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There was a lot of excitement this spring surrounding the Artemis II mission that successfully sent four astronauts around the moon.
It helped to set the stage for the third mission, which is scheduled for next year and will test the Orion spacecraft’s ability to dock with landers built by SpaceX and Blue Origin.
If those tests are successful, the goal will be to send the crew of Artemis IV to land on the moon in late 2028. That would mark the first time humans have been on the moon since December 1972, when Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days there as part of the Apollo 17 mission.
Whether or not you like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos -- and there’s a lot to like and dislike about both men -- their efforts to help the U.S. return to the moon can’t be discounted. They are among the great innovators of our time, the people who won’t take no for an answer and are willing to invest their time and money to reach whatever goals they have set. They are willing to take risks.
People who have followed their dreams have always helped to bring about big changes. An examplc can be found in Neil Armstrong, the Wapakoneta, Ohio, native who became the first man to walk on the moon.
“You know, Armstrong never set out to be an astronaut,” explained Logan Rex, curator and communications director for the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Armstrong’s Southern Ohio hometown. “Growing up, he never meant to be the first person on the moon. He never aspired for anything like that.
“It was really that he was just someone who really enjoyed flying and who really enjoyed learning about aviation, and being an astronaut was the next gradual step in aerospace,” he continued.
There have been many examples in our area about people who were willing o innovate in their industries, like Robert J. Gill, whose Gill furnace set the standard for glassmaking in the late 1800s, or Bezaleel Wells, who took a chance on bringing Merino sheep to Steubenville -- the city he founded -- in 1814, a move which led to the growth of the town’s wool industry.
Those innovations always have been happening in the Tri-State Area, as Anne Madarasz, chief historian of the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, explained. That includes work in the field of medicine, where Drs. Jonas Salk and Thomas Starzl brought about big changes.
Salk developed the polio vaccine that helped to all but eradicate the feared disease, while Starzl was a pioneer in the field of transplantation. Collaboration with their colleagues at was important to both medical pioneers.
“It’s much bigger than just saying that Pittsburgh became the center, and Starzl was the father of liver transplantation,” Madarasz said. “It’s really acknowledging that there was an effort to build new infrastructure, so this ongoing, and to set up new ways of practicing medicine so the research is performing in real time in the treatment of patients. You look at something like the Hillman Cancer Center at UPMC -- you literally have research and development happening in the same building where patient treatment is going on.”
The medical innovations that have come from Pittsburgh are too numerous to mention, but they include the work of Dr. Bernie Fisher and the Freedom House Ambulance Service, she added.
Fisher, who was a pioneer in transplantation and vascular surgery at the University of Pittsburgh and performed the first kidney transplant in Pittsburgh, led advancements in cancer treatment.
“He started out as a transplant person, but it was it was his research into breast cancer and his innovation in using random double-blind studies,” Madarasz said. “so, it’s not just a new subject advancing medicine, it’s advancing a way you can more effectively do research. He’s just one of many innovative cancer specialists who have come from here.”
Freedom House, meanwhile, was innovative in many ways -- it provided unemployed and undeserved residents of Pittsburgh’s Hill District with advanced medical training. The all-Black service, working with what is now UPMC, paved the way for today’s paramedic training, and turned ambulances from simple transport to a hospital into rolling platforms where early treatment could begin. It set the standards for today’s EMS system.
New technology changes over time, as Matt Anderson explained.
“When you think about the 19th century, the railroads were the definitive technology,” Anderson explained. “So far in the 21st century, it’s been the internet. But in the 20th century, the automobile was the defining technology. It transformed the century in a way no other invention did throughout the 20th century. And, the manufacturing behind the automobile also transformed the American economy and the lives of American workers.”
Anderson is the curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Mich. He said that Henry Ford’s invention of the moving assembly line was a critical development in industry --and it was quickly adopted by others. Some ideas, though, didn’t work as they had been planned.
“Ford realized he could control how quickly cars were made and how fast they were produced on the moving assembly line,” Anderson explained. “He couldn’t control the raw materials, the parts, the things that were coming from outside vendors. He also had concerns about labor issues cutting off supplies, natural disasters, whatever. It was his desire to control as much of the raw materials that into vehicles as possible.
“So, he owned coal mines in Kentucky. He owned forests and wood produced in the upper peninsula of Michigan and he built the Rouge plant in the 1920s,” he added. “There, he was able to basically build a car starting from the raw materials to the finished vehicle in about 28 hours --it was just incredible how fast people turned around there. But even then, Ford was never able to fully control everything that went into a care -- an automobile is just too complex.”
That led to changes.
“Within a couple of decades, the industry realized that it just wasn’t economically feasible, and you were better off to let others specialize in the smaller parts and components and bring them all together in the final assembly,” Anderson said.
All of those efforts not only changed the world --they have set the stage for the innovations that are sure to come.
“Hopefully, with the upcoming Artemis missions that we have planned, probably the majority of American who have never seen a lunar landing will see one,” said Rex. “Having an Artemis crew back on the moon --hopefully, that’s an inspiration to the next generation that America can still do great things. A lot of people question that right now, and I think we need space exploration more than ever.”
(Gallabrese, a resident of Steubenville, is senior writer of the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times)