August 15, 2025 • 34 mins
The Moon. We hit it and quit it. But after more than 50 years is it time to rekindle the relationship? We'll explore the reasons we stopped going to the moon and why NOW is the right time to go back (we see you, Artemis).
Also, how does a return to the moon get us closer to landing humans on Mars? And how do we overcome some of the logistical and psychological challenges of traveling 35 million miles to our neighboring planet?
GUEST: Andrew Chaikin, author of the book A Man on the Moon. Check out his cool new website: DoSpaceBetter.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, We
get the answers. Leave a message. Hey, they're American History Hotliners.
Your host, Bob Crawford here, happy to be joining you
again for another episode of American History Hotline. You're the
ones with the questions. I'm a guy trying to get
(00:23):
you some answers and keep those questions coming. The best
way to get us the question is to record a
video or a voice memo on your phone and email
it to American History Hotline at gmail dot com. That's
American History Hotline all one word at gmail dot com.
And remember we are the American History Hotline. Okay, today's
(00:49):
question is about space, the Final Frontier. It's a great one,
and here to help me answer it is Andrew Chakin.
He's an award winning science journalist and space historian, author
of numerous books, including A Man on the Moon. James
Cameron called him our best historian of the space age. Andrew,
(01:14):
so great to have you with me today.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Okay, Andrew, here's the question that our friend is hoping
you can answer. It comes from Evan in Muscle Shoals Alabama.
He wants to know why did the United States stop
going to the Moon and do we have any plans
to go back now? Andrew, before you answer, I think
(01:41):
we need to get a little background first. When was
the last time a human set foot on the Moon?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, that was a long time ago. It was December
of nineteen seventy two, on the last Apollo lunar landing mission,
Apollo seventeen. And amazingly that those last lunar footsteps happened
just less than twelve years after President John Kennedy challenged
(02:15):
the nation to send humans to the surface of the
Moon return them safely to the Earth. He actually said,
land amen on the Moon and return safely to the
Earth by the end of the nineteen sixties. And it
turned out, I mean, everybody knows that that happened on
Apollo eleven in July of nineteen sixty nine, and Kennedy
(02:37):
actually said nothing about going back. But we did go back,
and we tried to land on the Moon several more times,
and every one of them worked except for Apollo thirteen,
and you all know that story as well. But yeah,
after Apollo seventeen, that was the end of the lunar
(02:58):
landing program.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So let's go back even further. Why go to the
Moon in the first place. What was the reason that
Kennedy wanted to put us on the moon.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Well, it's really a product of the Cold War, And
if you think about what things were like when Kennedy
took office in nineteen sixty one, the Cold War was
at its height, the geopolitical competition between the United States
and the Soviet Union, kind of a battle for international
(03:33):
prestige and public opinion, and Kennedy was very alarmed by
the fact that the Soviets in April of nineteen sixty
one were able to launch the first human into space,
Yuri Gagarin, which scooped our effort, which was called Mercury,
(03:54):
And we didn't put our first American in space until
a few weeks later with Alan Shepard, and Art didn't
even get into orbit the way Gageron had. And even
before Shepherd's flight, Kennedy met with his advisors and said,
we have to find something to show the world that
we are strong, that we have a strong society. We
(04:17):
have nations out there that are developing, nations that we
do not want them to align with the Soviets. We
want them to be with us in the world balance
of power, and so we need to find something spectacular
to do in space. And he consulted with people from
NASA and they said, if we try to land humans
(04:41):
on the Moon, we would probably succeed if we went
all out, and the Soviets probably would not succeed, even
though they had at that moment more powerful rockets. They
knew the NASA people knew that it was going to
take a lot more than powerful rockets. Actually their it
would not have been able to put humans on the Moon,
(05:03):
and it was going to take a heck of a
lot more, you know, microelectronics, complicated systems, very sophisticated spacecraft,
and so that kind of leveled the playing field. But
Kennedy was thinking as a statesman. He was not a
space fan at that time. I think he got much
(05:23):
more enthusiastic when he saw what was developing as Apollo
got started. But it was really Cold War competition that
gave birth to the moon landing program.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Has any other anyone from any other country set foot
on the Moon.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
No, No, nobody has been on the surface of the
Moon except the twelve astronauts from Apollo on the six
lunar landings. Now, NASA is trying, working very very hard
to return astronauts to the Moon with a program called Artemis,
and so far the program has flown one unpiloted mission
(06:06):
with the capsule, the Orion Capsule, which is kind of
the mother ship. The lander is still in development. It's
being created by SpaceX, and there are plans next year
to send four astronauts around the Moon, and then after that,
perhaps in twenty twenty seven, will come the first landing
(06:27):
on the Artemis three mission.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I have to ask, is that proposed to be an
all women crew?
Speaker 2 (06:35):
No, but there is a woman on the crew for
the landing has not been named yet, but the flight
around the Moon. One of the astronauts is a woman,
Christina Cook, and very very talented and extremely capable and
has been in space and has done Actually, she and
(06:56):
one of her fellow astronauts did the first all women's
spacewalk a few years ago, so she's already had some
milestones that way.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
So I want to ask you this, have you ever
encountered a conspiracy theorist, like someone who, oh my god,
the moon landing was stage Oh.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
My god, Yes, and it's just so appalling because you know,
there it just flies in the face of everything we
know about the way NASA worked, about the way, uh,
you know, we got all those rocks back from the Moon.
They tell us things that no Earth rock could possibly have.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Have told us.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
The chemistry of those rocks, the the you know, the
details of those rocks, they could not have originated on Earth.
You know, we've now had images from orbiting satellites with
very high resolution cameras that actually showed the footprints the
trail of the astronauts as they walked across the Moon.
(08:03):
But my favorite line refuting the hoax theorists who really
when they go at it, they really just reveal how
little they understand about science when they talk about, oh,
they would never have survived the radiation. Of course they
did because they went through the Van Allen Belts very quickly.
Or they say, well, there's no stars in the photos,
(08:25):
it must have been done in a studio. Well, the
reason there's no stars in the photos is because they
were exposed for the conditions on the lunar surface with
a very bright landscape illuminated by a brilliant sun. And
I could go on and on and on, but my
favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. He said, it
would have been harder to fake it than to do it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Andrew. Now that we've set up this background, let's get
to our listener's question, why did we stop going to
the Moon?
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Well, it goes back to the reason why we started, which,
as I say, in Kennedy's mind, was to show the
world the strength of our free society by doing something very,
very challenging in space. Once we accomplished that with Apollo eleven,
the impetus to keep funding very ambitious human spacelight programs,
(09:17):
you know, that went away, and we had the hardware
left over to keep going to the Moon several more times.
But NASA's efforts at that time, right after Apollo eleven,
to convince the White House and Congress to support, you know,
very ambitious things like a base on the Moon, and
(09:38):
space stations in Earth orbit, space stations in lunar orbit,
eventually sending humans to Mars, all those things were rejected.
The country was a very different place by the time
of Pollo eleven landed in nineteen sixty nine that it
had been when Kennedy challenged us to go to the
Moon in nineteen sixty one, we had the Vietnam War,
which was costing incredible amounts of money. You know, it's
(10:03):
I think they spent in a month with the entire
Apollo program cost something like that, and the concerns over
the environment, the civil rights struggle was very much on
people's minds. Priorities had shifted, and in fact, most people
don't even know this. A year after Apollo eleven, NASA
(10:25):
was fighting for its life. The budget cuts were so
strong and the budget was coming down so steeply that
the entire human spaceflight program was in danger of going extinct.
And the only thing that saved it was that President
Nixon approved and Congress approved the Space Shuttle program to
(10:46):
create a reusable vehicle. But the Shuttle never went any
further than lower thort it. So it's taken all of
this time after NASA has flown the Space Shuttle, which
did amazing things and had amazing capability. They's built a
permanent space station in Earth orbit, where we've studied the
medical effects of long term spaceflight. We've looked into all
(11:08):
kinds of processes that might take advantage of weightlessness, all
of these things, learned how to keep a vehicle going
in space for years and years and years, We've had
astronauts up on the Space station as long as a
year at a time to teach us how we need
to keep astronauts healthy if they go to Mars. All
(11:30):
of those things now have set the stage for the
Artists Artemis program, which finally, now more than half a
century later, is trying to pick up where Apollo left off.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
So it sounds like the Shuttle missions really did a
lot of the basic science work that will potentially and
the International Space.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And the station.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that will.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
But there's a lot, there's a lot more to do.
I mean, I I I'll tell you a little story
late I heard from NASA's chief spacecraft designer, Max Faget,
brilliant engineer, designed the Mercury capsule, figured out the shape
it had to be to be able to get back
into the atmosphere without burning up, and had a huge
(12:19):
role in designing the Apollo capsule and the Space Shuttle itself.
And Max told me that one day, a few years
after the last moon landing, he and his former boss,
Bob Gilrith, also a brilliant engineer, were walking along the
beach in Galveston, Texas and there was a big moon
in the sky and Bob Gilrith, who at this point
(12:42):
was an elder statesman of human spaceflight, turned to Fijet
and he said, you know, Max, someday people are going
to try to go back to the Moon and they're
going to find out how hard it really is. And
I have come to really understand the wisdom of that comment,
because for the last ten fifteen years I have spent
(13:04):
all of my time delving into why Apollo was successful,
and it really comes down to it's more than the
rocket science. The rocket science is incredibly hard, we know that,
but the human piece turns out to be the most challenging.
How we think about the work, the mindset we have
(13:25):
to bring to the work in order to succeed. And
what I've done is I've gone back to Apollo and
I've created a framework to talk about the mindset, the behaviors,
the practices we must bring for spacelight professionals to succeed
in a business is demanding and unforgiving, and a spaceflight
and particularly sending humans to other worlds. And I teach
(13:49):
a class at NASA called Principles of Success in Spaceflight
and I'm working on My wife and I are working
on the Companion book, which we plan to have out
next year.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
This is American History Hotline. I'm Bob Crawford today. My
guest is Andrew Chaikin, space historian and author of the
book A Man on the Moon. We're talking about that
big rock in the sky, the Moon. Why has it
been more than half a century since a human has
bounced around on its surface? Remember, if you have any
(14:26):
questions about American history, let's have them record yourself using
a voice memo on your phone and email it to
American History Hotline at gmail dot com. We'll find an
amazing expert like Andrew to answer your question. Andrew, what
did we learn in science terms from the Moon landing?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
We learned an incredible amount we had in our hands.
When Apaul o'levin came back the rocks that Neil Armstrong
had picked up on the Sea of Tranquility in a one,
you know, in the overnight. Those rocks changed our understanding
of the Moon. We now knew that the Moon was
(15:13):
very ancient. We knew that lava flows had erupted on
the Moon billions of years ago, but that since then
the Moon has mostly been very quiet and dead geologically speaking,
of course, biologically speaking, the Moon is incredibly hostile, so
nobody who understood the environment of the Moon thought that
(15:34):
we would find life there. But the landings that followed
and went to different places around the Moon, the highlands
of the Moon, where the rocks were even older, they
picked up rocks dating back four and a half billion years.
That's almost the birth of the Solar System. It's almost
as old as the Earth, and it told us. The
(15:57):
rocks told us that the Moon probably formed early in
the Solar System's history when a massive body like a
planet slammed into the Earth. A planet may be the
size of Mars, slammed into the Earth and ejected material
from the Earth, and of course the body itself that
(16:18):
slammed into the Earth was also destroyed. That material went
into orbit around the Earth and eventually coalesced into what
we call the Moon. So the Moon scientifically is really
the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the earliest history of the Earth,
of the earliest history of the Solar System, particularly the
(16:42):
impact history, which is so critical to understand even how
life on the Earth came about because those asteroids and
comets that hit the Earth were the vehicles that delivered
water and organic molecules and the built blocks of life.
Amino acids certainly to the infant Earth, and the energy
(17:06):
that they brought to the Earth may have been critical
in helping life get started. So, you know, when we
barely scratch the surface of what the Moon has to
tell us. I mean, if you think about it, the
Moon has as much land area as the entire continent
of Africa. And we landed in six places, you know,
and walked around or drove around in the case of
(17:27):
the later missions. And then there have been a few
robotic missions that have brought back samples. But like I say,
that's just scratching the surface. But let me just add
to that by saying what I think the three great
legacies of the Moon landings are so scientifically, that's number one.
Number two is the perspective we gained by looking back
(17:51):
at the Earth. And you know, when you go out
to the Moon, the Earth is so far away. It's
two hundred and forty thousand miles, give or take, and
that's so far away that you can literally cover it
with an outstretched thumb. And that is a shift in
awareness that humans had never experienced until Apollo, and it
(18:14):
taught us a lesson that the Earth is a beautiful
and in many ways fragile oasis in space, and we
need to take care of it. We need to cherish
it and protect it. So that's the second great legacy
of Apollo, the leap in awareness. The third is what
humans can do when they work together. And as I
(18:37):
say in my work on Principles of Success in Spacelight,
that's right at the heart of what I'm trying to
get across to people is the ways in which Apollo
forced us to work together. And you know, physics doesn't
lie right. You can go in with any idea you
think you know, but the physics is going to be
(18:58):
the final arbiter of what works and does and work.
So that's the way engineering is. And actually, you know,
I said Kennedy wanted to do this for Cold War reasons,
but he actually said in a speech he gave in
the fall of nineteen sixty two at Rice University, he said,
we go to the Moon and do the other things
(19:20):
in this decade, not because they're easy, but because they're hard,
because that challenge will serve to organize and measures the
measure the best of our abilities and skills. That's it,
in a nutshell, and he knew that, he understood that.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Well, it's so interesting you say that because in a
lot of ways it feels like our country is in
a similar place like it was in nineteen seventy two.
You know, people might say housing is too expensive, food
costs or outrageous, education, healthcare, childcare unaffordable. You've seen the
(19:56):
DOGE cuts. You know, has NASA been spare from that?
And is there a sense with the politicians and the
and the federal government in the situation it is as
we speak that hey, can we really afford to go
to the moon?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Well, let me say a few things about that. First
of all, no, NASA has not been spared, and we
don't really know the full measure of what will happen
at NASA. That's kind of unfolding as we watch. But
I think the thing that scares me the most is
the rejection of the value of scientific exploration. You know,
(20:34):
if we go back to the Moon, it can't just
be about flags and footprints. To use an often heard phrase,
I think even buzz Aldrin used that phrase once in
a in a speech. You know, it can't just be
about look at us, you know, we were We have
the ability to put humans on another world. The return
(20:57):
on that huge investment in the form of new knowledge
and new understanding, not just about how to do hard things,
which is very valuable and the technological spin offs are valuable,
but the scientific understanding is immeasurably valuable. It teaches us
(21:18):
about who we are, where we came from, where we're going,
How life got started. I mean, I can't think of
a more compelling question than how life got started. Well,
I'll tell you what the moon is like. Walking into
the rare book room of the cosmic library. We can
page through the earliest chapters of Solar System history, which
(21:41):
are recorded very cleanly on the surface of the Moon. So,
you know, I am really passionately hoping that the scientific
exploration of the Moon and the Solar System as a
wider arena. And there's so many exciting missions that are
either underway or being planned to launch in the next
(22:05):
decade or you know, several years or within the next decade,
amazing missions to all kinds of places, And I just
hope we don't lose sight of how critical that is
to us for the health and well being of our society.
I also think that one of the great lessons of
Apollo is in danger of being lost because we are
(22:28):
so subjected to us versus them thinking. These days, it's
really become rampant. And Apollo showed us that to do
great things, we have to work together. We have to
be open to information that doesn't necessarily agree with what
(22:50):
we thought we knew. We have to be open minded
and collaborative. And you know, the greater good the team.
The team is all of us. We're you know, uh,
the astronauts called the Earth's spaceship Earth, and we're all
inhabitants of spaceship Earth. And so we gotta we gotta
(23:14):
get our minds around that fact that all of this
us versus them is leading us away from what will
ultimately benefit us as a society and us as a
human species.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
What about the psychological effect of space travel? I remember
a couple of years ago William Shatner uh was on.
I think it was Jeff Bezos. Is it Blue Origin
is what they call it? Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yes, And it was called the New Shepherd Vehicle. Jeff
names his vehicles after astronauts, So the Shepherd, the Alan
Shepherd Mercury flight was a suborbital up and down ballistic arc.
New Shepherd goes up and down, but it does it
(24:01):
amazingly in more of a straight line. It goes up
under a constant rocket power, hovers uh ago or goes
over the top of its uh you know, it goes
up to the to the end of its acceleration, and
then comes back down under controlled descent. And so you're
in space. You're you're you're you're weightless. For about five minutes,
you're above the atmosphere. You can look around and see
(24:23):
this incredible panorama. And I was taken. I know where
you're going with this, because I remember when Shatner came
back and he said, man, you know, people talk about
space as this exciting, uplifting experience. He said, I looked
out of those windows, and that blackness scared the daylights
out of me. He said, that was death if I'm
(24:45):
quoting him correctly, you know, And so he that was
a really interesting take on the space experience, and he
went gratified.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
I remember, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
I mean he was very moved by it as well.
I say, bravo. You know, so somebody who went up
and clearly was thoughtful about the experience. It wasn't just
a joy ride. It wasn't just a you know, gee,
this it'd be cool. You know. It's like he really
absorbed an experience on a deep level, and then he
was really skilled at communicating the impact of that experience.
(25:21):
And I think a lot of the astronauts have tried
to do that, and I'm very anxious to hear. You know,
these younger astronauts. They're younger than me anyway, I'm about
to turn sixty nine. But I know many of the astronauts,
including several of the ones who are going around the
Moon next year, and you know they are I think
(25:45):
they're more open to the to the emotional piece than
the Apollo guys were. You know, they came from a
different generation. And Ed Mitchell, who you may have heard of,
because he was very interested in psychic form and ended
up studying esp and that sort of thing after he
came back from the Moon. But he said to me
(26:06):
when I interviewed him from my book, he said, people
kept asking me how did it feel to be on
the Moon. I didn't know the answer to that, how
did it feel? That wasn't something I thought about so.
I think a lot of the guys kind of face that,
you know, the mission they never the mission they never
trained for, was a lot tougher for a lot of
those guys than actually flying the lunar mission. But I
(26:30):
think these younger astronauts are going to have some very
very interesting and I hope compelling things to say.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
What is your opinion of the millionaire of the billionaire
space explorer, of the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk And
you know, if you've got enough money, you can now
build a rocket ship and take your friends up. I mean,
I know I'm making it sound simpler than it really is.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, but there is that aspect. I mean, I think
it's probably it was inevitable. I don't think we could
have predicted it would play out in the way that
we're seeing it play out. I think it's like anything,
it's there's it's a double edged sword. I think it's
creating technologies and new ways of going into space that
(27:19):
I think are fabulous. I mean the engineering work, particularly,
you look at a company like Space Apps, which has
shown that they can, you know, my god, they can
take the first stage of their Falcon nine rocket and
land it they launched the second stage and then that
delivers whatever they're launching into orbit, but then the first
(27:39):
stage comes down and actually lands so it can be reused.
I mean that that was astounding when they started doing that,
and I could probably have rounded up many, many spacelight
veterans who would have predicted it would never work. So
bravo to that, you know, bravo to new ways of
(28:03):
thinking about how to do spacelight. That part of it
is just fabulous. I think there have been times when
they get a little bit too confident and they, you
know the phrase, they don't know what they don't know.
They don't have the history that NASA does. But people
may come in with a mindset that says, well, how
(28:24):
hard could it be if NASA did it fifty years ago. Well,
I refer you to that quote from Bob Gilrith. His
point was it can be damned hard.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Andrew, what is your vision of the future of space exploration?
I mean, where can you see us in twenty seventy two?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Oh gosh, that's a great question. I think by twenty
seventy two, we will, whether it's US or or China
or other countries, will have a base on the Moon
for sure. China is very directed and an ambitious in
their space program now, and they've said that they want
(29:03):
to build a lure base. I think so. I think
that that will be a reality, and I think we'll
be able to look up at night and see the
lights of a lunar base where people are living and
working on another world and learning things that we probably
can't even imagine right now. And I think by twenty
seventy two we will probably have we will. I think
(29:25):
it's almost a sure thing that we will see human
footsteps on Mars. Now, that is an incredible challenge. I mean,
the Moon really pales in comparison to going to Mars, because,
if you think about it, the Moon never you know,
the Moon is a quarter of a million miles away.
Mars never comes any closer than thirty five million miles away.
(29:50):
So the challenges of going to Mars. Number one, You've
got to keep people healthy, right, You've got to protect
them from radiation. You got to give them systems that
can last long enough to go to Mars and come back.
That could be two and a half or three years. Right,
you go to Mars, you're on the surface for a year.
(30:12):
You come back. You're racking up a lot of time
that those systems have to function, and you can't necessarily
bring enough You definitely can't bring enough spare parts to
fix all those things. So we've got to design things
with incredible reliability or maintainability. I'll give you one to
think about. When you go into deep space far from
(30:36):
the Earth, much farther than the Moon, you get a
million miles or so out. By the time you get
that far out, your communications take so long to travel
between you and the Earth that you literally cannot have
a real time conversation with anybody but the people who
are on your spaceship with you. By the time you
(30:58):
get out to Mars, that could be as much as
twenty two minutes one way. So you know, I've always
say when I give talks about this, I say, you say, Houston,
we've had a problem. You can go watch an episode
of Friends before you get the answer. So we don't
(31:20):
know that is uncharted territory. We're used to thinking of
the crew of the space mission as like a few
guys in a vehicle up in space with dozens of people,
really hundreds, If you think about the whole team on
Earth to help them solve problems well with that radio delay.
(31:44):
If a problem comes up that's not in the reference books,
it's something we haven't seen and it needs to be
solved now where the crew could die. That means that
you must have enough people on boards that they're collective
expertise is sufficient to handle that kind of thing. And
people say, oh, well.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
We'll have AI.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
AI is not a panacea. We don't really understand AI,
and research has shown that automation doesn't reduce risk. It
actually introduces risks that are unpredictable. So Mars is a
tremendous challenge. But if you're going to give me twenty
(32:30):
seventy two as the milestone, I will go out on
a limb I don't think it's a big limb and
say we'll solve those challenges by then. I just hope
that we as a society solve the challenges that threaten
us down here on Earth long before. Then.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Let's hope that you are right and that somehow we
can learn to come together here on Earth.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Amen.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Well, I've been talking to Andrew Chaikin. I have Andrew.
I've really enjoyed our time together. This has been wonderful.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks again for having me.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Hey and check out Andrew's book, A Man on the Moon.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Hey, can I give you my website?
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Please?
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Do brand new website for my principles success in spaceflight class.
It's called Dospacebetter dot com.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Do Spacebetter dot com. It's Andrew Chaikin. Thank you so much,
Thank you, Bob. You've been listening to American History Hotline,
a production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The
show is executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers
(33:44):
from iHeart are Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music
composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our
email is Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com. If you
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a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford.
(34:07):
Feel free to hit me up on social media to
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Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so much for listening. See you
next week.
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, We
get the answers. Leave a message. Hey, they're American History Hotliners.
Your host, Bob Crawford here, happy to be joining you
again for another episode of American History Hotline. You're the
ones with the questions. I'm a guy trying to get
(00:23):
you some answers and keep those questions coming. The best
way to get us the question is to record a
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it to American History Hotline at gmail dot com. That's
American History Hotline all one word at gmail dot com.
And remember we are the American History Hotline. Okay, today's
(00:49):
question is about space, the Final Frontier. It's a great one,
and here to help me answer it is Andrew Chakin.
He's an award winning science journalist and space historian, author
of numerous books, including A Man on the Moon. James
Cameron called him our best historian of the space age. Andrew,
(01:14):
so great to have you with me today.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Okay, Andrew, here's the question that our friend is hoping
you can answer. It comes from Evan in Muscle Shoals Alabama.
He wants to know why did the United States stop
going to the Moon and do we have any plans
to go back now? Andrew, before you answer, I think
(01:41):
we need to get a little background first. When was
the last time a human set foot on the Moon?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, that was a long time ago. It was December
of nineteen seventy two, on the last Apollo lunar landing mission,
Apollo seventeen. And amazingly that those last lunar footsteps happened
just less than twelve years after President John Kennedy challenged
(02:15):
the nation to send humans to the surface of the
Moon return them safely to the Earth. He actually said,
land amen on the Moon and return safely to the
Earth by the end of the nineteen sixties. And it
turned out, I mean, everybody knows that that happened on
Apollo eleven in July of nineteen sixty nine, and Kennedy
(02:37):
actually said nothing about going back. But we did go back,
and we tried to land on the Moon several more times,
and every one of them worked except for Apollo thirteen,
and you all know that story as well. But yeah,
after Apollo seventeen, that was the end of the lunar
(02:58):
landing program.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So let's go back even further. Why go to the
Moon in the first place. What was the reason that
Kennedy wanted to put us on the moon.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Well, it's really a product of the Cold War, And
if you think about what things were like when Kennedy
took office in nineteen sixty one, the Cold War was
at its height, the geopolitical competition between the United States
and the Soviet Union, kind of a battle for international
(03:33):
prestige and public opinion, and Kennedy was very alarmed by
the fact that the Soviets in April of nineteen sixty
one were able to launch the first human into space,
Yuri Gagarin, which scooped our effort, which was called Mercury,
(03:54):
And we didn't put our first American in space until
a few weeks later with Alan Shepard, and Art didn't
even get into orbit the way Gageron had. And even
before Shepherd's flight, Kennedy met with his advisors and said,
we have to find something to show the world that
we are strong, that we have a strong society. We
(04:17):
have nations out there that are developing, nations that we
do not want them to align with the Soviets. We
want them to be with us in the world balance
of power, and so we need to find something spectacular
to do in space. And he consulted with people from
NASA and they said, if we try to land humans
(04:41):
on the Moon, we would probably succeed if we went
all out, and the Soviets probably would not succeed, even
though they had at that moment more powerful rockets. They
knew the NASA people knew that it was going to
take a lot more than powerful rockets. Actually their it
would not have been able to put humans on the Moon,
(05:03):
and it was going to take a heck of a
lot more, you know, microelectronics, complicated systems, very sophisticated spacecraft,
and so that kind of leveled the playing field. But
Kennedy was thinking as a statesman. He was not a
space fan at that time. I think he got much
(05:23):
more enthusiastic when he saw what was developing as Apollo
got started. But it was really Cold War competition that
gave birth to the moon landing program.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Has any other anyone from any other country set foot
on the Moon.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
No, No, nobody has been on the surface of the
Moon except the twelve astronauts from Apollo on the six
lunar landings. Now, NASA is trying, working very very hard
to return astronauts to the Moon with a program called Artemis,
and so far the program has flown one unpiloted mission
(06:06):
with the capsule, the Orion Capsule, which is kind of
the mother ship. The lander is still in development. It's
being created by SpaceX, and there are plans next year
to send four astronauts around the Moon, and then after that,
perhaps in twenty twenty seven, will come the first landing
(06:27):
on the Artemis three mission.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
I have to ask, is that proposed to be an
all women crew?
Speaker 2 (06:35):
No, but there is a woman on the crew for
the landing has not been named yet, but the flight
around the Moon. One of the astronauts is a woman,
Christina Cook, and very very talented and extremely capable and
has been in space and has done Actually, she and
(06:56):
one of her fellow astronauts did the first all women's
spacewalk a few years ago, so she's already had some
milestones that way.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
So I want to ask you this, have you ever
encountered a conspiracy theorist, like someone who, oh my god,
the moon landing was stage Oh.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
My god, Yes, and it's just so appalling because you know,
there it just flies in the face of everything we
know about the way NASA worked, about the way, uh,
you know, we got all those rocks back from the Moon.
They tell us things that no Earth rock could possibly have.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Have told us.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
The chemistry of those rocks, the the you know, the
details of those rocks, they could not have originated on Earth.
You know, we've now had images from orbiting satellites with
very high resolution cameras that actually showed the footprints the
trail of the astronauts as they walked across the Moon.
(08:03):
But my favorite line refuting the hoax theorists who really
when they go at it, they really just reveal how
little they understand about science when they talk about, oh,
they would never have survived the radiation. Of course they
did because they went through the Van Allen Belts very quickly.
Or they say, well, there's no stars in the photos,
(08:25):
it must have been done in a studio. Well, the
reason there's no stars in the photos is because they
were exposed for the conditions on the lunar surface with
a very bright landscape illuminated by a brilliant sun. And
I could go on and on and on, but my
favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. He said, it
would have been harder to fake it than to do it.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Andrew. Now that we've set up this background, let's get
to our listener's question, why did we stop going to
the Moon?
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Well, it goes back to the reason why we started, which,
as I say, in Kennedy's mind, was to show the
world the strength of our free society by doing something very,
very challenging in space. Once we accomplished that with Apollo eleven,
the impetus to keep funding very ambitious human spacelight programs,
(09:17):
you know, that went away, and we had the hardware
left over to keep going to the Moon several more times.
But NASA's efforts at that time, right after Apollo eleven,
to convince the White House and Congress to support, you know,
very ambitious things like a base on the Moon, and
(09:38):
space stations in Earth orbit, space stations in lunar orbit,
eventually sending humans to Mars, all those things were rejected.
The country was a very different place by the time
of Pollo eleven landed in nineteen sixty nine that it
had been when Kennedy challenged us to go to the
Moon in nineteen sixty one, we had the Vietnam War,
which was costing incredible amounts of money. You know, it's
(10:03):
I think they spent in a month with the entire
Apollo program cost something like that, and the concerns over
the environment, the civil rights struggle was very much on
people's minds. Priorities had shifted, and in fact, most people
don't even know this. A year after Apollo eleven, NASA
(10:25):
was fighting for its life. The budget cuts were so
strong and the budget was coming down so steeply that
the entire human spaceflight program was in danger of going extinct.
And the only thing that saved it was that President
Nixon approved and Congress approved the Space Shuttle program to
(10:46):
create a reusable vehicle. But the Shuttle never went any
further than lower thort it. So it's taken all of
this time after NASA has flown the Space Shuttle, which
did amazing things and had amazing capability. They's built a
permanent space station in Earth orbit, where we've studied the
medical effects of long term spaceflight. We've looked into all
(11:08):
kinds of processes that might take advantage of weightlessness, all
of these things, learned how to keep a vehicle going
in space for years and years and years, We've had
astronauts up on the Space station as long as a
year at a time to teach us how we need
to keep astronauts healthy if they go to Mars. All
(11:30):
of those things now have set the stage for the
Artists Artemis program, which finally, now more than half a
century later, is trying to pick up where Apollo left off.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
So it sounds like the Shuttle missions really did a
lot of the basic science work that will potentially and
the International Space.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And the station.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that will.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
But there's a lot, there's a lot more to do.
I mean, I I I'll tell you a little story
late I heard from NASA's chief spacecraft designer, Max Faget,
brilliant engineer, designed the Mercury capsule, figured out the shape
it had to be to be able to get back
into the atmosphere without burning up, and had a huge
(12:19):
role in designing the Apollo capsule and the Space Shuttle itself.
And Max told me that one day, a few years
after the last moon landing, he and his former boss,
Bob Gilrith, also a brilliant engineer, were walking along the
beach in Galveston, Texas and there was a big moon
in the sky and Bob Gilrith, who at this point
(12:42):
was an elder statesman of human spaceflight, turned to Fijet
and he said, you know, Max, someday people are going
to try to go back to the Moon and they're
going to find out how hard it really is. And
I have come to really understand the wisdom of that comment,
because for the last ten fifteen years I have spent
(13:04):
all of my time delving into why Apollo was successful,
and it really comes down to it's more than the
rocket science. The rocket science is incredibly hard, we know that,
but the human piece turns out to be the most challenging.
How we think about the work, the mindset we have
(13:25):
to bring to the work in order to succeed. And
what I've done is I've gone back to Apollo and
I've created a framework to talk about the mindset, the behaviors,
the practices we must bring for spacelight professionals to succeed
in a business is demanding and unforgiving, and a spaceflight
and particularly sending humans to other worlds. And I teach
(13:49):
a class at NASA called Principles of Success in Spaceflight
and I'm working on My wife and I are working
on the Companion book, which we plan to have out
next year.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
This is American History Hotline. I'm Bob Crawford today. My
guest is Andrew Chaikin, space historian and author of the
book A Man on the Moon. We're talking about that
big rock in the sky, the Moon. Why has it
been more than half a century since a human has
bounced around on its surface? Remember, if you have any
(14:26):
questions about American history, let's have them record yourself using
a voice memo on your phone and email it to
American History Hotline at gmail dot com. We'll find an
amazing expert like Andrew to answer your question. Andrew, what
did we learn in science terms from the Moon landing?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
We learned an incredible amount we had in our hands.
When Apaul o'levin came back the rocks that Neil Armstrong
had picked up on the Sea of Tranquility in a one,
you know, in the overnight. Those rocks changed our understanding
of the Moon. We now knew that the Moon was
(15:13):
very ancient. We knew that lava flows had erupted on
the Moon billions of years ago, but that since then
the Moon has mostly been very quiet and dead geologically speaking,
of course, biologically speaking, the Moon is incredibly hostile, so
nobody who understood the environment of the Moon thought that
(15:34):
we would find life there. But the landings that followed
and went to different places around the Moon, the highlands
of the Moon, where the rocks were even older, they
picked up rocks dating back four and a half billion years.
That's almost the birth of the Solar System. It's almost
as old as the Earth, and it told us. The
(15:57):
rocks told us that the Moon probably formed early in
the Solar System's history when a massive body like a
planet slammed into the Earth. A planet may be the
size of Mars, slammed into the Earth and ejected material
from the Earth, and of course the body itself that
(16:18):
slammed into the Earth was also destroyed. That material went
into orbit around the Earth and eventually coalesced into what
we call the Moon. So the Moon scientifically is really
the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the earliest history of the Earth,
of the earliest history of the Solar System, particularly the
(16:42):
impact history, which is so critical to understand even how
life on the Earth came about because those asteroids and
comets that hit the Earth were the vehicles that delivered
water and organic molecules and the built blocks of life.
Amino acids certainly to the infant Earth, and the energy
(17:06):
that they brought to the Earth may have been critical
in helping life get started. So, you know, when we
barely scratch the surface of what the Moon has to
tell us. I mean, if you think about it, the
Moon has as much land area as the entire continent
of Africa. And we landed in six places, you know,
and walked around or drove around in the case of
(17:27):
the later missions. And then there have been a few
robotic missions that have brought back samples. But like I say,
that's just scratching the surface. But let me just add
to that by saying what I think the three great
legacies of the Moon landings are so scientifically, that's number one.
Number two is the perspective we gained by looking back
(17:51):
at the Earth. And you know, when you go out
to the Moon, the Earth is so far away. It's
two hundred and forty thousand miles, give or take, and
that's so far away that you can literally cover it
with an outstretched thumb. And that is a shift in
awareness that humans had never experienced until Apollo, and it
(18:14):
taught us a lesson that the Earth is a beautiful
and in many ways fragile oasis in space, and we
need to take care of it. We need to cherish
it and protect it. So that's the second great legacy
of Apollo, the leap in awareness. The third is what
humans can do when they work together. And as I
(18:37):
say in my work on Principles of Success in Spacelight,
that's right at the heart of what I'm trying to
get across to people is the ways in which Apollo
forced us to work together. And you know, physics doesn't
lie right. You can go in with any idea you
think you know, but the physics is going to be
(18:58):
the final arbiter of what works and does and work.
So that's the way engineering is. And actually, you know,
I said Kennedy wanted to do this for Cold War reasons,
but he actually said in a speech he gave in
the fall of nineteen sixty two at Rice University, he said,
we go to the Moon and do the other things
(19:20):
in this decade, not because they're easy, but because they're hard,
because that challenge will serve to organize and measures the
measure the best of our abilities and skills. That's it,
in a nutshell, and he knew that, he understood that.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Well, it's so interesting you say that because in a
lot of ways it feels like our country is in
a similar place like it was in nineteen seventy two.
You know, people might say housing is too expensive, food
costs or outrageous, education, healthcare, childcare unaffordable. You've seen the
(19:56):
DOGE cuts. You know, has NASA been spare from that?
And is there a sense with the politicians and the
and the federal government in the situation it is as
we speak that hey, can we really afford to go
to the moon?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Well, let me say a few things about that. First
of all, no, NASA has not been spared, and we
don't really know the full measure of what will happen
at NASA. That's kind of unfolding as we watch. But
I think the thing that scares me the most is
the rejection of the value of scientific exploration. You know,
(20:34):
if we go back to the Moon, it can't just
be about flags and footprints. To use an often heard phrase,
I think even buzz Aldrin used that phrase once in
a in a speech. You know, it can't just be
about look at us, you know, we were We have
the ability to put humans on another world. The return
(20:57):
on that huge investment in the form of new knowledge
and new understanding, not just about how to do hard things,
which is very valuable and the technological spin offs are valuable,
but the scientific understanding is immeasurably valuable. It teaches us
(21:18):
about who we are, where we came from, where we're going,
How life got started. I mean, I can't think of
a more compelling question than how life got started. Well,
I'll tell you what the moon is like. Walking into
the rare book room of the cosmic library. We can
page through the earliest chapters of Solar System history, which
(21:41):
are recorded very cleanly on the surface of the Moon. So,
you know, I am really passionately hoping that the scientific
exploration of the Moon and the Solar System as a
wider arena. And there's so many exciting missions that are
either underway or being planned to launch in the next
(22:05):
decade or you know, several years or within the next decade,
amazing missions to all kinds of places, And I just
hope we don't lose sight of how critical that is
to us for the health and well being of our society.
I also think that one of the great lessons of
Apollo is in danger of being lost because we are
(22:28):
so subjected to us versus them thinking. These days, it's
really become rampant. And Apollo showed us that to do
great things, we have to work together. We have to
be open to information that doesn't necessarily agree with what
(22:50):
we thought we knew. We have to be open minded
and collaborative. And you know, the greater good the team.
The team is all of us. We're you know, uh,
the astronauts called the Earth's spaceship Earth, and we're all
inhabitants of spaceship Earth. And so we gotta we gotta
(23:14):
get our minds around that fact that all of this
us versus them is leading us away from what will
ultimately benefit us as a society and us as a
human species.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
What about the psychological effect of space travel? I remember
a couple of years ago William Shatner uh was on.
I think it was Jeff Bezos. Is it Blue Origin
is what they call it? Yes?
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yes, And it was called the New Shepherd Vehicle. Jeff
names his vehicles after astronauts, So the Shepherd, the Alan
Shepherd Mercury flight was a suborbital up and down ballistic arc.
New Shepherd goes up and down, but it does it
(24:01):
amazingly in more of a straight line. It goes up
under a constant rocket power, hovers uh ago or goes
over the top of its uh you know, it goes
up to the to the end of its acceleration, and
then comes back down under controlled descent. And so you're
in space. You're you're you're you're weightless. For about five minutes,
you're above the atmosphere. You can look around and see
(24:23):
this incredible panorama. And I was taken. I know where
you're going with this, because I remember when Shatner came
back and he said, man, you know, people talk about
space as this exciting, uplifting experience. He said, I looked
out of those windows, and that blackness scared the daylights
out of me. He said, that was death if I'm
(24:45):
quoting him correctly, you know, And so he that was
a really interesting take on the space experience, and he
went gratified.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
I remember, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
I mean he was very moved by it as well.
I say, bravo. You know, so somebody who went up
and clearly was thoughtful about the experience. It wasn't just
a joy ride. It wasn't just a you know, gee,
this it'd be cool. You know. It's like he really
absorbed an experience on a deep level, and then he
was really skilled at communicating the impact of that experience.
(25:21):
And I think a lot of the astronauts have tried
to do that, and I'm very anxious to hear. You know,
these younger astronauts. They're younger than me anyway, I'm about
to turn sixty nine. But I know many of the astronauts,
including several of the ones who are going around the
Moon next year, and you know they are I think
(25:45):
they're more open to the to the emotional piece than
the Apollo guys were. You know, they came from a
different generation. And Ed Mitchell, who you may have heard of,
because he was very interested in psychic form and ended
up studying esp and that sort of thing after he
came back from the Moon. But he said to me
(26:06):
when I interviewed him from my book, he said, people
kept asking me how did it feel to be on
the Moon. I didn't know the answer to that, how
did it feel? That wasn't something I thought about so.
I think a lot of the guys kind of face that,
you know, the mission they never the mission they never
trained for, was a lot tougher for a lot of
those guys than actually flying the lunar mission. But I
(26:30):
think these younger astronauts are going to have some very
very interesting and I hope compelling things to say.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
What is your opinion of the millionaire of the billionaire
space explorer, of the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk And
you know, if you've got enough money, you can now
build a rocket ship and take your friends up. I mean,
I know I'm making it sound simpler than it really is.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, but there is that aspect. I mean, I think
it's probably it was inevitable. I don't think we could
have predicted it would play out in the way that
we're seeing it play out. I think it's like anything,
it's there's it's a double edged sword. I think it's
creating technologies and new ways of going into space that
(27:19):
I think are fabulous. I mean the engineering work, particularly,
you look at a company like Space Apps, which has
shown that they can, you know, my god, they can
take the first stage of their Falcon nine rocket and
land it they launched the second stage and then that
delivers whatever they're launching into orbit, but then the first
(27:39):
stage comes down and actually lands so it can be reused.
I mean that that was astounding when they started doing that,
and I could probably have rounded up many, many spacelight
veterans who would have predicted it would never work. So
bravo to that, you know, bravo to new ways of
(28:03):
thinking about how to do spacelight. That part of it
is just fabulous. I think there have been times when
they get a little bit too confident and they, you
know the phrase, they don't know what they don't know.
They don't have the history that NASA does. But people
may come in with a mindset that says, well, how
(28:24):
hard could it be if NASA did it fifty years ago. Well,
I refer you to that quote from Bob Gilrith. His
point was it can be damned hard.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Andrew, what is your vision of the future of space exploration?
I mean, where can you see us in twenty seventy two?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Oh gosh, that's a great question. I think by twenty
seventy two, we will, whether it's US or or China
or other countries, will have a base on the Moon
for sure. China is very directed and an ambitious in
their space program now, and they've said that they want
(29:03):
to build a lure base. I think so. I think
that that will be a reality, and I think we'll
be able to look up at night and see the
lights of a lunar base where people are living and
working on another world and learning things that we probably
can't even imagine right now. And I think by twenty
seventy two we will probably have we will. I think
(29:25):
it's almost a sure thing that we will see human
footsteps on Mars. Now, that is an incredible challenge. I mean,
the Moon really pales in comparison to going to Mars, because,
if you think about it, the Moon never you know,
the Moon is a quarter of a million miles away.
Mars never comes any closer than thirty five million miles away.
(29:50):
So the challenges of going to Mars. Number one, You've
got to keep people healthy, right, You've got to protect
them from radiation. You got to give them systems that
can last long enough to go to Mars and come back.
That could be two and a half or three years. Right,
you go to Mars, you're on the surface for a year.
(30:12):
You come back. You're racking up a lot of time
that those systems have to function, and you can't necessarily
bring enough You definitely can't bring enough spare parts to
fix all those things. So we've got to design things
with incredible reliability or maintainability. I'll give you one to
think about. When you go into deep space far from
(30:36):
the Earth, much farther than the Moon, you get a
million miles or so out. By the time you get
that far out, your communications take so long to travel
between you and the Earth that you literally cannot have
a real time conversation with anybody but the people who
are on your spaceship with you. By the time you
(30:58):
get out to Mars, that could be as much as
twenty two minutes one way. So you know, I've always
say when I give talks about this, I say, you say, Houston,
we've had a problem. You can go watch an episode
of Friends before you get the answer. So we don't
(31:20):
know that is uncharted territory. We're used to thinking of
the crew of the space mission as like a few
guys in a vehicle up in space with dozens of people,
really hundreds, If you think about the whole team on
Earth to help them solve problems well with that radio delay.
(31:44):
If a problem comes up that's not in the reference books,
it's something we haven't seen and it needs to be
solved now where the crew could die. That means that
you must have enough people on boards that they're collective
expertise is sufficient to handle that kind of thing. And
people say, oh, well.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
We'll have AI.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
AI is not a panacea. We don't really understand AI,
and research has shown that automation doesn't reduce risk. It
actually introduces risks that are unpredictable. So Mars is a
tremendous challenge. But if you're going to give me twenty
(32:30):
seventy two as the milestone, I will go out on
a limb I don't think it's a big limb and
say we'll solve those challenges by then. I just hope
that we as a society solve the challenges that threaten
us down here on Earth long before. Then.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Let's hope that you are right and that somehow we
can learn to come together here on Earth.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Amen.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Well, I've been talking to Andrew Chaikin. I have Andrew.
I've really enjoyed our time together. This has been wonderful.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks again for having me.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Hey and check out Andrew's book, A Man on the Moon.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Hey, can I give you my website?
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Please?
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Do brand new website for my principles success in spaceflight class.
It's called Dospacebetter dot com.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Do Spacebetter dot com. It's Andrew Chaikin. Thank you so much,
Thank you, Bob. You've been listening to American History Hotline,
a production of iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The
show is executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers
(33:44):
from iHeart are Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music
composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our
email is Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com. If you
like the show, please tell your friends and leave us
a review in Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford.
(34:07):
Feel free to hit me up on social media to
ask a history question or to let me know what
you think of the show. You can find me at
Bob Crawford Base. Thanks so much for listening. See you
next week.
Host
Bob Crawford
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