AMERICA’S SPACE PROGRAM BY Bill clark

This year on July 20, America celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. It made me reflect on the fact that the space program was conceived and developed in my lifetime.

I have often been awed by the space program. In about 1952 or 1953 in Tacoma, Washington, when I was about eight or nine years old, I can remember getting small plastic space men with removable clear plastic helmets. These were distributed by Richfield gasoline stations. These small action figures were about three inches high. They were futuristic. Space travel was just fantasy at that time. It was the realm of Buck Rogers. It was entertaining. It was also scary. Orson Welles scared a lot of people in this country with a radio broadcast adaptation of H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. Then, in the fall of 1957, I learned a new word along with everyone else in the United States and elsewhere. That word was Sputnik. The Russians had launched a manmade object into space. The space race was on. The line between science fiction and reality was about to shift. Early in his presidency, John F. Kennedy declared we would reach the moon in a decade. Almost daily, the newspapers chronicled the U.S. advances in the space race. In the early 1960s, we learned of the Mercury Program. Words like astronaut were added to our language. People like Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Gus Grissom became celebrities. Cape Canaveral became a place that everyone was familiar with. We followed each new space launch with intense interest. The suspense was incredible. The first Mercury capsule launch and recovery was filled with danger and unknown, but was televised live. Then, the Mercury capsule that first orbited the earth was exhilarating. People had to wrap their minds around the fact that a man was circling the Earth every ninety minutes. Many people had “splash down” parties to mark the achievement of each mission. America had spacemen. The Gemini Program followed Mercury with a capsule that held two astronauts instead of one. Next came the Apollo Program with a three-man command module. Deeper space missions were attempted and accomplished. The moon was a possibility. The American space program has provided many commercial successes. The first new product that was touted shamelessly on television was Tang, the orange-flavored breakfast drink, or instant orange juice. The danger of space was brought home to every American on January 27, 1967. Astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in a fire that consumed the Apollo 1 capsule as it sat on the launch pad. The climax came with the Apollo 11 mission. Not only did we reach the moon. Not only did we orbit the moon. We landed on the moon. I say we because the space program had an amazing unifying effect on the people of this country. Unfortunately, the unifying effect was countered by the anti-Vietnam War movement that developed in the late 1960s. I was in Danang, Vietnam, on July 20, 1969. I think it was actually July 21, in Danang, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The news of the moonwalk lifted my spirits. I went to the MACG-18 officers club and reveled in the news with a cold drink in a cool environment. In the club were Vietnamese cocktail waitresses. I think only one was on duty that afternoon. It was still early. I was one of the only people in the bar at the time. I tried to make conversation with the waitress by telling her of the moon landing. I don’t know if there was a language problem, or she just thought I was bullshitting her, but that girl got angry with me. She stalked away and would not talk to me. The near disaster of Apollo 13 seemed to have put the brakes on the folks at NASA. The expense of the Vietnam War impacted also, as I understand it. Daily events in the Marine Corps intervened, and my interest in the space program waned. My interest was renewed when the space shuttle came on line. I was fortunate enough in 1986 to make a job-related trip to Cape Canaveral. Nothing was going on, but it was still educational. I was proud to stand in the shadow of greatness. Then on January 28, 1986, there was the tragedy of the Challenger accident. That was one of the launches I actually watched. There was a lot of interest because Christa McAuliffe was aboard that flight as the first American “civilian” in space. Christa was a schoolteacher scheduled to teach from space. The horror of the Challenger exploding was played repeatedly. Upon explosion at seventy-three seconds into the flight, one of the controllers announced a “catastrophic failure” of Challenger. Americans reeled in horror and felt the grief of the families, particularly for that of the schoolteacher who was trying something new. The U.S. space program quietly continued. I tuned in again in the early 1990s. I sat and watched astronauts repair the Hubble Telescope in real time. I was mesmerized. I was able to watch repairs in progress as the occurred and listen to the astronauts talk to each other as they worked. That single event brought home the fact that communications had made exponential progress. That in itself was probably a by-product of the space program. It was awesome. Now we have the international space station aboard which humans live for months at a time. What are their experiments for? What new technology are they developing? Will the new knowledge be used for good or evil? Will war, armed conflict, reach space? Thousands of years of recorded human history says yes. The human condition that fosters greed, and the need for power, or to control others, has not changed in those thousands of years. War fighting has been refined through technological advances, and war flourishes. Even more hostile than the deserts of the Middle East, and the mountains of Afghanistan, is the environment of outer space. There will be men and women, though, tough enough to meet the challenge of combat in outer space. Like their iron-willed, eagle, globe, and anchor-wearing predecessors, they will endure and excel. If it comes to pass, I hope it is in a far distant future.

Bill Clark joined the Marine Corps in 1965. He served in Vietnam with the First Light Anti-Aircraft Missile Battalion at Da Nang. Bill left the Marine Corps in 1979 and worked at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in the Range Management Division as a federal civil servant. In 1985, Bill joined the Arizona Army National Guard. He served in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, as a member of the 855th Military Police Company during Desert Storm. Bill retired from the U.S. Army in July 1995 and began teaching at an inner-city high school in Phoenix, Arizona. Bill published a personal history about his first four years in the Marine Corps entitled Land, Sea, and Foreign Shore in 2002. He retired in 2009 as a reading teacher to pursue his interest in writing.