The Death of Exploration

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962
It’s been nearly 50 years since those words of poetry and exploration were spoken. Less than seven years after that speech, the US put Americans on the moon and returned on five subsequent missions. The Apollo program was soberly conducted, and risks were considered, but our race to the moon was not without danger. Astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in a capsule fire during ground testing. Another crew of three, the men of Apollo 13, only made it back to earth because they and their ground controllers were able to improvise repairs to their stricken craft. Yet, still our countrymen persevered, literally going where no man had gone before.
Apollo ended in the early 70s, and we pressed on with the Shuttle program. The Space Shuttle was sold to the American public, not with romantic visions of humans launching on expeditions into the unknown, but with the practicalities of a re-usable vehicle built to carry cargoes into low earth orbit. There were promises, though, that the Shuttle would be a stepping stone to far greater adventures. The Shuttle would establish a permanent manned presence away from the gravity of earth, from which ambitious manned expeditions into the unknown could originate more easily.
These promises faded gradually over the next thirty years. While the Shuttle did a few things for which a manned presence was probably essential, like repairing the Hubble Telescope, the human presence on most missions seemed to give an incremental advantage at best. Most importantly, mankind was venturing nowhere new, just trudging up an increasingly well-worn path to low earth orbit. The International Space Station came along, with increasing cooperation among nations and new longevity records for humans in earth orbit, but the science and exploration, the pushing out of the boundaries of human existence, lagged. After the moonshots, there were no more pushes into the unknown. NASA, born as an agency that figured out how to manage risks, now became an agency that avoided risk. After the Columbia tragedy especially, Space Shuttle missions seemed predominantly concerned with the safe return of the vessels to earth, with many days of two-week missions spent not in doing science but in ensuring no launch damage endangered re-entry.
But this “maturation” of manned space flight from explorers pushing into the unknown to a retrenchment to lower cost, lower return missions was not done in a vacuum. It was done in the context of America becoming a mature power, content to rely largely on past triumphs to keep its reputation and influence intact. Centuries ago, Imperial Rome reached a point of its greatest extent. It no longer sought to expand, but instead focused on maintaining a status quo, putting its legions on the defensive, over a long twilight. Similarly, the people of the United States have matured from restless pioneers following the sun west into new lands, bound together by a spirit of self-determination, to a people with little overarching national identity, seeking to maintain a share of an ever-dwindling pie. We conquered the western lands of our continent and when threatened by external forces, launched our armed forces across the globe. But then we retrenched, slowly losing our national identity.
Many would say we have enough problems here without worrying about manned space exploration – the energy challenge, international terrorism, and a mounting national debt, to name a few. But this misses the point. . It is tempting in a time of seemingly uncontrollable debt and uncertain national unity to paste a stamp of frivolity on space exploration. But this is wrong – this is acceptance that America has seen her best days already, that her best path is to hold onto what she has, to carefully husband her remaining coins, to wait to die. Our pioneering ancestors faced down problems that would make most modern day Americans quiver with fear, yet still they pressed on. They conquered a continent while Civil War raged. They came out of a Great Depression to defeat enemies on fronts covering the planet. They sent men to the moon while their countrymen chose self over service. Perhaps America’s time in the sun is fading – no great world power has remained at the forefront of world influence indefinitely. Then again, perhaps there is still opportunity to rekindle this national spirit that tamed many past challenges. There is no challenge which fits into this mold than that of manned exploration of space. There is still time for us to chart a course into the unknown, to once again push out the boundaries of American civilization. But we must act

Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington, a photojournalist and co-creator of the Afghan War documentary Restrepo, was killed on April 20th in Misrata, Libya while covering the Libyan civil war. He was doing what he did extraordinarily well, telling of the horrors of war in pictures.

I happened on an interview he did on NPR last June, talking about Restrepo. Restrepo, if you haven't seen it, focuses on the 15 month deployment of a company of airborne troopers into the Korengal Valley, a six mile tangle of villages and wilds which has remained a Taliban stronghold throughout the Afghan War. I was immediately drawn in by his humanity. He was on the show to shill his film, but he was not talking about it so much as he was showering respect on the extraordinary soldiers he had met and lived with in the Korengal. What got me, and convinced me of his dedication to telling about the soldiers he now counted as friends, was his breaking down in telling the story of soldiers finding out that one of their most respected comrades had been killed. There was no way to fake the emotion he conveyed in talking about that death.

Restrepo blew me away. Tim Hetherington and his partner in making the documentary, Sebastian Junger, did an amazing job of not inserting themselves, their thoughts, or anything about them into the film. The film was about the soldiers of Battle Company and their experiences in the Korengal, where they came in contact with the enemy nearly every day, and often two or three times in the same day. Tim and Sebastian silently captured all the horror, fear, focused moments of life and death, boredom, humor, and agitation of a small unit in combat. Every American, regardless of position on this or any war, should see it, to witness what young men are doing half a world away in our name.

Restrepo was just one shining light in a body of work that chronicled death and struggle in many dark places. Tim spent years covering African Wars, even earning himself a death "sentence" from Liberian dictator Charles Taylor after he traveled with and filmed rebels fighting against Taylor's brutal government.

It is in fashion for those on the right to attack the "mainstream media", to dismiss them as leftist dilettantes who write or broadcast about that which they do not understand, all in the name of a socialist agenda. Tim Hetherington gave the lie to this stereotype. He was a real guy, telling stories in pictures and words about real people struggling and dying in horrific circumstances, and always staying in the background, doing nothing for self-aggrandizement. The world is a little bit sadder, and some of its darkest places will not have light shown upon them, because of Tim's passing.