Neil Armstrong tribute

He Lived To Set Man Free
By Mitchell Gordon ©2012
      Freedom comes in many different chapters. The story of flight has always been to set man free from his natural shackles to the ground. Think of the burdens impaired on a world bereft of heavier than air travel; and then think of the airports we take for granted today, with thousands of jet craft aloft at any one time.

      Neil Armstrong helped open a new chapter to set man free from the restrictions of gravity and time. As a test pilot aboard the X-15 rocket plane, he ascended to the edge of space before making a horizontal landing. When President Kennedy gave direction toward a moon landing, NASA moved on to simpler capsule designs, and Armstrong moved with the program.

      Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, recalled (in his book, Flight) Armstrong as calm, quiet, with a gentle smile, and exuding absolute confidence. That “amazing calm” voice was heard during the Gemini VIII mission, when Armstrong and Dave Scott ran into trouble. Armstrong steered the ship to the first ever space docking, but a jammed thruster led to them tumbling, spinning at close to ninety revolutions per minute. Armstrong brought the ship back under control and made an emergency splashdown.

      When it came to choose who would command the Apollo 11 mission, and go first onto the moon, Neil Armstrong, “reticent, soft-spoken, and heroic, was our only choice,” notes Kraft.

      Some may recall the epic journey of Armstrong and Apollo 11 as a Cold War feat of engineering, signifying little in terms of more freedom in their day to day lives. But history is written for the ages. A case in point: When Michael Hart wrote his book, The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons In History, President Kennedy made the list, coming in at number 80. The reason? He was primarily responsible for instituting the Apollo Space Program. Hart concluded that: “Space travel will play a far greater role in the future than it has in the past. If so, our descendants will feel that the voyage of Apollo 11, like Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic, was the start of an entire new era in human history.”

      The legacy of Armstrong has yet to be written, simply because too few have gleaned the consequences of pioneering the space frontier. Former NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin did, proclaiming what many in the National Space Society now think: “One day, I don’t know when, but one day, there will be more humans living off Earth than on it.”

      Armstrong established Tranquility Base, for a few brief moments the first outpost of a nascent, post-terrestrial civilization. To dismiss this as an interesting factoid for your kid’s history book would be a mistake. Mark Hopkins of the National Space Society, the largest grassroots space organization, is infused with optimism for space settlement, noting that: “The vast amount of material resources of the solar system are in space rather than on Earth.” He says that the asteroids alone have enough material to produce space settlements with a combined land surface area that is 1000 times the land surface area of the Earth. These settlements, inspired by the work of Gerard K. O’Neill, would be large, hollow cylinders revolving in space (to induce gravity), which would have interiors covered with soil, lakes, streams, forests, fields, and urban areas. Here you would find “a home that is at least as nice as some of the best places on Earth.” (Ad Astra, Summer, 2009)

      Add to this the venues of: more entrepreneurial space stations and hotels in earth orbit; space factories and solar power centers (for microwave transmission); bases and villages on the moon, Mars, and on the moons of the outer planets. Prospects for future mega engineering (aka terraforming) might include making Mars more earthlike.

      So one can begin to see the cause and the legacy that Neil Armstrong worked toward most of his life—freedom from the bonds of Earth. Armstrong never overreached for fame and money, and quietly retired to teaching, while occasionally making appearances for the sake of pioneering the space frontier.

      I am reminded of him each day I open my closet door, and see on the wall the framed, aging newspaper with the banner headline and photo of man walking on the moon. The best way to honor his memory is to not let his work slip away in vain.

      We Americans are too much a part of the Space Age to ever abandon it. It is not for us to sit by as other nations take our place in the high frontier. It is not for us to consign this world of increasing population and diminishing resources to remorse and malaise. Rather it is for us to have a rebirth in manned exploration, and to give life to the vision of the National Commission on Space, whose report a quarter of a century ago declared in no uncertain terms that THE SOLAR SYSTEM IS OUR EXTENDED HOME.

      In Neil Armstrong’s memory, and to those willing to follow in his footsteps, let them go up.

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Mitchell Gordon is Vice President of NSS PASA, the Philadelphia Area Space Alliance, which recently won the Chapter of the Year Award from the National Space Society. Contact mfgordon@excite.com, or visit http://pasa01.tripod.com.

Starting a Space Lottery

By Mitchell Gordon.  Richard Bowers, a founding member of what is now the Philadelphia Area Space Alliance (PASA), thinks that it is now time for a more democratic approach for getting people who are not wealthy into space--a space lottery. Even if the winners do not plan on going into space themselves, they could have the option of reselling a winning lottery ticket (perhaps on e-bay) for cash, or could transfer rights to another person--for in this way more people would buy into a space lottery. We hear a lot about democratizing other countries, but space also needs democratization, and the space lottery is the perfect vehicle. For a nominal price of a lottery ticket, one has the possibility of having or giving the trip of a lifetime and a mind-expanding (some would say spiritually- expanding) experience. Some space lottery advantages include: (1) Greater interest from the public about space would be gained, leading to more NASA support. (2) A broader spectrum of travelers, rather than just flight crews and scientists, would be achieved. (3) You would not have to be a multimillionaire to travel to space. (4) The space lottery could help jump-start the nascent space tourist industry. Bowers has a problem with our current state-run lotteries, and believes more people could be helped if individual winnings were capped, so the jackpot could be spread out rather than hoarded to a select few. For example, if 1000 people could win $300,000 each rather than a single person winning 300 million dollars, more people could benefit and have their lives changed by a still sizable amount of cash. Capping the limit on winnings may make it easier for multiple winners, and may be a better way to administer the lottery, but it may not garner the large number of tickets sold that happens when a jackpot goes over the 200 million dollar mark. However, if the cost to travel into space falls to $200,000 per person because of technology and private sector involvement, then one could foresee multiple winners from a single space lottery drawing. Historically lotteries have danced around the traditional definition of gambling. Rather than seen as reckless risk taking, they have used the smallest of wagers to help finance necessities of life and liberty, from the American Revolution to the health and well-being of the elderly today. If the space lottery becomes a reality, another interesting chapter will be added to lottery history. Some say that the lottery ultimately becomes a tax on the poor; yet more often than not, dreams are not free. Whether people would be better off without a lottery--but with a few more dollars in their pocket and no chance for a big dream at all-- I cannot say. But as a space activist, I would be the last one to kill off a dream. That is why the space lottery is starting to make some sense to me. My next step is bringing the idea to the attention of the National Space Society. If the space lottery eventually gets a liftoff date, I will let you know. In the meantime, "live long and prosper." _______________________ Mitchell Gordon is Vice President of PASA and a freelance writer.

The PASA List: The Top Ten Things We Are Doing Wrong in Promoting the Space Frontier

Commentary by Mitchell Gordon, VP, PASA (Phila. Area Space Alliance) 10. Stop concentrating on trying to celebrate Space Day or Space Week in July (the month of the Apollo 11 mission). The college kids are not around and their parents are on vacation. Better to concentrate your efforts on World Space Week, coordinated by the United Nations, and held each year from October 4 -10, an ideal time for public relations activity. 9. Stop always asking those who can least afford it (the kids) to enroll in space camp. Establish a Space Lottery Fund to award kids with camp scholarships. The fund could also be used to fund citizen trips to space. 8. End the regional bias that has tipped space development too far in favor of the southern and western portions of the United States. Such bias promotes greater citizen apathy in the central and northeast regions of the country when it comes to space ventures, as shown by the lack of space studies curriculums in major college centers like Philadelphia. More national meetings of space engineers and related scientists need to be held in places other than Florida, Texas, and California. 7. Modern art wings of major art museums have virtually ignored fifty years of drama in the space frontier. Never has so great an undertaking by humankind been so ignored by the artist community. Between the artists and the space activists, somebody is doing something wrong somewhere. At this rate the 2007 golden anniversary year of space exploration will be all but ignored in the art community, save for the science museums. Space art may be predominantly illustration rather than fine art, but this does not justify the absence of work depicting space undertakings by the artist community. Art is an important public relations tool, and some space activists may have to become artists to fill the void. Thank God for artist Robert McCall. 6. If NASA was an entrepreneur, diamonds would be relegated to museums and university geology labs. Get this straight: Space rock is the spice of the 21st century. Shaped, polished, certified and sold, these meteorites, moon and Mars stones, and asteroidal gems can bring in billions of dollars in sales and taxes over the years. I can think of no one--male or female--who would not want a space stone as part of their jewelry collection. Such rings, pendants, pins and cufflinks from new jewelry-tech industries will help sell the quest for space. 5. Imagine if the only way to fly was to go to Florida (if you live east of the Mississippi) or California (if you live west of the Mississippi). At the minimum, we will need seven regional space bases in the country from the following regions: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast (Kennedy Space Center), South Central, Central, Southwest, and Northwest. Designating such bases now in the regions mentioned will set the bureaucratic process in motion so that when the technology becomes acceptable and available, a U.S. Space Transit Line will be in place.Weather conditions may close some bases during winter intervals, but no one is shutting down baseball because of winter weather. Until they are available for space flights, the American Seven locations can serve as space learning centers and good public relations. Orbital takeoffs may not be optimal, but if optimal flight was the determining factor alone, many jet flights to various cities would be shut down. 4. We take short shots into space and overlook a systems approach. Best proof: we have not been back to the moon in over thirty years. Space development in the near future will be a nine-venue system, in which all parts will matter and will need staying power: a. Earth auxiliaries: space camps, bases, science museums and space studies at schools. b. Suborbital flights: leisure and learning experiences featuring weightlessness. c. Earth orbit: space station(s) and hotel(s) plus satellite networks. d. L5 habitats and factories between the Earth and the moon. e. Moonbase(s). f. Mars colony. g. Asteroidal mining and research stations. h. Jupiter moonbase. i. Saturn lunar outpost. 3. Spinoffs from space may be helpful to consumers, but they lack the boldness of masterplans of macroengineering, in which space scientists weigh in on the ways and means to save planet Earth from such things as global warming and the expansion of the deserts. Stop thinking small and think about terraforming our own world. Such a contradiction makes sense if you try to make the dryest places bloom; then take what we have learned to the stars. 2. Space Studies is a curriculum that requires its own career path. Students are often frustrated with trying to find what courses to take to be involved with the final frontier. Colleges and universities need to do a better job to prepare future generations of space enthusiasts. The field should be broad enough to include those who wish to stay on Earth (working at science museums, space camps and learning centers) and those who wish to explore and do research (engineers, biotechnicions and flight crews). 1. Space science has its place, but if NASA had been in charge of opening up the West, we would still only have research scientists west of the Rocky Mountains. We need a fast track toward opening up space hotel modules as part of the International Space Station, or as freestanding habitats in space. We need a symbol that unequivocally states that space is open to all of humanity, and the space hotel is that symbol NASA, get out of the doorway if you cannot lend a hand. Ad astra per Hilton.