The Race to the Moon

On this 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, I would like to express some thoughts on the role the early days of manned space flight played in my life and my appreciation for the people who were instrumental in sending humans to the moon, which inspired a whole generation of current scientists. In contrast to many of my blog posts, this one will be autobiographical with little direct connection made between science and Christianity.

I spent eight and a half years of my childhood, from when I was five years old to when I was thirteen years old in Huntsville, Alabama, the city where the Saturn V rocket was designed and where the bottom stage of the Saturn V rocket was built and tested. During the 1960's and early 1970's, Huntsville was among the cities most involved with manned space flight, along with Houston where mission control existed and Cape Canaveral where flights were launched. I was fascinated and captivated by manned space flight. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew, up I would have probably answered that I wanted to be an astronaut. Some kids could name their favorite sports heroes, but I could name all of the astronauts. The remarkable achievement of humans going to the moon, pushing the boundaries of technology and adventure, inspired a whole generation of scientists. I know that my interest in science and technology, which eventually led me to becoming an experimental particle physicist, was spawned and nurtured because of the accomplishments made in the race to put humans on the moon.

A Small Big Universe

The universe is unfathomably large. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is made of around 200,000,000,000 stars and there are about 200,000,000,000 galaxies in the visible universe. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, which is  9.5 × 10¹⁷ km (6 × 10¹⁷ miles). (A light year is the distance light travels in a year which is 9,500,000,000,000 km or 6,000,000,000,000 miles.) We can see galaxies that are so far away it has taken about 13 billion years for their light to reach us.  Since the universe is expanding, those galaxies have continued to recede away from us during the time it took their light to reach us. So the present size of the known universe is approximately 93,000,000,000 light years across in all directions. That is, the universe we can see is now a sphere about 9 × 10²³ km (6 × 10²³ miles) in diameter. We talk about the "visible" or "known" universe because that is all of the universe we can see. We have no idea how large the universe is beyond that.

It is impossible to understand how big this is. Consider something much smaller, the distance to the nearest star which is about 4.3 light years away. If we could travel to that star at about the same speed as the Apollo astronauts traveled to the moon, it would take almost 1 million years to get there. That is just to the closest star in our galaxy! Even if we could travel at the fastest speed of any object ever created by humans it would take about 30,000 years to reach the nearest star.  You can do the math, but even at that extreme speed it would take 700,000,000 years to cross our galaxy.