The Mars Generation Page #4

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walk in space, to float there.

[astronaut] OK, yeah?

[Ed White speaks indistinctly]

OK.

[astronaut] You're right in front, Ed.

You look beautiful!

[White] I feel like a million dollars!

So I'm gonna kick off!

[Dr. Thomas] We put together everything

we learned from Mercury and Gemini

in the Apollo program.

[JFK] But why, some say, the Moon?

Why choose this as our goal?

And they may well ask,

why climb the highest mountain?

[mission control]

Liftoff! We have a liftoff!

[cheering]

[JFK] Many years ago,

the great British explorer George Mallory,

who was to die on Mount Everest,

was asked why did he want to climb it.

He said "Because it is there."

Well, space is there,

and we're going to climb it.

And the Moon and the planets are there.

And new hopes

for knowledge and peace are there!

Going to the Moon, many people

just considered outright impossible.

[astronaut] Four forward,

drifting to the right a little.

[radio blips]

[deGrasse Tyson]

Once the impossible becomes possible,

that opens the floodgates

of human imagination.

That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

[whistles]

[laughs]

[JFK] We choose to go to the Moon!

We choose to go to the Moon!

[applause and cheering]

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade

and do the other things,

not because they are easy,

but because they are hard.

[Raj] We should probably check it,

cause last time we had a pretty bad angle.

Dude, come on, let's check it.

No, I just want to make sure ours

is positioned so we won't die again.

As a kid, I would love to witness

one of our presidents

challenge NASA to land on Mars

in a deadline that may seem impossible.

Because I feel like

few things motivate humans.

I mean the Soviets motivated us,

but that was out of fear.

I swear, if ours doesn't work

-I'm crying!

-Oh crap, dude!

Ours looks all bent up and everything.

What is he doing?

Dude, now look at it!

We're bent to the side now. Oh my god.

-[camper] It's going to go that way.

-[camper]...two, one...

[excited chatter]

-Please, please deploy!

-Do it, do it, do it!

[all] Yeah!

[celebratory music]

[cheering continues]

[all] Rub the orange!

Rub the orange! Rub the orange!

[all laughing and cheering]

[Raj] I think we should go to Mars because

we would learn so much along the way.

Forget about actually stepping on Mars.

I think the journey there

is far more important.

We're checking the payload

to see if it's still intact.

See any juice?

[camper] Oooh...

This chute idea might have saved us.

It's cracked.

No! I think we made it!

Oh my god, we made it!

[all celebrate] Whoa!

Yes!

[laughter]

[Raj] Wow, that was so ratchet.

[Eugene Cernan] Bob, this is Gene

and I'm on the surface.

[breathless]

I'd like to just say,

what I believe history will record:

that America's challenge of today

has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.

As soon as the first landing on the Moon

seemed inevitable,

and certainly after it happened,

every single story

written about that success

included a secondary story

that said "So, what's next?"

[Cernan] And as we leave the Moon

at Taurus-Littrow,

we leave as we came

and, God willing, as we shall return:

with peace and hope for all mankind.

God speed the crew of Apollo 17.

[Jacobsen] In that moment, von Braun

reveals his true ambition as a scientist.

This is a great moment.

We've gotten to the Moon.

But actually it's a stepping stone

to the red planet, to Mars.

[Kluger] Wernher von Braun

talked about a Mars mission

and he talked about a possible presence,

permanent presence, on Mars by 1981.

That sounds insanely ambitious:

11 years to have a permanent presence

on two planets.

But the fact is,

it was equally hubristic to say

"And we're gonna put

a man on the Moon by 1969."

Except we did it.

So everything we were talking about doing

in extremely short order, by 1981,

getting people on Mars,

was actually perfectly consistent

with the extremely short order work

we had done to get to the Moon.

[Jacobsen] The plan to go to Mars

was complicated in the '60s

because the way von Braun saw it,

this was gonna be a symbol of the future.

But the way the public interpreted it

was entirely different.

Now, of course, there are many other

things competing for public interest.

There is an election coming up,

and there is a war going on in Vietnam,

and there are problems in the cities.

And quite a few people seem to believe

that we are taking money away

from the public purse.

We prefer to see our space program

in a somewhat different light.

We believe that

we are actually producing values,

and we are producing values

at a faster rate than we are

taking money out of the treasury.

[Kluger] Nixon had a choice

to continue the program to go on to Mars.

The infrastructure

for planetary exploration was in place.

The NASA personnel infrastructure

that had gotten us to the Moon

was prepared to get us to Mars.

Mr. Speaker,

the President of the United States!

[applause]

[Nye] I gotta tell you, everybody,

this longing for the Apollo era

is not well advised.

It's not coming back.

We're operating now

not under the Kennedy doctrine,

but under the Nixon doctrine.

In reaching the Moon,

we demonstrated

what miracles American technology

is capable of achieving.

And now the time has come

to move more deliberately

toward making full use of that technology

here on Earth.

[applause]

[Nye] President Nixon and his advisors

felt that U.S. public interest

in space exploration had waned.

It was a very expensive undertaking.

Let's do something else.

[theme tune plays]

[newscaster] Sunday, April 12, 1981.

Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

The Space Shuttle.

Fourteen stories high, 2,000 tons,

poised on the pad for its maiden flight.

[Kluger] Nixon's goal was to contract

America's space footprint.

To make getting to and from orbit

routine, affordable,

and ultimately profitable.

But the Nixon doctrine,

the idea of monetizing

and simplifying access to orbit,

did not work.

[mission control] ...two, one,

starting motor ignition and liftoff!

Liftoff of Columbia!

The shuttle has cleared the tower.

Columbia, you're negative seats.

And liftoff.

Liftoff of the orbiter Challenger and

the sixth flight of the Space Shuttle.

[Kluger] What's been happening at NASA

has been a very long term drift

in terms of the manned space program.

After we went to the Moon,

it was the carousel of shuttle flights

around the Earth for 30-some years.

That was it.

[mission control]

We have ignition and liftoff

of Atlantis and the Galileo spacecraft

bound for Jupiter.

[CAPCOM] Roger roll, Atlantis.

[Dr. Kaku] The Space Shuttle

can't reach deep space.

The Space Shuttle was only designed

to go whizzing around the planet Earth.

And so we began to realize

that NASA lost its way.

And liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery

to complete NASA's constellation

of tracking stations in the sky.

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