Message in a Bottle

By Robert Gounley

There are, I'm told, special people who keep immaculately neat and ordered homes. They know what they have and where. The "orderly people", if they do exist, may think themselves superior to those us with bulging closets and booby-trapped garages.

That would be a pity. They, who never mislay anything, can't know the joy of finding a long forgotten relic from their past. The postcard, newly excavated from behind a bureau, may not have seemed important at the time. A draft may have nudged it from the wastebasket it was intended to enter. Today, it brings to mind friends and events we haven't seen in years. Like a message in a bottle, we're connected to another time. If we're fortunate, it may remind us about what should be important in our future.

Recently, a relic has fallen from the behind the Solar System's bureau. For the space activist community, it should be a source of pleasant nostalgia — and renewed resolve.

Apollo 12 at Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center. NASA Photo ID: S69-56596.

This summer, an amateur astronomer found a new object in Earth's vicinity. This was nothing unusual; sky surveys looking for Earth-crossing asteroids have catalogued thousands. As they are discovered, astronomers meticulously calculate the asteroid trajectories, looking for any which may some day come too close for comfort. What surprised the astronomical community was that this new object, designated J002E3 wasn't passing by the Earth. It was in orbit about the Earth, roughly twice as far as the Moon. Briefly, news reports declared the discovery of Earth's second natural satellite, albeit one too far and dim to be regarded by young lovers without a modest telescope.

Research by Dr. Paul Chodas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed something nearly as remarkable. It now appears likely that J002E3 is the spent third stage of the Saturn V rocket that delivered Apollo 12 astronauts to the Moon over 33 years ago. Its job fulfilled, Moon's gravity diverted it into orbit about the Sun, where it drifted like a piece of flotsam in an ocean current. Too small and dim for astronomers to track, it was lost and forgotten.

It would have remained so, but for an accidental passage near Earth's L1 (Langrange) point. There, the gravity of Earth and Sun pull in opposite direction and very nearly cancel each other. Like an eddy in a stream, objects passing near this spot may sometimes be gently nudged to shore or, in this case, into orbit about the Earth. Scientists have exploited this feature to deliberately redirect spacecraft around the inner Solar System. As far as we know, this is the first time any object, man-made or otherwise, has been captured into Earth's immediate orbit from Deep Space. (In contrast, meteor craters on the Earth and Moon show celestial bodies sometimes make far less graceful appearances in our neighborhood.)

Now, 30 years since men last set foot on the Moon, we have on object in the night sky to remind us of what we have accomplished. It was not a race of giants that did this. People like us, many of them still living, built the Saturn rocket. Their tools, especially in the computational area, were simple by contemporary standards. Most importantly, this was not done during an idyllic age, but one of the most tumultuous in our nation's history. During a decade scarred by war, riots, and assassinations, our country found the will to do something no other generation accomplished before or matched since — it put men from Earth onto another world.

40 years ago this month that President John F. Kennedy spoke to a crowd in the football stadium of Rice University in Houston about. Like much of the country, his audience questioned the reasons for such an ambitious expedition, not to mention the costs. In reply Kennedy said, "There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why chose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

"We chose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win — and the others, too."

He concluded, "But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the Moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than three hundred feel tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 mile per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun, almost as hot as it is here today, and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out, then we must be bold…"

We were bold and we did succeed. We can do it again — even now.

If there are minor deities who guide the appearance of postcards and spent rocket boosters, I'm grateful to them. In troubled times, they comfort us.

For more information about J002E3, see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov.