LORI WALSH, HOST:
It’s not just the journey that captures human imagination. It’s the view, from the moon, of a blue and green planet.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC
You’re listening to SDPB’s In the Moment. I’m Lori Walsh. For the first time in more than 50 years, America is going back to the moon. As soon as Wednesday, four astronauts could launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as part of the Artemis II mission.
Patrick Hicks is the author of “In the Shadow of Dora.” The book explores the intersection of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program and America’s Apollo programs. He has a lifelong fascination with space and space travel. I talked with him about what’s at stake for NASA’s latest moonshot.
LORI WALSH
We are going back to the moon.
PATRICK HICKS:
We are, For the first time since 1972.
WALSH:
At least we’re planning a trip to the moon.
HICKS:
Yes. The launch window is almost open.
WALSH:
Tell me about Artemis II. Because there’s been, to be fair, a lot of news going on. You might have missed this one.
HICKS:
Yes.
WALSH:
Tell me about Artemis II. What’s the mission?
HICKS
The mission of Artemis II is, it sounds simple, but there’s, like, 500 mission parameters that have to line up properly before they can even light the fuse and send this thing off into the stratosphere. It sounds pretty simple, but it’s very, very complicated. They’re going to make sure that all of the systems are compatible.
They’re going to do an orbit around the Earth, checking everything from the electrics to the plumbing to the toilet. And then they’re going to the moon. And this is the first time we’ve done this since 1972. They’re not going to go into lunar orbit. They’re going to slingshot around the moon and come back on a free return.
WALSH:
So they don’t land.
HICKS:
Nope.
WALSH:
There’s no moonwalk.
HICKS:
Nope.
WALSH:
But they’re going to see parts of the moon that no one has seen before?
HICKS:
Correct. Yeah. They’re going to be, looking at the dark side of the moon. And there’s just a handful of people that have done that. And, the crew of Artemis two are going …
WALSH:
Are we going to cue Pink Floyd there?
HICKS:
Yeah, exactly. You can cue that in.
SOUNDBITE OF PINK FLOYD’S BRAIN DAMAGE
HICKS
And, the crew of Artemus II is going to be, at one point in time, the furthest away humans have ever been from planet Earth. The mission reminds me an awful lot of Apollo 8, as Apollo 8 had the same idea. This was in 1968. And those three astronauts, they did go into lunar orbit, and they were the first human beings to leave the Earth’s gravity at all.
And to everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t necessarily the photos of the moon that captivated Apollo 8. It was them taking a photo of Earthrise, which has since become very famous, which is funny. We went to the moon in order to find out more about ourselves. And there’s something really beautiful about planet Earth from that distance.
And I don’t know how much fanfare there’s going to be with Artemis II taking off. Certainly it’s going to make headlines. It’s a 10-day mission. And I think somewhere around day seven, they’re going to be sending back photos of us. And I think it’s going to captivate the world the same way it did in 1968.
SOUNDBITE OF APOLLO 8 CHRISTMAS EVE TRANSMISSION FROM SPACE
WALSH:
All right. This is an American space mission, but with a Canadian.
HICKS:
Yes. We’ve got a Canadian. So the crew is Reid Wiseman. He’s the commander. He’s American, Victor Glover (pilot), also American, Christina Koch (mission specialist), American, and Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist), who’s Canadian. And he has never actually gone into space. So, I can only imagine how exciting that must be for him.
WALSH:
Tell me a little bit about some of the reasons this scientific mission captivates people. And then we’ll talk about the broader idea of humans going to the moon and what that means for us — if anything anymore. What’s some of the significance of the technology of the mission itself?
HICKS:
The technology — no surprise here — technology has changed quite a bit in the last 50 years. And, of course, it’s a completely new system not just the Orion capsule that the astronauts will be in, but the Space Launch System, the SLS, that’s going to take them into orbit is brand new.
Artemis I was the first time it was ever used, and it’s the largest rocket human hands have built. It’s a beast.
SOUNDBITE OF ARTEMIS I LAUNCH
HICKS:
For all these technical reasons, it’s exciting to see us returning to the moon. But the long term idea is that Artemis III is going to be in low Earth orbit, checking everything out. And Artemis IV in 2028 is when we’re going to land astronauts on the moon. And the plan is to land them in the south pole of the moon.
It’s a place we’ve never visited. And the reason for that is there’s water there, and water, aside from being necessary for human life, you can break out water to hydrogen and oxygen so you can have breathable air, but hydrogen is also a fuel. So, the idea is that, maybe the moon can become a launchpad for Mars at some point.
WALSH:
Okay, so what’s the life of an astronaut like in that 10 days?
HICKS:
And since we’re talking about the toilet, I might as well mention …
WALSH:
We have to, right?
HICKS:
Yeah. Everyone wants to know how this happens. Jim Lovell with Apollo 8 said, Well, it’s really complicated, you roll down the window and, you know, stop at the gas station. But, there’s a toilet. There hasn’t been a toilet on any of the previous flights because they’re, they’re all men.
But we’ve got a woman now, so they have an element of privacy. Boy, I’ve seen photos of this toilet, and it makes the toilets in airplanes look spacious. But, you do have an element of privacy, but there’s no water or anything like that, so you’re in, zero gravity. So everyone seems to be kind of fascinated with the basic bodily functions of what happens.
WALSH:
I want to go back. It’s not just because there’s a woman, right? Men don’t poop in space?
HICKS:
Well, in the past, they just used bags. So that’s what I’m getting at. So, you know, this is one reason that I think, you know, the 60s were different. I mean, we did have female astronauts, but they never went up. The Mercury 13, they trained alongside the Mercury seven. But that’s another story. We’ll have all of this sort of new technology that they’re going to be testing and, and, and whatnot.
WALSH:
All right. Is it safe? We certainly have a history of journeys not going the way we planned in American space exploration.
SOUNDBITE FROM MOVIE APOLLO 13
HICKS:
Well, whenever you are sitting on top of 5.5 million pounds of thrust, it’s a very large explosion. In fact, the rocket is two miles away from a human life. And they’ve calculated that because that’s how big the fireball would be if it blew up on the launch pad. So there’s always danger, with Apollo and also with the Artemis program.
They’ve got, sort of a mini rocket on top of the capsule so that the astronauts can hit a button and the top part will fly away from the rocket, and they’ll be launched up into the sky and and come down in parachutes. But it’s not without risk.
WALSH:
And the expense.
HICKS:
Yeah.
WALSH:
So American taxpayers are footing the bill, and it’s worth it because?
HICKS:
Yeah. And I appreciate this. This is one reason that Apollo stopped at Apollo 17 because the public just kind of lost interest. You know, we landed on the moon with Apollo 11, why are we still doing this? But, every one of your listeners has a device that very close to them that is a direct result of the communication systems that came out of Apollo, and the technological advances that happened because Apollo were enormous, and they’re still influencing us today — from not very exciting things like Velcro and Teflon, those are from Apollo — all the way to how we communicate and the telecommunication systems that make our phones possible and allows you to watch YouTube while you’re on the subway.
WALSH:
Will America be captivated by this?
HICKS:
I hope so because it’s an incredible story. I’m reminded there are so many parallels between Artemis II and Apollo 8. I don’t think the public was very interested in Apollo 8 taking off.
WALSH:
Who was on Apollo 8?
HICKS:
Well, Lovell, Borman and Anders.
WALSH:
And they were the first?
HICKS:
They were the first men to leave Earth orbit and to go into lunar orbit.
WALSH:
Okay. People were not people captivated by that?
HICKS:
I don’t think people initially were very captivated. But 1968, I mean, we opened up talking about how there’s so much news going on today. 1968 was a pretty brutal year for America. We had the Democratic convention in Chicago.
SOUNDBITE FROM 1968 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
HICKS:
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. RFK was assassinated. I mean the My Lai Massacre happened in 1968. So when Apollo eight returned, Jim Lovell actually got a telegram from some woman. I don’t know her name, and it simply said, Thank you for saving 1968. And I think looking up at the moon, as this will be the first time in my life I will be able to do this, I will look up at the moon and think, people are orbiting the moon.
How can that not be fascinating and offer us a little bit of pause to think about, you know, not all is lost. We can still do amazing things when we do them together.
WALSH:
What does this mean for the future of space exploration, especially in areas of space tourism or as you mentioned, fuel extraction or traveling further on to Mars? What are we hoping 50 years from now?
HICKS:
That’s a great question. I know that in the 1970s, everyone was very hopeful that we’d be on Mars by the 1990s, which seems quaint nowadays. People talk about going to Mars. It’s going to be an incredible endeavor because you’re looking at like 14 months round trip. We don’t have the technology yet to sustain people in general, but just getting to the moon, we’ve done it several times as a nation.
You know, you’re sitting on top of this rocket, which has 5.5 million pounds of thrust. As soon as the engines are lit, it takes only eight minutes to go from zero to 17,500 miles an hour. Eight minutes. I mean, that takes me longer to make a sandwich.
And they’re going to be in Earth orbit, and then when they’re orbiting the Earth, they’ll get a go for what’s called TLI, which is trans lunar injection. And that’s essentially the push of a button. And they are off to the moon. And the mathematical complexity of that blows my mind, because they have to aim where the moon is going to be in three days, and if they are off by even a percentage point, one of two things is going to happen.
They’re going to plow into the moon, or they’re going to skip off the surface of the moon. And I don’t know if they can reverse gears and come back. I don’t know if they’ve got the fuel to do that. They were relying on entering the backside of the moon perfectly and then having a free return. Which means they don’t need as much fuel.
WALSH:
And same with the heat shields, which they had problems with before, yes? Changing the angle of it, that’s all math.
HICKS:
Yeah. It is. One of the Apollo astronauts, Michael Collins, I think it was. He was in the crew of Apollo 11. He said that, reentering the Earth, he said if you took a piece of paper and you bent it a little bit, we have to hit that perfectly. And we have, that angle has to be established well before we get to the Earth.
So math is incredible.
SOUNDBITE FROM THE MOVIE HIDDEN FIGURES
WALSH:
Math, science, physics, everything right? You’re an English professor. You’re a writer, you’re a poet. You’re a novelist. what’s the role for the humanities here? And a trip to the moon?
HICKS
You know, I understand why they don’t give seats up for people like me. I wish they would. I would go, you know. Most of the people involved to become astronauts, they’re fighter jocks, you know, fighter jet jocks and, they’re very, very cool. You know, they talk about the “Right Stuff.” You know, they’re not known for being expressive people.
And I get that, you know, that’s one reason they got to where they were. But, to explain what it was like to be around the moon or to stand on the moon, I mean, I feel badly for Neil Armstrong. Before he passed away, he got that question all the time. And the dude was an incredible fighter pilot and test pilot and astrophysicist.
But he was not built to wax poetically about standing on the surface of the moon. For my money, the best astronaut that has explained from a humanities perspective what it might be like to be up in space is Michael Collins. He wrote a truly incredible book called Carrying the Fire about his experiences on Gemeni and also about, being on Apollo 11.
He’s a he’s an extraordinary writer.
WALSH
Look up.
HICKS:
Yes.
WALSH:
Look up and know that this is happening for the first time in more than 50 years.
HICKS:
Yeah, more than 50 years. I mean, I, I was two years old when Apollo 17 happened. Obviously, I have no memory of that. So for my whole life, I’ve. I’ve been captivated by Apollo, but I’ve never experienced the awe I think I’ll experience looking up at the moon and thinking, wow … People are looking back at us.
It will be extraordinary.