Most idealistic American kids watching the Apollo missions on TV back in the 1960s were quite content to believe that they were witnessing the opening of a grand new age of peaceful scientific exploration. Soon we’d be living on the moon, then going to Mars and beyond. After all, hadn’t we just gone from sending men up in dinky capsules for 15-minute suborbital joyrides to landing on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility in less than a decade?
Of course, that’s not how things worked out. After the triumph of Apollo 11, three Apollo missions were canceled, and NASA’s budget continued to fall. President John F. Kennedy’s goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” had been achieved. The point had been proven, and there were other things, such as the Vietnam War, that needed the money.
BOOK REVIEW — “Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo,” by Teasel Muir-Harmony (Basic Books, 384 pages).
But as Smithsonian Apollo historian Teasel Muir-Harmony explains in her new book, “Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo,” science and exploration were never the point of NASA’s manned space program. “It was not science, the innate human thirst for exploration, or economic incentive that drove the human spaceflight program; instead, it was politics, or more precisely, the particular geopolitical moment, where global superpowers competed for global leadership through demonstrations of technological superiority,” she writes.
It started with Sputnik in Oct. 1957. The beeping basketball orbiting over the United States every hour and a half may have alarmed political leaders and the public, but most scientists were nonplussed. Both the U.S. and the USSR had already publicly announced their plans to launch an Earth satellite as part of the then-ongoing International Geophysical Year program, and the fact that the Soviet Union had managed to do it first made no difference to science.
Yet even if both sides publicly hailed it as a scientific breakthrough, the most profound repercussions were political and military. Sputnik 1, and the much heavier Sputnik 2 craft that followed it a month later, were clear demonstrations of Soviet technological strength — especially in the existentially vital area of missile technology. America was behind, its assumed global dominance had been challenged in the eyes of the world, and something had to be done. The perception that Soviets were stronger and more advanced than Americans had to be countered somehow.
Not everyone agreed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for one, wasn’t panicking, and his successor, Kennedy, had other priorities. “At the end of 1960, neither the outgoing president nor the one assuming the post saw human spaceflight as a national priority,” notes Muir-Harmony.
When Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space on April 12, 1961 — just before the new U.S. administration launched the Bay of Pigs fiasco — Kennedy began to change his mind about the importance of space, imploring his advisers to find something “which promises dramatic results in which we could win.”
It started with Sputnik in Oct. 1957. The beeping basketball orbiting over the U.S. every hour and a half may have alarmed political leaders and the public, but most scientists were nonplussed.
Space had clearly become a crucial new arena for superpower competition. “It was the one-two punch of Gagarin’s flight boosting Soviet prestige followed in quick succession by the loss of U.S. prestige because of the Bay of Pigs invasion that laid the groundwork for Project Apollo,” says Muir-Harmony.
She points out that although Kennedy’s subsequent address to Congress is most famous for setting the goal of the moon landing, such an interpretation overlooks the full context of that goal and the president’s motivations for setting it forth. The May 25, 1961 speech, she writes, was considered an unofficial “second State of the Union,” laying out “urgent national needs,” mostly focusing on America reaffirming its international standing as the “leader in freedom’s cause.” Putting an American on the moon offered a clear objective that was peaceful in essence yet clearly demonstrated U.S. strength. “The president recognized that lunar exploration had the potential to restore America’s geopolitical standing,” she observes.
Muir-Harmony’s book traces just how the U.S. set out to do that, using the achievements of the space program as the basis of an ambitious campaign to promote American values and virtues around the world through the “soft power” of cultural and political persuasion. For the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), a State Department body formed under Eisenhower to counter Soviet propaganda through its own brand of propaganda and psychological warfare, space spectaculars served as a new form of diplomacy.
Overwhelming international enthusiasm for John Glenn’s orbital Friendship 7 mission in February 1962 gave the USIA its first chance at “space diplomacy.” The agency sent Glenn’s Mercury capsule on an international tour of more than 20 cities as the center of a carefully crafted exhibit tailored to each nation’s culture. Alluding to the three Earth orbits the capsule had flown with Glenn at the controls, Friendship 7’s tour was dubbed the “Fourth Orbit,” and proved a smashing success, with millions of people waiting in long lines for hours to see and touch the craft.
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Muir-Harmony shows how the USIA carefully honed and evolved its strategies with subsequent NASA successes, such as the Gemini flights and especially the landmark mission of Apollo 8 in December 1968, which for both the U.S. and the world provided a hopeful and inspiring coda to a year wracked by war, assassinations, and political upheavals.
All the experience went into the meticulous planning for managing the reception of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing. NASA and the State Department wanted to ensure that the mission wouldn’t be represented parochially as another demonstration of American supremacy but as an achievement truly to be shared “for all mankind,” as the plaque mounted on the lunar lander declared. “When public opinion polls and feedback from foreign posts revealed that international audiences did not respond well to the heralding of American greatness and technological strength,” she writes, “this message was dampened and subsequently replaced with one emphasizing global unity and international participation.”
While Kennedy never lived to see his goal ultimately achieved, his successors didn’t hesitate to reap the political capital of the space program. For Lyndon B. Johnson, Muir-Harmony writes, “space became an even more multifaceted political instrument,” providing a model for his liberal social programs. If we could send a man to the moon, he claimed, we should be able to feed the poor and care for our citizens.
For Richard M. Nixon, Apollo was a perfectly timed, conveniently exploitable opportunity. “Although it had been proposed by one of his fiercest rivals — John F. Kennedy — Nixon shrewdly co-opted Project Apollo in support of his foreign relations agenda,” Muir-Harmony writes. Nixon timed his first international trip as president to follow immediately after a European tour by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, soaking up the residual good will, and set off on another important trip to Asia and Europe right after welcoming home the Apollo 11 astronauts in late summer 1969. As if to drive home the message that Nixon was touring the world as the president of the nation that had just achieved the first human moon landing, the trip was dubbed “Operation Moonglow.”
NASA and the State Department wanted to ensure that the mission wouldn’t be represented parochially as another demonstration of American supremacy but as an achievement truly to be shared “for all mankind.”
As the most visible part of the U.S. space program, the astronauts were indispensable to media efforts, something that NASA and the USIA realized from the beginning. Some of the astronauts chafed at their public relations duties, but others, such as Glenn, Frank Borman, and Neil Armstrong, turned out to excel as public figures and diplomatic envoys, and some went on to later careers as senators or ambassadors. A certain degree of charisma, political savvy, and articulate stage presence may even have boosted some astronauts’ professional status while they were with NASA. Muir-Harmony observes that according to Armstrong’s biographer James Hansen, Armstrong’s performance on a 1966 tour of South America “may have been influential in 1969 when Armstrong was selected to be the first man on the moon.”
Muir-Harmony’s book is not the first work to focus on the political dimensions of Apollo; Walter A. McDougall’s 1985 “…The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age” is generally considered the most comprehensive treatment, although much further work using new sources has appeared since then. “Operation Moonglow ” is a significant addition to that literature, not just from the perspective of space history but also as a detailed examination of the carefully crafted use of soft power — or, as some might prefer to call it, propaganda — in the service of effective diplomacy and international relations. Muir-Harmony, the curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, draws on State Department, NASA, and USIA archives along with personal interviews with Apollo astronauts to portray how their courageous exploits in space were spun into political bounty on Earth.
“Operation Moonglow” ends after Apollo 11 in 1969, but the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft was in 1975 with the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz project, perhaps the most blatantly politically-motivated mission of all as an elaborate exercise in geopolitical detente. Yet it also served as a legitimate test of orbital rendezvous and rescue techniques and laid the foundations for the U.S.-Russian cooperation in space that would come much later. Now, Apollo’s achievements are paving the way for a return to the moon. Perhaps Apollo was born out of politics, but it’s continuing to pay political, scientific, and even cultural dividends well into the 21st century. Sometimes, it seems, even propaganda can be a positive thing.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
