Why is the present manned space program so different from the one that Clarke and Kubrick envisioned?
Some of you may recall that after the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 1969, there was an amazingly abrupt decrease in public enthusiasm for manned space flight. I have a theory about what happened. I believe that a principal sociological force driving the manned space program of the 1960s was territoriality, the basic human urge to explore and occupy new territory. I think the man-in-the-street expected the Apollo astronauts to go to the Moon and claim it as our territory. Neil Armstrong was supposed to step out of the Lunar Lander and say “I claim this territory in the name of the United States of America.” When instead, all he said was the scripted lines about a giant step for mankind, the aftermath was like air escaping from a balloon. The entire space program deflated very rapidly when the taxpayers discovered that the Moon Race was not about claiming the Moon as a territory of the United States of America. The pattern of exploration and territorial expansion we had learned in his
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- Why is the present manned space program so different from the one that Clarke and Kubrick envisioned?
