Twenty & Forty-Five Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today, fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy began slamming into Jupiter.

Photo: Hubble Space Telescope

In May the comet had broken up as it neared Jupiter and tidal forces shredded it into twenty-two major pieces that we could see (and probably tens of thousands that were too small for us to see).

Photo: Hubble Space Telescope

On July 16, 1994, the first large fragment hit Jupiter’s atmosphere. The enormous amount of energy released left a disturbance in the cloud layers that was several times larger than the Earth.

Photo: Hubble Space Telescope

Between July 16th and July 22nd a string of giant impact marks could be seen as the comet fragments impacted and the planet turned beneath them, exposing new impact sites every few hours.

These dark impact storms could be seen for weeks afterward and were easily visible even in small telescopes such as mine. (Yes, I had my telescope out on the sidewalk and shared the views with everyone in the neighborhood.)

Photo: NASA

Even more importantly, forty-five years ago today, on July 16, 1969, three men left Earth on top of  6.2 million pounds of high explosives.

Photo: NASA

It was indeed a moment that the entire world watched, seconded only by what happened four days later.

Photo: NASA

If you’re on Twitter, I recommend you follow @astVintageSpace as she “live tweets” the Apollo 11 mission. She’s recreating the mission in real time (forty-five years later) as if Twitter had existed in 1969. What’s really important is that she has a lot of really cool information, quotes, and minor events that I had never heard before. (Hindsight = 20/20.)

Photo: NASA

Regardless of why we did it, the fact remains that we did it. Our society and our country would be much better served if we could remember what we can do when we want to and dare to. Maybe then we could dare to do something even more “impossible” and inspiring instead of the bickering and bitching that seems to be tying us in knots these days.

Photo: NASA

As they left the Earth behind them, only the seventh, eighth, and ninth men to ever do so, they looked back and saw this. (Original, high-resolution NASA photo is here. It would make a wonderful lock page for your tablet or phone. Just sayin’.)

Today, all is not lost. There are six astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, which has been continuously manned for 13 years and 256 days. Early this morning a Cygnus robot cargo craft docked there, bringing up supplies, spare parts, and new science experiments. We have robots (plural!) orbiting and driving around on the surface of Mars. We have the first spacecraft orbiting Mercury, now in its fourth year of doing so. We have the first spacecraft orbiting Saturn, now in its eleventh year in the Saturnian system. We have a second orbiter on its way to Jupiter, and in less than one year we’ll be doing the first flyby of Pluto. The Hubble Space Telescope is going strong and the Webb Space Telescope is getting ready to launch in late 2018. We see the first private spacecraft (unmanned, so far) from Orbital Sciences and SpaceX. Soon we may see private spacecraft taking paying passengers on suborbital flights. There is hope that not too long after that we’ll see private spacecraft taking paying passengers into orbit where they can visit a private space station.

While all of that is wonderful, it’s bittersweet sometimes to think that it’s taken forty-five years from Apollo 11 to get to where we are now. How much further along and how much further outward could we be now if we had just been able to maintain our momentum and drive after winning the race to the moon, instead of gutting the program and changing (some would say “losing”) our focus.

It’s time to put thousands and tens of thousands of people in orbit, not dozens. It’s time to return to the moon, this time to build research stations, then exotic tourist destinations, then cities. It’s time to go to Mars, to stay, to live, to colonize. It’s time to mine the asteroids, send robots to Europa and Ganymede and Callisto and Titan, and make sure that we know we’re protected from any incoming rocks or comets. (What if Shoemaker-Levy had hit the Earth instead of Jupiter? Well, I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it.)

It’s time. It’s been time for forty-five years now.