One step for a man, one gialnt leap for mankind – 50 years later

Jill Lepore reviews seven new books on the moon landing, Why Did the Moon Landing Matter? (NYTimes). She concludes:

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The lasting legacy of the voyage to the moon lies in the wonder of discovery, the joy of knowledge, not the gee-whizzery of machinery but the wisdom of beauty and the power of humility. A single photograph, the photograph of Earth taken from space by William Anders, on Apollo 8, in 1968, served as an icon for the entire environmental movement. People who’ve seen the Earth from space, not in a photograph but in real life, pretty much all report the same thing. “You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply ingrained nationalisms begin to erode,” Carl Sagan once described the phenomenon. “They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.” This experience, this feeling of transcendence, is so universal, among the tiny handful of people who have ever felt it, that scientists have a term for it. It’s called the Overview Effect. You get a sense of the whole. Rivers look like blood. “The Earth is like a vibrant living thing,” the Chinese astronaut Yang Liu thought, when he saw it. It took Alan Shepard by surprise. “If somebody’d said before the flight, ‘Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the moon?’ I would have said, ‘No, no way.’ But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the moon, I cried.” The Russian astronaut Yuri Artyushkin put it this way: “It isn’t important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth.”

That’s beautiful. But here’s the hitch. It’s been 50 years. The waters are rising. The Earth needs guarding, and not only by people who’ve seen it from space. Saving the planet requires not racing to the moon again, or to Mars, but to the White House and up the steps of the Capitol, putting one foot in front of the other.

Apollo 11 in Real Time is live! Relive the first landing on the Moon for #Apollo50th

Includes all film footage, TV broadcasts, photographs, every word spoken, and more, including 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio never before made publicly availablehttps://t.co/PyMjtxWeRz pic.twitter.com/evLmH2U3EV

— Ben Feist (@BenFeist) June 15, 2019