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Apollo 13 and touching the future
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
Thirty five years ago, on an April day, Apollo 13 ran into grave danger on its way to the moon. It did not land on the moon, could not, because it succumbed to engineering problems soon after lift-off. If you remember — and I do because as a schoolboy my interest in physics, in space science was greater than even I can now comprehend — it was an age of immense discovery. It was a time when men were going into space, to try exploring its deep darkness. The men of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 had gone to the moon, walked on its soil and felt light all the way. It was now the turn of Apollo 13 and its adventurous astronauts — James Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert — to be the third band of Americans, of the human race, to reach beyond the stars and step on lunar soil. In the event, Apollo 13 did not land on the moon. What began as a journey of great expectation turned out to be a mission geared to saving the lives of three men who needed to get back home to earth. No one knew if they would return, for the trajectory was one that would take them round the moon and set them on a route back to earth. But what if they could not go into a loop around the moon? What if they passed the moon by and simply disappeared into space?
It was a week of trepidation we all lived though. Our only contact with the world of science, with NASA, was the radio. Back where we lived, television was yet in the future. Maybe it was better that way. It is infinitely better to listen to things and have them enter the sensibilities than to watch things happen and lose the power of imagining the pains or delights, as the case may be, of a riveting story being told. In December 1968 (and this I have said earlier as well), when the astronauts of Apollo 8 rounded the moon and travelled to its dark side on Christmas Eve, we waited with bated breath around our radio sets, glued to the constant commentary on the Voice of America, praying that Frank Borman and his friends would reappear to tell us that they were alive and well. Long minutes went by, the world went silent, the winter winds howled outside our doors. And then there was a crackle, a faint voice slowly rising to clarity. It was Borman telling us everything was fine. He then read from the Bible, ‘In the beginning . . . and God saw that it was good.’ We whooped for joy. That year, Christmas was a carnival, even as the snow fell all night on our roofs, through the trees and all over the streets. We knew then that it was now possible for men to go to the moon and be back. The radio took us back to the days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to the moment in 1961 when he promised that America would land a man on the moon within the decade and have him come back to earth. Kennedy had been dead five years, but suddenly his words had acquired a new resonance. It was as if the whole of humanity had come together. And indeed it had. As the Apollo 8 astronauts looked out at an earthrise from their orbits around the moon, they saw how awesome the beauty of our planet was. We shared their enthusiasm, and wondered why such terrible things like Vietnam and Biafra had to happen on such a gleaming, glittering jewel in the sky.
But on that evening, through the snowfall, a pale moon rose from behind the mountains. We strained our eyes to spot any sign of Apollo 8 there. Of course we could not see all that with the unaided eye. But it felt good to know that creatures of our kind, three of them, were there somewhere. When nearly two years later Apollo 13 ran into trouble, however, we knew what dangers could beat our resolve to master our destiny. Here were three men, helpless in their loneliness, and few among us had any idea of how to save them. When they did come back to earth, it was because of the ingenuity of the people at NASA, because of the prayers of the millions on earth. But prayers sometimes can be laid waste. In 1967, three astronauts were burnt to cinders as they tested a spacecraft on the ground. Everyone knew they were burning up inside, but no one knew what to do about saving them. It happened so fast and so terribly that the world was left bereft of words to express its feelings. It was much the same way when men and women died later on their way out of earth or on the journey back to it. Deep sadness has been etched into our souls. We have all felt the fire lapping up our sensibilities every time we have heard of an individual dying in space or because of it. The death of Yuri Gagarin left us stunned for weeks. The delay in the launch of space missions tested the limits of our patience.
And yet we have loved going to space, to the moon. The idea that men will one day travel to another solar system, to another galaxy, is hugely exciting. There are billions of galaxies out there; the universe is forever expanding outward. When we know this, we know too how far we have come in the exercise of our intelligence. Back in 1969, when President Nixon welcomed back to earth the first men on the moon, we understood the enormity of what had been achieved. In the 1970s, an unmanned Voyager spacecraft left earth on a journey that would take it into the very recesses of the universe, a journey that would take a very long stretch of time. It is yet out there, going forth in search of possible intelligent life in a world we have not yet heard of. And it bears a message from President Jimmy Carter, a simple message informing a distant civilization that we on earth come to them in peace. Could anything be nobler than that?
In the night, as the skies lose themselves in the mists of darkness, it is the courage of people like Christa McAuliffe you remember. She was a teacher. And she turned into memory when the Challenger spacecraft she was in exploded in space on a January day. In her final days alive, she told people she touched the future, for she was a teacher.
Christa McAuliffe and all those others touched our lives. Because they did, we think we are in touch with the future, out there.
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