formulation, and I dont know anyone who has articulated Lovells sentiment in those words, responded Yale Divinity School Dean and Professor of New Testament Greg Sterling. There was a sense he had of already being in heaven in his life in a way that other human beings were not

It was another quote that led me to some fascinating reflections from a group of scholars gathered soon after that first moon walk in the book, Men in Space The Impact on Science, Technology and International Cooperation. The quote is by the late physicist Freeman Dyson I was privileged to know. He writes, I foresee a time, a few centuries from now, when the bulk of heavy industry is space-borne, with the majority of mining operations perhaps transferred to the moon, and the earth preserved for the enjoyment of its inhabitants as a green and pleasant land.

Dyson was an environmentalist afeared of the three great forces of technology, the forces of weaponry, population growth, and pollution, We are in danger of ruining all that is beautiful on this planet through our accumulations of poisonous mess. He adds For 24 years the nuclear physicists have been saying One world, or noneThe Earth has grown too small for bickering tribes and city-states to exist on it.

Dyson foresaw that, The emigration into distant parts of the solar system of a substantial number of people would make our species as a whole invulnerable. But he adds, I do not think planets will play the major role in mans future. For one thing, they are mostly uninhabitable. For another thing, even if they are habitable, they will not increase our living-space very much. If we succeed in colonizing Mars, Mars will soon resemble the Earth, complete with parking lots, income tax forms, and all the rest of it.

Certainly not an acceptable view to Elon Musk who is featured in Basil Heros book as drawn to Mars, with a long-held dream to air-drop a miniature experimental greenhouse containing food and crops to see how it would adapt to the Martian environment. To get there, Musk developed the Space-X rocket. Whats been driving Musk is that humanitys time on Earth was running out.

The late physicist Stephen Hawking is revealed as a kindred spirit who believed, With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics, and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious.

Remarkably, I found another man I knew in that book, Man in Space Sidney Hyman. Sidney lived across the street from my young family in our year in Washington, DC. Hes listed in the book as a Fellow of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, but he was author, professor, and sometime presidential speechwriter for JFK and knew well Kennedys role in launching the space race to put a man on the moon.

In the book Sidney writes of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean, having discovered five islands in 1492, not knowing of that continental land mass that would become America. Could any man then alive, he writes, foresee how the discovery of the New World would profoundly change virtually all existing relationships in Europe that virtually nothing would ever be the same again That the consequences of that Columbian discovery included the poetic fact that it was the American children of the New Worldwho would first succeed in putting a man on the moon.

Sidney believed it was an open question whether the Earths population pressures can be eased by rocket immigrations on celestial Mayflowers which will colonize the moon, Mars, Venus, or points beyondIt is thus natural for imaginative and deeply concerned men to invoke other planets of the solar system as the New World was invoked to redress population problems of the Old World.

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On my watch: Looking forward and backward on how we value space exploration - Greenwich Sentinel