Apollo 11

by William H. Benson

July 25, 2019

     Apollo 11’s Saturn V rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, on Merritt Island, Florida, on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, at 9:32 a.m. EDT. At that moment a clock began running. Hence, NASA officials set liftoff at zero hours Mission Time.

     The Saturn V rocket contained almost a million gallons of kerosene, liquid oxygen, and liquid hydrogen. Michael Neufeld, a Smithsonian curator, said, “If the Saturn V had blown up on or near the launch pad, it would have had the force of a small nuclear weapon.”

     After one complete orbit around Planet Earth, the three astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins—set a trajectory for a rendezvous with the Moon, 240,000 miles distant. Three days later, on Saturday, July 19, at 75:49 hours, the three entered into the first of numerous lunar orbits.

     On Sunday, July 20, at 100:0:12 hours, the Command Space Module, CSM, and the Lunar Module, LEM, undocked from each other. Armstrong and Aldrin commanded the LEM, code-named “Eagle,” while Collins remained alone to pilot the CSM, code-named “Columbia.”

     At 102:33:05 hours, when 50,000 +/- feet above the lunar surface, Armstrong and Aldrin flipped the switches that ignited the “powered descent engine.” Less than thirteen minutes later, at 102:45:39 hours, Armstrong landed the LEM on the Moon’s surface.

     He reported, “Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

     NASA officials, historians, and journalists have dissected and rehashed those thirteen minutes often. The BBC even built a podcast around those tense, nail-biting, thirteen minutes.

     First, the computer called out a series of “1202” computer malfunctions that alarmed Armstrong and Aldrin, plus Collins and Houston.

     Later, NASA officials determined that they were asking the computer to complete too many tasks, that it felt overloaded, forced to drop certain tasks and stick with others. NASA officials chose to set aside the “1202” warnings, deal with them later, but let Armstrong land the Eagle, rather than abort.

     Then, when Armstrong neared the Moon’s surface, he noticed that the computer wanted to land the Eagle in a crater filled with boulders, some as big as cars. Armstrong took over the landing, keeping the Eagle airborne long enough to pass over that crater until he saw a level plain, and there he landed.

     One NASA official estimated that the Eagle had seventeen seconds of fuel remaining.

     Six and a half hours later, at 109:24 hours, or 9:56 p.m. EDT, Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder and planted a footprint onto the Moon’s surface. Buzz Aldrin followed at 109:43.

     Together they planted the Stars and Stripes, set up a video camera, unveiled a plaque with their  signatures engraved, collected dirt samples, snapped photos, heard President Nixon offer his congratulations from the Oval Office, and ambled about the Moon.

     Buzz Aldrin looked about him, and called the scene, “Magnificent Desolation.”

     After two hours outside, at 111:37, the two were back inside the Eagle. There they spent the night. Altogether, the two astronauts spent 21 hours and 36 minutes on the Moon’s surface.

     The next day, July 21, at 12:54 p.m. EDT, or at 124:22 hours, the two flipped switches to ignite the Lunar module’s liftoff from the Moon’s surface. The rocket scientists had not built redundant machinery for a liftoff. If Armstrong and Aldrin were to leave the Moon, and return to Earth, that single liftoff system had to work, and it did. One newspaper though had a headline prepared if it failed, “Marooned.”

     At 128:03 hours, three hours and forty-one minutes after liftoff, Armstrong and Aldrin docked their  module with Columbia. They then joined Michael Collins inside the Command Module.

     Three days later, on July 24, at 195:07 hours, the Command Module entered the Earth’s orbit, and at 195:18, it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, some 800 miles southwest of Hawaii, some 12 miles from the USS Hornet.

     After 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds, the three called their mission completed.

     A helicopter carried the three to a quarantine trailer, where they remained until August 10. NASA officials feared that the astronauts would bring back a germ that would unleash an epidemic on Earth.

     Soon, they were reunited with their families, and a New York City ticker tape parade awaited them.

     Fifty years have passed since those moments in 1969, but the three astronauts’ story and adventure, their unimaginable achievement, continues to astonish and surprise everyone. They expected their mission to succeed, and it did.

Moon’s Geography

by William H. Benson

July 11, 2019

     The Earth revolves around the Sun every 365 ¼ days, and rotates on its axis every 24 hours. The Moon revolves around the Earth every 27 days, and it rotates on its axis the same time, every 27 days. Because the two are synchronized, people on Earth look up at one surface of the Moon, the near side.

     Each side of the Moon though, near or far, receives sunlight for two weeks.

     The near or visible side of the Earth, seen at night, is composed of flat plains called seas, of highlands called mountains, and of craters, but the Moon’s far side is littered with a bewildering numbers of craters, each given a name, but no seas.

     Earth’s Moon is the fifth largest of all the Solar System’s moons, but it is the largest relative to its planet, about 27 ½% the size of Earth. Earth and Moon coordinate with each other during their annual elliptical path around the Sun.

     NASA has deployed at least three series of probes to the Moon: Ranger, Surveyor, and Apollo.

     Of the nine Ranger probes, in the early 1960’s, three succeeded in sending back a total of 17,439 pictures of the Moon, minutes before each hard-crashed into the Moon’s surface.

     Of the seven Surveyor probes, in the mid-1960’s, two crash-landed, but five soft-landed on the Moon’s surface, and then sent back pictures of the Moon’s surface. All seven still remain on the Moon.

     Of the fifteen Apollo missions in the late 1960’s, six soft-landed on the Moon’s surface: 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. The twelve Americans who walked on the Moon’s surface plus the other six who remained inside the Command Modules in lunar orbit returned to Earth.

     The Moon’s near side is defined by x / y coordinates, with a center point at 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude.

     On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, landed their Lunar Module, the Eagle, onto the Sea of Tranquility’s southern edge, about five hundred miles due east of the center point, close to where Ranger 8 and Surveyor 5 had landed earlier.

     On November 15, 1969, Apollo 12’s astronauts, Charles Conrad, Jr., and Alan L. Bean, landed their Lunar Module, about five hundred miles due west of that center point, on the eastern edge of Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, but only 600 feet from Surveyor 3.

     Conrad and Bean walked to that previous Moon probe, that had soft-landed on April 20, 1967, nineteen months before, and investigated it, even snapping a photograph of it and themselves.

     Apollo 14 landed about four hundred miles west of the center point. Apollo 15 landed about 700 miles due north of the center point, about forty percent of the distance to the Moon’s north pole. Apollo 16 landed about five hundred miles south and east of the center point. Apollo 17 landed about eight hundred miles north east of the center point.

     One can see that NASA’s moon landings in the 1960’s and 1970’s clustered about that center point. Only one of its moon landings—from either Ranger, Surveyor, or Apollo—touched down on the Moon’s far side, Ranger 4, on April 26, 1962, and that was due to a malfunction.

     Other countries have sent probes to the Moon, including: the Soviet Union and / or Russia, Japan, China, the European Space Agency, India, and now Israel.

     On January 3, 2019, China’s National Space Administration Agency soft-landed “Chang’e 4” on the Moon’s far side, inside the Van Karman crater, almost one thousand miles due south of that side’s center point, sixty percent of the distance to the Moon’s south pole.

     The Van Karman crater lies within a vast basin, a depressed area on the Moon’s far side, called the South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the largest impact basin’s in the Solar System, 1600 miles in diameter and 8 miles deep.

     Last month, Peters B. James, a professor of planetary geophysics at Baylor University, announced that he and his team had discovered “a mysterious large mass of material beneath the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, and that it may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and that formed the basin.” It lies at least five miles and more below the Moon’s surface.

     The Israeli’s attempted to send a recent un-crewed probe to the Moon’s surface. Called Beresheet, Israeli officials hoped to land it in the Sea of Serenitatis, just north of the Sea of Tranquility. On April 11, 2019, during its descent the spacecraft’s main engine stopped working, causing a hard-landing.

     Moon exploration, a series of failures, but also a series of stunning successes.

Frederick Douglass, 1852 Speech

by William H. Benson

June 30, 2019

     The Rochester, New York Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society asked the abolitionist Frederick Douglass to deliver the address at the Fourth of July celebration on Monday, July 5, 1852.

     This was nine years before voters elected Lincoln president, before the Southern states departed Congress to form the Confederacy, before shots rang out at Fort Sumter, and ten years before Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the 3.5 million slaves in the former Southern states.

     No one in 1852 knew that a bloody civil war was imminent, that it would rip the nation apart, and that its winner would toss slavery into the dustbin of history, where it belonged. 

     Partway into his speech, Douglass stops and asks, “why am I called upon to speak here to-day?”

     He notes the “sad sense of the disparity between” himself, a black man and a former slave, and his audience, white free ladies, and dares to point out the obvious. “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.

     “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

     “I will, in the name of humanity, dare to call in question and to denounce everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America!”

      He then submits five questions. First, “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?” He answers, “It is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race.”

     He asks, “Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty?” He answers, “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

     He asks, “Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong?” He answers, “No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength.”

     He asks, “What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken?” He answers, “That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot.”

     Finally, he asks a crucial question, “What, to the American slave, is your 4^th of July?”

     He answers, “a day that reveals to him the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.

     “Your denunciations of tyrants brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.

     “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

     Douglass then denounces the internal slave trade. “Here,” he says, “you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. I was born amid such sights and scenes.”

     He picks up again his attack upon the church. “But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

     “They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs.”

     As were most abolitionists, Frederick Douglass was bare-knuckled, unrelenting, hostile, in-your- face, and merciless, when he spoke, when he condemned the “peculiar institution” of slavery, as he did on July 5, 1852. The Ladies Anti-Slavery Society received an earful that day, more than they expected.

     Today, in certain cities, mainly in New England, groups gather to celebrate the Fourth of July with a “Reading Frederick Douglass” event. Participants take turns reading portions of Douglass’s speech.

     For example, participants will gather on Friday, July 5, at 6:00 p.m. in Boston’s Egleston Square to hear a complete reading.

     In 2018, the Yale historian David Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for history for writing his biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. In it, he called Douglass’s 1852 speech “abolition’s rhetorical masterpiece.” Indeed, it is.

A Frenchman Crosses the Atlantic in a Barrel

by William H. Benson

June 13, 2019

     The Atlantic Ocean intimidates, but many have dared to cross it.

     Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator initiated Europe’s Age of Discovery, beginning about 1400. His shipbuilders developed the caravel, a light-weight ocean-going vessel, that could achieve fast speeds, was highly maneuverable, and yet could make forward progress when sailing into the wind.

     Prince Henry’s sailors sailed west to the islands of Madeira in 1419, and then to the Azores in 1427. Then, the prince encouraged them to sail south along Africa’s western coast.

     Yet, it was Queen Isabela, of the Castile and Aragon Kingdoms in Spain, who financed Christopher Columbus’s scheme to sail west across the Atlantic in 1492, in the hopes of finding a sea route to India. For the voyage, Columbus enlisted three caravels: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

     Columbus did cross the Atlantic, but it is doubtful that he understood he had not arrived in India.

     Then, in 1499, a Portuguese sailor named Vasco de Gama discovered a sea route to India by sailing around the African continent.

     By the seventeenth-century, Europeans considered transatlantic travel commonplace. Although George Washington never crossed the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and John Adams did, multiple times. The champion for crossing the Atlantic in the eighteenth century was the Great Awakening evangelist, George Whitefield, who sailed across the Atlantic thirteen times.

     In the twentieth-century, men and women have tried various ways to cross the Atlantic. The Washington Post reported in 1987 that, “The Guinness Book of World Records lists more that thirty methods of crossing the Atlantic.” Yet, I cannot find anyone who claims that they have crossed the Atlantic by swimming, yet.

     On October 19, 1952, a Frenchman named Alain Bombard climbed onto a fifteen-foot Zodiac inflatable boat, fashioned with a sail, at an island off the African coast, and headed west, alone. He drank rainwater, but also some seawater, and he ate fish he caught with harpoon and hooks. On December 23, 1952, after sixty-seven days at sea, he disembarked on the Barbados, in the Caribbean.

     On May 17, 1970, the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and his crew set sail from Morocco aboard the Ra II, a log raft, and fifty-seven days and 4,000 miles later, they too landed at Barbados.

     In 2003, a Frenchwoman named Maud Fontenoy rowed her boat across the Atlantic Ocean.

     A Polish explorer, named Aleksander Doba, then in his sixties, paddled his kayak across the Atlantic in 2010, again in 2013, and a third time in 2017.

     Late last year, on December 26, 2018, a seventy-one-year-old Frenchman, named Jean Jacques Savin, departed from a Canary Island, southwest of Portugal, inside an orange barrel, that he built out of resin-coated plywood, for $65,000.

     Flat on the ends, rounded on the sides, it measured ten feet long, 6.8 feet wide. From within, Savin stared outside at the sea through four portholes. Without engine or sail, the barrel relied upon ocean currents to carry it west. Two solar panels topside provided sufficient electricity for communications, the GPS, and a desalination machine. A weighted keel kept it upright in the sea.

     Savin built the capsule to resist the ocean’s pounding waves and potential attacks by orca whales.

     The barrel averaged two miles per hour. Inside, Savin read, took notes for an intended book of his adventure, caught fish, ate his meals in a galley, slept on a cot, and swam in the ocean. With him he took freeze-dried food, and two bottles of wine, one to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and the other to mark his seventy-second birthday in January.

     On his website Savin said that inside his barrel he “felt less as captain of a ship, but more as passenger of the ocean. The time at sea passed very quickly. I decided to do this. I had the need for solitude. It was my desire to leave and to be alone.” He had read Alain Bombard’s book five times.

     Two times he feared for his life, “once when he met an oil tanker, and another time when another large ship edged near him.”

     After 2,930 miles and 128 days, Savin’s barrel floated onto the beach at St. Eustatia, a Caribbean island near the Dominican Republic, on May 2, 2019. He said the adventure was “exhilarating, but also quite risky,” and that, “Everything has an end. Finally, here I am at the end of this adventure.”

America at War

by William H. Benson

May 30, 2019

     On Palm Sunday, April 14, this year, former President Jimmy Carter told his Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, that President Donald Trump had called him the day before, on Saturday, for the first time since voters elected him president in November of 2016.

     To his class, Carter explained that Trump is fearful that China is “getting ahead of us.” On the phone, Carter asked Trump, “And do you know why that is? Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war.”

     Carter then told his class that the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world due to our desire to impose American values on other countries. China is investing in high-speed railroads, rather than in defense.”

     “How many miles of high-speed railroads do we have in this country?” he asked his class.

     “Zero,” his class members answered.

     Carter said. “We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that is why they’re ahead of us in almost every way. If you take $3 trillion and put it into American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion left over.

     “We’d have high-speed railroads. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing. We’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”

     Carter makes some valid points, although not all are politically popular.

     Transportation officials define high-speed railroads as those that run in excess of 250 kilometers per hour (160 mph). As of December 31, 2018, China claimed 29,000 kilometers (18,000 miles) of high speed railroads, two-thirds of the world’s total.

     A pleasant thought: instead of a two plus hour drive to a major airport, a forty minute ride.

     Carter’s comment that the U.S. is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world” is astonishing when one remembers that he is a 1946 graduate of the naval academy at Annapolis. Historians though might argue with him that ancient Rome exceeded the U.S.’s talent for declaring war.

     On Sunday, May 14, the New York Times featured two articles on America at war.

     The first appeared in the “Book Review.” The historian Joseph J. Ellis reviewed Rick Atkinson’s book, The British are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. Ellis praises how Atkinson displays “a novelistic imagination that verges on the cinematic.”

     Atkinson begins his “brutal and bloody” account of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and ends it at Princeton on Christmas Day, 1777, after Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware River at night and attacked the unprepared Hessians at daybreak.

     Atkinson intends “to rescue the American Revolution from the sentimental stereotypes and bring it to life as an ugly, savage, often barbaric war. Unlike in World War II, most of the killing occurred up close. If a continental soldier was hit in the torso, his chances of dying were more than 50 percent.”

     The second article appeared in the “Sunday Review” section under the headline, “A Battle in Falluja, Revisited.” Elliot Ackerman, Marine and First Platoon leader, wrote of his fierce days fighting door-to-door in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.

     Ackerman writes, “This is the 15^th Memorial Day since the battle of Falluja in late 2004, in which 82 American service members died. The battle was a key operation at the outset of the Iraq War and resulted in the fiercest urban combat since the battle for Hue in Vietnam in 1968.”

     Ackerman says, that as a platoon leader, “You are responsible for everything your platoon does or fails to do. Responsible for everything.”

     A handwritten note scrawled on the wall of the government center in Ramadi, Iraq, in January 2007 said it well, “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war: America is at the mall.”

     Indeed, it is the military service organizations—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—that fight the wars that the politicians select, while the vast majority of Americans live their lives unperturbed. America has been and will be, it seems, at continuous war.

     And yet, as Americans we have a choice: continue to engage in a stream of wars far into the future, or, as Jimmy Carter advises, apply the revenues intended for war to our faltering infrastructure and to our schools. He urges the government to spend its revenues more wisely, with a better return.

     Carter said that Trump is worried about China surpassing the U.S. as the world’s top economic power, but he said, “I don’t really fear that, but it bothers President Trump, and I don’t know why.”

Australia’s Feral Animals

by William H. Benson

May 16, 2019

     Australia is a world away from the United States. Ask a typical American for details about Australia, and he or she may recollect three familiar items: sheep, kangaroos, or rabbits.

     Today, Australia’s shepherds care for some 75 million sheep that graze on huge pastures that the natives call stations. Also, the kangaroo is a marsupial, those mammals that evolved on the Australian continent, and are known for a mother’s pouch where the infant resides for weeks after birth.

     Then, the rabbit is one of the ecological disasters that resulted after Europeans introduced their animals into Australia. Australian officials have since tried to manage a series of invasive species.

     Feral rabbits spread across the continent, mainly because they face no natural predators, like wolves or coyotes. One incredible statistic, almost unbelievable, claims that by 1920, Australia’s ranchers and shepherds were facing as many as 10 billion rabbits.

     A rabbit’s ability to destroy a pasture is astonishing. It leaves nothing behind, not a single spear of grass, and then the soil erodes. To reduce rabbit numbers, Australians have built fences, shot them, poisoned them, and introduced a killing bacteria. Today, their population stands at about 200 million.   

     Another ecological disaster is the hog. In a short amount of time, domesticated hogs that escaped farms turned feral. Today, an estimated 24 million hogs ravage Australia’s pastures.

     One official said that “feral hogs are prolific breeders, more akin to the breeding habits of rabbits. Sows produce two litters per year, and four to 10 pigs per litter.” Ranchers build fences, but the hogs burrow under them.

     Then, there are 5 million feral donkeys, 2.6 million feral goats, 400,000 feral horses, 300,000 feral camels, 150,000 feral water buffalos, and a number of feral dogs, the dingoes.

     But of all the invasive species, it is the feral cat that Australian officials are most determined to cull. A recent New York Times Magazine article reported that between two and six million feral cats reside across 98% of Australia’s landmass, but an official pushed the number higher, close to 20 million.

     These feral cats are “catastrophic cats,” not your sweet, gentle house cat. The male feral cats are vicious predators that have mastered the art of hunting birds, mammals, retiles, amphibians, and that go on profligate sprees. They climb trees, find the birds’ nests, and eat the eggs or hatchlings.

     “They hunt no matter what. Even if not hungry, they are programmed to stalk available prey. The cats kill an estimated 377 million birds and 649 million reptiles every year in Australia.”

     As a result, “an estimated 34 mammal species are now extinct, and the cats are blamed for 22 of those extinctions. Officials list another 100 plus species in Australia as ‘near threatened,’ or ‘critical’.”

     John Woinarski, an Australian conservation researcher, said, “Recent extinction rates in Australia are unparalleled. It’s calamitous.”

     “In 2015, the Australian national government adopted a plan to kill two million feral cats by 2020, out of grave concern for the nation’s indigenous wildlife, groups of small and threatened rodent and marsupial species, for which cats have become a deadly predator.”

     Today, hunters kill the cats with either bullets or with arrows, or they trap them and then shoot them, or they poison them. Pilots eject 50 poisoned sausages per square mile from airplanes in certain targeted areas, “laying down nearly half a million baits in the course of one month.”

     “The sausages include kangaroo meat, chicken fat, a mix of herbs and spices, along with a poison—called 1080—derived from gastrolobium plants and highly lethal to cats.”

     Cats first arrived in Australia in the mid-eighteenth century and then “spread with astonishing speed,” across the continent. In 1885, a rancher reported, “It is a very remarkable fact that the domestic cat is to be found everywhere throughout the dry back country. I have met with cats, some of enormous size, at least 50 miles from water.”

     A backlash erupted against the killing, but from foreigners, who organized petition drives to save the cats. “The petitions were met with scorn in Australia.” The Australians asked, “Why has someone started a petition to save the feral cats? Pure stupidity as cats kill more and more native animals.”

     In the U.S., Alley Cat Allies and other organizations promote a no-kill, or a catch-neuter-release policy, a program that may stop the cats’ proliferation, but will not stop the wildlife devastation now.

     Australians will continue to try to manage the feral animal populations, especially the cats, but the sheer numbers overwhelm them.