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Not all of the religious overtones of the Apollos are full of awe and new found humility. "Space travel says you can live forever," exulted Ray Bradbury after the moon landing of 1969. "Now we are able to transport our seed to other worlds. We can be sure that this miraculous gift of life goes on forever." Nor is that a blasphemous hope, Bradbury insisted: "We are the material of the universe coming alive. We are God re-creating himself." William Thompson had similar thoughts at the liftoff of Apollo 17. "You threw away anxiety," he wrote later, "and leapt up with the sheer joy of knowing that men were turning the tables on the heavens and riding that comet out of the earth...One could write on the rocket as the anonymous stonemasons did on medieval cathedrals: Adam made me."
In President Nixon's message marking the completion of the Apollo 1 7 mission last week, those proud visions seemed to be recast as a kind of Manifest Destiny for the space age. Asked Nixon: "Can we look at the record of 24 men sent to circle the moon or to stand on it, and 24 men returned to earth alive and well, and not see God's hand in it?" (Did the President forget the three astronauts who died on an Apollo launching pad or the four Russians killed in their space program?) The fault in such a pronouncement lies in its assumption that the conquest of space is such an unalloyed good that God would deign to grant it some special protection. If motives were taken into account — especially the bald chauvinism that motivated so many who voted for Apollo appropriations — divine wrath rather than benevolence might have attended the project.
"Let us recognize," Novelist Norman Mailer told an assemblage of scientists and fellow authors who were observing Apollo 17's blastoff, "that we are performing that one act that was considered most sacrilegious by the early Jehovah — we are trying to become Gods." Gods? Perhaps — if we see space as only one more territory to subdue, one more realm to compete for, one more vastness to pollute. But Mailer's accusation need not hold true if man stands on the threshold of the universe with the becoming humility of a stranger at an unfamiliar door. Such a stranger might appreciate the immense potential that the open universe spreads before him to learn and to grow, to expand his mind and spirit in profound new ways. That potential alone urges man to continue the search — not to wait, as some insist, until he can first set his own world completely in order. For just as the New World reshaped the old Europe, man's meeting with the universe may help to reshape and renew the tired Earth. ·Mayo Mohs