Innovation & Tech Today – May 2019

72 INNOVATION & TECH TODAY | SUMMER 2019

tech
zone NASA

The New

Space Race

50 years after Apollo 11, the nation and world look forward to a multi-pronged space program

built on cooperation between NASA and many commercial ventures.

By Robert Yehling

Monumental scenes defined the Sixties:

Vietnam, Civil Rights, the “Love Generation,”

Woodstock and Monterey, the advent of color

TV, the arrival of mainframe computers in large

business settings – and the Space Race. Now, 50

years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

landed Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle onto

Tranquility Base and first walked on the moon,

we’re blasting off again.

What a time to be honoring Armstrong,

Aldrin, and the other 10 men who walked on

the moon. We’re seeing excitement in the space

program we haven’t seen since the Apollo era,

with four generations involved, from older,

nostalgic Apollo observers to robotics-building

elementary school kids. Instead of operating

under the central mission of beating the Soviets

to the moon, we’re now venturing into an

expanded program of deep-space exploration

with probes and telescopes, near-Earth science

and technology in our continued Space Station

program, commercial space ventures that

involve people and payloads, sustainable

manned missions to the moon, and the sexiest

ruby red “where no man has gone before” jewel

in our astronautic grasp – Mars.

Rather than focusing all experiments and

technology on getting to the moon and back –

which seized a nation’s consciousness for eight

years in the Sixties – we now conduct earth

science, medical, robotics, technological,

materials development, and many other

experiments in space. The technology we

developed, then and now, serves our society in

thousands of ways. And, we have increasingly

deep buy-in from hundreds of commercial space

ventures. The scene at May’s Space Tech Expo

2019 at the Pasadena Convention Center, near

NASA’s JPL lab (where the Mars missions are

monitored) was rife with optimism: more than

250 space industry suppliers showed off

everything from missile defense systems to cyro

technology and tools for extracting minerals

from the moon – or, possibly even Mars.

Today’s excitement reminds over-55 NASA

officials, scientists, astronauts, and their

partners in government and the commercial

space world of what they felt as kids in those

dreamy 1960s, when twenty manned missions

launched into Earth and lunar orbits – almost all

fraught with danger and the unknown.

“The things everyone is talking about today,

we talked about then,” former Deputy NASA

Administrator and two-time Space Shuttle

astronaut Leland Melvin recalled. “Even then

(in school), we were drawing pictures of flying

cars and landing on Mars on our school folders,