In this time of Christmas
We celebrate the Eighth Day of Man...
Apollo's missions move, and Christus seek,
And wonder as we look among the stars
Did he know these?
—Ray Bradbury, from the cantata Christus Apollo
THE last of the moon men are back; the gantries are idle now, stark and skeletal against the Florida sky. On the moon there are flags from the earth, and on earth there are pieces of the moon. The Apollos have passed from the evening news into an assured place in history. They have opened a chestful of scientific riches that researchers will need years to assay fully. They have not solved the problems of the earth, nor were they meant to. But, as Bradbury suggests, they may have provoked man into asking anew some of the old questions about the heavens—and himself.
The missions were man's first raw personal confrontation with the universe beyond this planet, and because of that they were awesome. The awe wore off as the television cameras covered each methodical moment of successive flights, but the best of the images grew into a frieze of transcendence, chiseled on the edges of the mind like Wordsworth's intimations of immortality: the readings from Genesis as Apollo 8 spun toward its rendezvous with the dark side of the moon; the "giant leap for mankind" as Neil Armstrong set his booted foot into the moon dust; the vision of the earth from space, a milky sapphire hanging alone and fragile in the blackness; and then Apollo 17 —a pillar of fire cutting up into the night, spreading a carpet of orange clouds and the sound of thunder behind.
That last image may have been as much theatrical effect as spiritual experience; as the first nighttime launching, Apollo 17 was a triumph of spectacle. It was also the last manifestation of a wonder of the world, and to see it depart was like taking the last voyage on the Queen Mary or hearing the farewell concert of Toscanini.
Is there more? Is there some stirring of human imagination that goes beyond the gee-whiz of the spectator or the sentiment of the nostalgia buff? One need go no farther than the astronauts themselves for the answer. "I am not the same man," Rusty Schweickart says. "None of us are." The Apollo veterans have become poets, seers, preachers, all of them evangelists for the privileged vision from space that Edgar Mitchell calls "instant global consciousness." It is no coincidence that the ecologists' concept of Spaceship Earth has become a commonplace in the years of Apollo.
Philosopher William Irwin Thompson, who perceives a growing sense of myth and mysticism in today's technological society (TIME, Aug. 21), mused over the astronauts' "conversions" as he watched the ascent of Apollo 17. In space, Thompson says, the astronauts felt "their consciousness being transformed to behold God making all things new. Perhaps this transformation of consciousness is the strongest argument in favor of manned space flight. Had we merely sent out efficient instruments of measurement...the machines would literally encircle man. Now that we have sent out man, we have affirmed that technology is still only part of the culture-America has taken one giant step toward humanizing its technology."