on the previous Christmas Eve, were the first humans to orbit the moon and to describe the desolate “dirty beach” of its surface. It was they who, returning from their flight over the far side, first saw Earth rising above its neighbor’s lifeless landscape like a promise to be kept. As Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had suggested earlier that year, space was a setting for odysseys, for stories of return. The Apollo missions were as much about coming home to Earth as they were about going to the moon.
The moon was barren and alienating, a match in its inhumanity to the vast military-industrial complex that had provided the means to reach it. Earth, where a newly forming global village shared the experience, was beautiful and involving. The world from which we watched was dis- covered afresh, a pearl seen for what it was only when displayed on the black satin of space. And so the space program turned out to be about the place the astronauts weren’t; as Buzz Aldrin said to Neil Armstrong as they returned to the fold of a humanity that had talked of little else for a week, “we missed the whole thing.”
Thirty years on, it’s easy to see Apollo 11 just in terms of this Earthly impact, as one defining–if famously small–step on the road to globalization, the high point in an adventure now for the most part over. As Aldrin and Armstrong walked over dust that had sat unperturbed for billions of years, the budgets for spaceflight were already falling. The ’70s would bring only Skylab, the ’80s the shuttle, the ’90s Mir. Space has become a place for the routines of commerce, its depths accessible only to robots. The prospect of the International Space Station under construction may be a passing diversion to many; it thrills only a few. More or less the only shuttle astronauts that most people can name died on board Challenger.
But do not dismiss those little robots in the depths. There are ever more of them; they are ever more capable, and with their help scientists back on Earth are creating a new vision of what lies beyond. Apollo 8’s clear contrast–in a lifeless void, one living world–is starting to break down. Science is reaffirming a potential for life far from Earth, envisioning a biological universe of which Earth is an extension, not an exception. We are learning of far-off solar systems where life may exist while seeing new possibilities for its past presence closer to home. The search for life will be the dominant theme of the next 30 years of spaceflight, a grand attempt to mend the breach between the heavens and Earth. In the following pages, we look at how that attempt is shaping up.
Humans may not venture far from Earth again for a long time. But when they do, the thrill will not be that of leaving behind the single world where they belong. It will be the thrill of finding a bigger one.
