Understanding Moonshots

THE BIGGEST meaning-of-the-moonshot mistake running is to identify it with a new bold-face heading in "history," and sigh. Why, this is just exactly like Columbus traveling to new unexplored continents for the first time, editorialized the New York Times, a source of information we've come to know in the past year to be consistently misleading in the most subtle of ways. And shortly after they splashed down, the astronauts were given a big cake in the shape of a history book.

"History" is something we're supposed to all want to make. History is experience remembered by those people who are most detached from the actual event itself and who can in no way really experience it. So when we are told to identify the moonshot with its place in history, we have to keep ourselves as far away from experiencing the event as possible so that we can really get the feeling that it's "history" which is happening.

The true meaning of the moonshot lies in the moment. A given moment is all one can be entirely aware of, can fully experience. During the actual shot, the what would happen was still essentially unknown, a true probe in the imagination; the space capsule could have yoyoed the moon and whipped off towards the sun on a screaming tangent. But more importantly, only we, observing the space shot at the moment it happened, can fully understand the extent of human knowledge, mythology, and curiosity at the time of the experience.

And our minds, as we watched the live TV shots from space are much more like the minds of the astronauts themselves than will be the minds of any future historians. And we will know what it is to have tried to build a philosophy limited to the single chunk of the planet, and then to be liberated, able to imagine realistically that an alternative to our daily living experience was to be completely removed from this world.

Now we know that we could conceivably be standing quietly on the moon staring at the earth or even staring the other way. "History" is intriguing to paw through because of the illusion it creates about cause and effect; it tells us that one event led to this second event which finally determined that memorable catastrophe over there. But the philosophical meaning of an experience can't be comprehended by dropping it into a historical chain. We must understand it as part of the flow, a drop in the flood of every sensation surrounding us.

AND WE FIND the necessary basis for our analysis of the meaning of an experience in a given moment is a belief in the idea that some sort of change or progress is being made. If we were to take a given moment (say, now), looked around us, and tried to justify what we saw as a finished product, we would lose ourselves in hopeless despair. We now justify what we are doing as being part of a process--since we can't justify what we are doing, we justify how we are doing it. This process has to have a direction if we are to proceed.

What the Christmas moonshot tells us is that we are pressing forward into space. Like the invention of electricity and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the moonshot is one of those dramatic events that reminds us that the conditions of our lives are always changing. Our civilizations, like a rain-muddied road under the feet of a retreating Union army, is having its very nature reshaped.

And where the moonshot affirms the continuation of the kind of change that one imagines might have stopped when all the world had become as crowded as New York City, it also promises to give us some more philosophical material to work with. Or at least some more causes for our effects. Imagine what it would do to our thinking if we could find out what the ends of the universe might be. It's for sure that once we get our astronomers and their telescopes up there free of our obscuring atmosphere they will, right away, start telling us all kinds of unimagined new things about what it is we and our planet are doing here.

ONE of the things space people are asked to explain is how we can let ourselves pay billions of dollars to keep a couple of individuals up for a few hours when that money could be putting food in the mouths now of now starving people all over the world and even here in the U.S.A.

Again people who ask this fail to see the oneness of man's condition. Space spending is related to spending on social programs only to the extent that it is related to all spending, all efforts of man's production and economy.

First of all, it is clear that legislators are not holding back money from poverty programs (on a conscious level) so they can get us first to the moon. Taking our national government's spending as a whole, what is wrong with it is that we're putting much too much into the military and not enough into equalizing opportunity in our society.

Congress won't spend more on poverty for two reasons: 1) too many of them have a conservative's paranoia about the dole; and 2) there isn't enough money left over in the budget as a whole as it is worked out now.

The budget as a whole is in bad shape because we're spending $86 billion on our own military, and a lot of our foreign aid money on war toys for tin horn dictators. Not because we're spending what we do in space.

However, we all know (if we believe Galbraith economics) that the national government must maintain a large base of industrial spending in areas that don't compete with the regular supply-and-demand of the consumer so that a small margin of this government spending when increased or cut will be able to maintain the market demand of a fluctuating capitalistic economy like ours.

Right now the government keeps its influence over the economy by chucking $86 billion into missiles and tanks. It can't put this money into poverty programs because billions of dollars just handed over to the poor would ruin our whole competitive ethic (this is what everyone in Congress thinks anyway; and of course, it isn't true. But unfortunately they decide).

What we should do is cut our military spending down to, say, 10 billion dollars (because it's dangerous having all those guns around; it makes people want to shoot them). Then jack up government spending to as high a level as our economy requires by sending more and more of us out amongst the stars.

But until the existentialists take over from the colonels, it's dangerous to eclipse the space program because then we'd become even more dependent on military spending.

It's important to realize that everything is related when it comes to parcelling out the government's money. All is one. You can't just kick the government's in the space program and expect to see money come pouring out over in the poverty place.

And you never know what messing around in space might do for us. Maybe we'll discover a super new source of easy energy that will fix it all up just fine.