Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Andrew Chaikin on the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 8

Episode Date: December 29, 2008

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Andrew Chaikin on the first Earthrise, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The author of A Man on the Moon and A Passion for Mars returns to tell us how the most famous picture ever taken in space came to be and how that image of our planet rising over the horizon of the moon calls us to once again venture beyond Earth.

Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, says NASA doesn't need to go into space to find the solar power we can use down here. And Bruce Betts will join me to celebrate the night sky and the great new mnemonics many of you sent us. At least one of them has got to be a better way to remember how stars are classified. Emily Lakdawalla has this holiday week off. She'll return with a new Q&A segment next time. In the meantime, you can look to her blog at planetary.org for the latest news from around our solar system and more distant locales. For example, there's her story about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

taking another major step toward its planned launch in April. Time for Bill. I'll be right back with Andrew Chaikin. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy, vice president of Planetary Society. And this week, as the holidays wound down, you may not have noticed that NASA canceled its space-based solar power initiative. It's SBSP. And this is probably not a bad thing. For those of you unfamiliar, the idea is to have enormous antennas in space, many, many times larger than an international space station, that would gather solar power and then beam it to the Earth's surface on microwaves. And we'd gather these microwaves up in an enormous antenna in some desert location, say in North America,

and then we'd have solar-based electricity for houses and factories all over North America. It seems like a fine idea. The electricity you might think, the energy you might think is free. But this idea dates from a long time ago, from big science projects, like when we were building the supersonic transport airplanes and enormous hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants. But these ideas turn out to be quite expensive. You know, how much trouble we have keeping the space station working. An astronaut drops a tool bag and this becomes a missile in orbit for decades or centuries to come. Sunlight is the most distributed energy resource in the world.

It's spread out all over the world. So why concentrate it in space and beam it to a desert? Because it seemed like a good idea, but it's fraught with technical problems. Instead, if somebody wants to go into the commercial business of doing this, of trying this, well, more power to them. Get it? But NASA's mission maybe should be to inspire us, to help us learn about our place in the universe, to help us learn about our planet's climate, and to help us know our place among our other planets. These

are worthy endeavors for NASA. That NASA's canceled the space-based solar power, it's okay. So enjoy the holidays, my friends, and reckon this. As reckoned in Britain, Isaac Newton was born on the 25th of December. As reckoned in Italy, it was the 4th of January. And it all has to do with understanding the motion of the sun. This goes back a long way for us humans and to many more adventures in the coming year. I've got to fly. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. It was only about two months ago that we talked with Andrew Chaikin about his great new book, A Passion for Mars.

He first gained fame for A Man on the Moon, his definitive and much-celebrated history of the Apollo program that he and Tom Hanks later turned into the award-winning HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Andy interviewed scores of astronauts over the 10 years it took him to research A Man on the Moon, including the three humans who became the first to look back on our beautiful homeworld from another body in space. Andy, thanks so much for joining us once again, and so soon after your first appearance, when we talked about A Passion for Mars,

I realized with the fair amount of coverage last week about Apollo 8, and especially that Earthrise image, I thought, man, I've got to talk to somebody, and I realized I could go right to, I don't know if it's the source, but I couldn't think of anybody better to talk to about this piece of history from Apollo than you. One step removed from the source, I like to think of myself. One small step for a man. One giant leap for historian kind. Yeah, we're really going to stretch this if we go any further. I know, I know.

We should quit while we're behind, as my wife likes to say. Tell me, did Anders, Borman, and Lovell have any idea of the significance of that image when they snapped it? I think they did. I think it was something that hit them right between the eyes when they saw the Earth coming up. I mean, to hear Bill Anders talk about it, he was the one who was looking out the window at the beginning of Apollo 8's fourth orbit around the moon. Frank Borman was at the control for the command module and was rotating it to a new orientation. And when Borman made that little roll maneuver, Anders looked out the window and saw the Earth starting to come up beyond the, you know,

the very stark gray, tan gray horizon of the moon and said, oh my God, look at that picture over there. Wow, is that pretty. It's the Earth coming up. And this moment was actually recorded on the onboard voice recordings, which I got a hold of the actual, while I was researching my book, A Man on the Moon. And, you know, Bill snapped off first the black and white image, and then a couple of color images. And the color image is the one that became such an icon of the 20th century. The way Bill described it to me when I interviewed him was we were completely focused on the moon. We were trained to go to the

moon. It was not go to the moon and look back at the earth. You know, that was not in our thoughts. And so when this earth popped up, suddenly it was not only incredibly beautiful, but he said its beauty was even magnified because it was in contrast to this very desolate moonscape, which was battered beyond recognition and really looked like, in Borman's words, the final battlefield of the final war. the final battlefield of the final war. So here is this tiny, radiant sphere, which is the only color that they can see in the entire universe. Everything else is just black or gray. And they also know that that's home,

so that magnifies its beauty even more. So that sort of zap, as I call it, hit them in the moment, and the surprise of it, and the momentousness of it, and it hit them on an emotional level as well as on an intellectual level. impact kind of continued to sink in in an even bigger way. And again, Bill Anders was the one who told me that, you know, he began to realize that NASA had sent them all this way to explore the moon, but it was really the view of the Earth as seen from the moon that was the biggest discovery and the most interesting aspect of the flight of Apollo 8. So much has been made of the fact that this image came out at just about the time that the modern environmental movement was being born, and that it really supported that so

brilliantly. It did, and it was, you know, one of the things I like to point out about Apollo 8 was that unlike any event in the history of exploration up to that time, Apollo 8 was an event that we experienced as it happened through live television and radio. Look at the front page of the New York Times on Christmas Day of 1968. So this is the day after Borman, Lovell, and Anders orbit the moon. There's a big headline, of course, that says, Three men orbit the moon, and so on and so forth. And then down at the bottom of that page is an essay by a poet named Archibald MacLeish, named Archibald MacLeish, which talks about us as riders, brothers on this Earth, riding on this Earth in the eternal cold in the oasis of spaceship Earth. And that was really a kind of a transcendent perspective that we were absorbing in the moment,

in real time, as it happened. absorbing in the moment, in real time, as it happened. Of course, anybody who tuned in that Christmas Eve night and watched their second broadcast from lunar orbit, the astronauts made two telecasts using a little black and white camera. And during that second telecast, of course, they read from the book of Genesis. And that was a truly transcendent moment for everybody involved, at least if you were open to looking at it that way, it felt transcendent. Certainly it was a historic moment. The impact of that moment was that human beings had finally left home for the first time. You know, the old Tsiolkovsky line about Earth is the cradle of humanity, but you can't live in the cradle forever. Well, this was humans finally stepping out of the cradle and looking back at their home and seeing it with new eyes, which did, in fact, give a tremendous impetus to the environmental movement. In fact, if you look at, there's a picture of a protester on the very first Earth Day in April of 1970.

So by that time, several Apollo missions had gone to the moon and even walked on the moon. This protester is holding a sign that says, Earth RIP, and I think he put 1990 on there. He was predicting that the environmental disaster would hit us if we didn't change our ways by 1990. And on his sign was a picture of the Earth as seen from an Apollo moon mission. So the image of the Earth as seen from the moon rapidly became part of the iconography of the environmental movement. When we return, Andrew Chaykin will tell us why the Apollo 8 Earthrise image calls us to explore. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's vice president. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS.

Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Author, public speaker, and passionate space exploration enthusiast Andrew Chaikin is our guest. We're talking with him about the legacy of the Apollo 8 mission. It was the first to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit to the moon.

You touched on really the other central fact of this mission, which is that it was the first time we went anywhere other than low Earth orbit. It's been an awfully long time since we've done anything like that. Yeah, and I keep grappling with this kind of strange, almost bizarre, paradoxical feeling of looking back at something that is at the very edge of human experience. I mean, certainly going to the moon is as futuristic a thing as we have ever done, and yet it's in our past. It's 40 years ago, and I don't quite know how to put those two things together. And I ruminated on that some in the most recent edition of A Man on the Moon. and afterward about that and the kind of disconnect that that has created,

especially for us poor space advocates who really have had to experience the evolution of spaceflight in a kind of an out-of-sequence, jumbled-up way. I mean, if you go back to the years leading up to the space age when, I'll give you one example walt disney did these wonderful tomorrowland tv shows in the mid 50s in which he kind of gave television viewers a coming attraction of the space age which had not yet begun in the one about the first flight around the moon which was called tomorrow the moon he even even shows the Earth rising beyond the moon's horizon, a scene from this moon ship that's going around the moon in a figure eight.

But the context for Walt Disney's moon flight was taken straight from Werner Von Braun, who was an advisor to the show. And in Von Braun's mind, you have an infrastructure, and first you build the reusable three-stage rockets that are going to send people to space and back. And then when you've established the capability to send people into space, why, then you build a space station in Earth orbit. And that becomes your staging base for going out to the moon and eventually go to the planets. And that kind of blueprint was kind of hardwired into everybody and persisted, even today, has persisted in the minds of many space advocates. But in reality, we did it completely out of sequence. We didn't build the space station before we went to the moon. Not

only that, but we didn't go to the moon in a way that was sustained. So it became a dead end. it was sustained. So it became a dead end. And since then, one of my problems with NASA is that they have been too in love with that old architecture, the Von Braun playbook, and they've been building things just because they feel they ought to build them without even figuring out what they're good for. I think that's been the problem with the shuttle, and I think it's been the problem with the station. And also the fact that NASA's compromised on the design of the shuttle based on budgetary stuff way, way back. But the most important thing to me is that we move forward as a species when we explore. It isn't enough to just go into space and live inside a few modules for six months at a time. We've got to be going places and seeing new things and expanding our consciousness and our awareness. That's what

Apollo 8 was. It was this, my God, it was this absolute turning point in human evolution, which for the very first time gave us the experience of traveling from our home planet to another celestial body. We're still feeling the effects today. I want to refer to a terrific essay that you wrote just recently for the Connect Space website, and we'll link to that from planetary.org slash radio. In it, you juxtapose two images of distant Earths, one of them taken by a robot. Yes, and it is a picture of the Earth as a bright dot in the pre-dawn sky of Mars, which is how it would look if you could stand on Mars.

The Earth would simply look like a bright bluish star-like point of light because it would be more than 35 million miles away. That's as close as Mars ever gets, but it'd probably be even further if you were standing on Mars now. That picture, to me, symbolizes the challenges of going to Mars with human beings, all the tremendous technological, medical, even psychological challenges that await us to be solved before we can follow in the footsteps of our robotic explorers. But, you know, I think of it as a bookend on where we are at this particular moment in time, but it gives us something to shoot for. That's our goal, whereas the Earthrise from Apollo 8 represents our glorious past that we've not yet been able to recapture.

You close that essay by saying there's an unspoken message in every transmission from these robotic surrogates that we have exploring the solar system, and it's just two words, follow me. Right, and I really feel that. I really feel that if you're paying attention, that you get that really strong sense from those images and from all of the planetary images that we see coming in from all the different missions, which is that we are clever creatures. able to, from our own intelligence, our ingenuity, our creativity, and our persistence, and of course our passion, we're able to build machines that can be our avatars, if you will, in going places in the solar system that we have not yet been able to go ourselves. Well, if we're that clever to be able to build machines like that and send them off on journeys of millions or even billions of miles

and last for years or even decades and stay in touch with us and send back reports, then we are also clever enough to solve the challenges of becoming a multi-planet species and truly leaving the cradle and visiting and then inhabiting other worlds. And I love the space exploration program, not just for the fantastic images and the other data that we get, but for the ingenuity and the testimony it gives to the creative power of human beings. the creative power of human beings. It's one of the things that just excites me no end and makes me excited every time I see something new from one of our missions. And you're talking to the right audience with that message, Andy. Thank you so much for joining us again.

Happy holidays and happy 40th anniversary of our first visit to another body. Thank you, Matt, and I look forward to great things and talking to your listeners again in 2009. So do we. Andrew Chaikin is the author of A Man on the Moon, which was turned into From the Earth to the Moon, that terrific HBO miniseries with Tom Hanks, or turned into

it by Tom Hanks, I should say. Most recently, he is the author of A Passion for Mars, available from Abrams. It is a terrific book that we talked about just a couple of months ago on this program, and I recommend it highly. I also recommend you stick around for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts, and we'll get those wonderful new mnemonics for finding your way around the system of stars in our galaxy and beyond.

And by the way, that website where you can find Andrew's essay is not connect, but collectspace.com. We've got a direct link at planetary.org slash radio. Bruce is just moments away. Time for a mid-holiday what's up with Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. We've got him on the Skype connection. And, Bruce, we've got some fun stuff later on in the segment because we're going to go through those stellar classification mnemonics. But do tell us what's up in the night sky. We'll go through the unfun stuff now. No, that's not true. Venus, beautiful in the evening sky. We'll go through the unfun stuff now. No, that's not true. Venus, beautiful in the evening sky. Look over to the west after sunset.

Brightest star-like object over there. Saturn rising middle of the night in the east and then high overhead before dawn, looking a little bit kind of yellowish. And if you check it out with a small telescope, the rings are nearly edge-on these days. An annular solar eclipse coming up January 26th. At least a partial eclipse will be visible throughout most of southern Africa,

southeastern Asia, and western Australia. On to this week in space history. Spirit, Mars rover, landed five years ago. Can you believe it? Yeah, we're going to mark that very soon. At that end, the only slightly later arrival of Opportunity, still ticking. Both of them still going. On to Random Space Fact!

I didn't know you had the range. Alpha Centauri, the closest star system, 4.3 light years away. Its distance was first measured 170 years ago by Thomas Henderson using the parallax effect, which is the amount the star appears to move relative to the more distant background stars as the Earth goes from one side of its orbit to the other, kind of like holding your finger in front of your eyes, first closing one eye, then the other, and observing the apparent movement of your finger. If you try this, try to keep your finger out of your eyes. Nice trick, especially for that long ago. Indeed, that's what I thought.

On to the trivia contest. On to the trivia contest. We asked you to come up with a new mnemonic for stellar classification, classifying it using what's sometimes called the Harvard classification system, where you have stars ranked by basically their surface temperature, OBAFGKM. How'd we do, Matt? Wow. I know how we did. We did great. Yeah, we did great. You've seen the results. Now, we're going to read quite a few of these because so many are so good. And it's still a pretty small fraction of what we received. You guys are good.

What can we say? But we did pick a winner. We're going to get to that eventually. But first, a whole slew of honorable mentions. And I'll do the first one here, okay? All right. Orbs brightly alight, facilitate gauging Keplerian motion. So there it is, O-B-A-F-G-K-M. And that came to us from Taras.

Do I have to try this? Henantishan. Taras Henantishan from New York, New York. Thank you, Taras. Very nice work. That one, nicely summarizing what's actually going on with the stars. In stark contrast, we have Otto builds a frighteningly gruesome kitten mangler.

From Lindsay Dawson down under in Australia. From the sublime to the ridiculous. And here's another one from Lindsay. Orbiting bodies always follow gravity's kinetic manipulations. Little shades of the first one there from Taras. And now in what's just a ridiculous thing for us to do since neither of us speak German, I'm going to give you the one in German. I apologize. I apologize.

I'm a baked out fewer guys kind muffins. Which means, of course, grandma doesn't bake muffins for geese either. That one from Uwe Voigt from Germany. Yeah, that's Dr. Voigt from the European Space Agency, who was a regular listener and contributor. All right, here's my next one. This happens to be one of my favorites, but disqualified because it's backwards. Instead of starting with O, it starts at the other end with M.

Matt Kaplan goes for a big orangutan. You wild man. From William Stewart, Cheshire, United Kingdom. Okay. I wouldn't disqualify it. I just really don't want that image in my head every time I try to remember the anchor. Yeah, well, there's more of that to come. Oh, but here is the most brilliant of all.

Oh, boy. Bruce always finds great knowledge, Matt, from Andrew Boyle in Orlando, Florida. Ain't it the truth. Here's another one that's from out there in left field. From John Gallant in Lima, New York. Only bats avoid the feeble grasp of Kafkaesque monkeys. Nice. You know, I've met a couple of Kafkaesque monkeys.

It is creepy. As long as they don't fly. Don't even start with that. It scares me a lot. On to the following one. Let me mention first before I read it. Morgan Keenan is a related spectral classification system. With that knowledge, on Bagram Airfield, generals keep Marines for Morgan Keenan.

This is from Tim Dunlap, who had served in Afghanistan and was familiar with Bagram Airfield there, where the generals like to go to stay. Here is the very last of the honorable mentions from Mark Smith, another regular, San Diego, California. On Bellatrix, all falafels get kosher mayonnaise. I seem to have the off the wall ones

and you get the winner as opposed to some of the ones I read I do I get the winner it's funny and has a better chance of remembering it than some of the others which is one reason we liked it and here it is obviously bananas

are fruit gone kooky mad Torsten Zimmer in Germany Congratulations Torsten Very nicely done It's only a sub-sample Again very impressed by the creativity Of the listenership Nice job, thank you

Torsten is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt And a free membership In the Oceanside Photo and Telescope Rewards Program. That's opt at optcorped.com. I think that's a $20 value. So congratulations, Torsten. What do you got for us next time?

We're running out of time. Something a little more straightforward. Who is the only person ever to have discovered all the moons of a planet? All the moons of one planet, only person to have ever discovered all of them of one planet, go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. For this contest, we are going to be giving away the fabulous

Year in Space desk calendar for 2009, the official source of this week in space history and other groovy things. And if you don't win, you can also, you can pick one of those up. And we'll try to put a link on the website from planetary.org slash radio. You can find out how to get your own no matter whether you win or not.

Good idea. We'll throw in another OPT rewards program card as well. And that's it. I think we're done. I better tell people, though, that they have to get those entries into a spy. January 5, Monday, 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about hedgehogs. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts. He's all over those hedgehogs, especially the sonic variety.

He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Happy New Year, Guy. Happy New Year. joins us every week here for What's Up. Happy New Year, Guy. Happy New Year. Next week, we'll welcome back Peter Smith, head of the recently completed Phoenix mission on Mars.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week and a great year. Thank you.