http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j20.shtml
Now here is a really really good read and good information about the
space program and capitalism etc.... good read!
Forty years since the first Moon landing
20 July 2009
Forty years ago today, on July 20, 1969, two American astronauts, Neil
Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, became the first human beings to land
on the Moon. This historic scientific and technological feat is all the
more remarkable because the period of manned exploration of Earth's
satellite inaugurated by Apollo 11 ended little more than three years
later. All six Moon missions were completed during the first term of a
single US president, Richard M. Nixon.
When Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt returned to Earth
in Apollo 17 on December 19, 1972, Nixon was in the White House, Leonid
Brezhnev ruled in the Kremlin and Mao Tse-tung in China. The US military
had just begun Operation Linebacker II, the so-called Christmas bombing
of Hanoi and Haiphong, to pressure the North Vietnamese delegation at
the Paris Peace Talks.
Forty years on, the Moon landing remains an unparalleled feat of
engineering, organization and daring, using technology that was
rudimentary by the standards of the 21st century. Closer to World War II
than to our own day, the mid-1960s saw such innovations as the
eight-track tape, the first primitive laser and the automobile airbag.
The microchip was still in development. The complex calculations
required for travel from the Earth to the Moon and back were performed
by gargantuan computers built with vacuum tubes and transistors and
using punch cards and paper tape.
The successful eight-year effort to put a man on the Moon was the
product of specific social and political circumstances that made
possible a massive mobilization of resources. When President John F.
Kennedy declared the goal of placing a man on the Moon within a decade,
American imperialism was at the height of its Cold War struggle against
the Soviet Union, and was trailing in space, following the Soviet
success in launching Sputnik and putting the first man in space,
cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.
Sputnik gave the initial impetus to what became known as the "space
race," but the vast resources of American capitalism, by far the world's
greatest economic power, made possible the ultimate success of the
Apollo program. At its height, the program enlisted the technical and
manufacturing prowess of 90,000 scientists and engineers and 420,000
workers altogether, and accounted for more than half of all research and
development spending in the United States.
While Kennedy had given the initial green light, his motivation was
primarily political---to dispel the worldwide prestige gained by the
USSR. "I am not that interested in space," he told James E. Webb, NASA's
administrator in late 1962. "I think it's good. I think we ought to know
about it. But we're talking about fantastic expenditures."
By the mid-1960s, NASA budgets began to come under pressure as a result
of increased spending on the Vietnam War. By the time of the Moon
landing, the NASA and its contractor workforce was being systematically
cut back, the planning horizon was narrowed, and the space program was
casting about for a new mission---a condition that continues to this day.
The 40-month period of the manned Moon landings, July 1969-December
1972, represents in many ways the critical turning point in the
post-World War II history of American and world capitalism. War spending
and a wages offensive by the American labor movement had produced
increasing strains on the financial position of American capitalism,
reflected in mounting balance of payments deficits.
On August 15, 1971, President Nixon went on national television to
announce a radical shift in US economic policies, ending the
international currency system established in 1944 at the Bretton Woods
conference, which was anchored by the dollar's convertibility into gold
at $35 to the ounce. He also announced a 90-day wage freeze and a 10
percent tariff surcharge on imports.
These decisions had profound historical significance. American
capitalism was no longer capable of playing the role of stabilizer of
the world financial system. Faced with resurgent capitalist competitors
in Europe and Asia, and a powerful labor movement at home, the US ruling
class found it necessary to embark on a drastic change of course in both
international and domestic policy.
The 1970s were characterized by sharp recessions and a series of probing
attacks against the labor movement, most notably the 111-day walkout by
US coal miners in which the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter
sought unsuccessfully to use the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike.
By 1980, with interest rates in double-digits, the US ruling elite
brought to power the Reagan administration, and embarked on a campaign
of open unionbusting and deindustrialization which provoked a decade of
bitter strike struggles, all of them isolated and defeated through the
collaboration of the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy.
The result of these defeats was a colossal decline in the standard of
living of the American working class. It is no accident that the same
year, 1972, that marked the end of manned Moon missions also marked the
apogee for working class living standards in the United States. American
capitalism had entered a period of irreversible historical decline, a
process that has found expression in every sphere of social and cultural
life.
In its foreign policy, this decline sparked a series of aggressive
military adventures. After a period of retrenchment after the defeat in
Vietnam, American imperialism began a military buildup directed against
both the USSR and the nationalist regimes in the "Third World" which
sought to balance between the United States and the Soviet bloc.
The space program was completely subordinated to this drive for military
supremacy. Exploration beyond Earth's orbit was relegated to machines
only, and the manned program were devoted to the space shuttle,
conceived of particularly by the Reagan administration as an adjunct to
its "Star Wars" plans for placing offensive and defensive weapons
systems in space.
The space shuttle was given a nominal "civilian" mission---laying the
foundations for a permanent space station---but its real purpose was to
provide the Pentagon greater capabilities for launching spy satellites
and, if they could be successfully developed, actual space weapons. The
technological failure of "Star Wars," however, left the space program
with no real purpose, and NASA budgets stagnated.
The loss of Challenger in 1987 and Columbia in 2003 underscored both the
inherent limitations in the space shuttle program, and the impact of the
deteriorating economic position of American capitalism. Just enough
resources were provided to NASA to keep the program running, but not
enough to forestall the next catastrophe. Finally, after Columbia, NASA
has been compelled to announce the phase-out of the shuttle program and
a turn back to Apollo-style rocket boosters, which will not be ready for
use until at least 2015.
Moreover, the space station, only just now nearly complete after the
expenditure of $100 billion over two decades, will be allowed to die for
lack of funding. NASA space station program manager Michael T.
Suffredini told the /Washington Post/ last week, "In the first quarter
of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft."
The dead end of the US space program did not arise because of failures
by the scientists and engineers who joined it out of a genuine desire to
make a contribution to mankind's emergence from a planet-bound to an
interplanetary existence. NASA continues to achieve technical and
scientific advances with a series of brilliant efforts to explore the
solar system through robot spacecraft---in the past year alone, a flyby
of Mercury, the Phoenix mission to Mars, the continued success of the
two Mars rovers landed five years ago, the repair of the Hubble Space
Telescope, and preparations for additional missions to the outer planets.
In the final analysis, the successful exploration of space is beyond the
capability of any national state, even the richest and most
technologically advanced. And under today's conditions of worldwide
economic crisis, whatever remains of the gains of past decades will be
quickly lost.
Like all historically progressive tasks, humanity's advance into space
depends upon the overcoming of the barriers erected by the profit
system: private ownership of the means of production, and the division
of the world into rival and competing nation-states. In other words, it
depends on the development of an independent movement of the world
working class, based on a socialist program.
Patrick Martin
/The author also recommends/
The Moon landings in historical perspective
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jul1999/moon-j20.shtml>
[20 July 1999]
The Columbia tragedy: NASA, Congress, Bush ignored safety warnings
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/shut-f04.shtml>
[4 February 2003]
The Columbia Space Shuttle disaster: science and the profit system
(three-part series)
Part 1 <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/col1-s19.shtml>, Part
2 <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/col2-s20.shtml>, and Part 3
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/col3-s22.shtml>
[19, 20 and 22 September 2003]
--
Linda
*http://freedetainees.org <http://freedetainees.org/>
"If we shadows have offended, Think but this,
and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd
here While these visions did appear..."
- William Shakespeare
*
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