In mid-summer 1969, then–Nixon administration speechwriter Bill Safire wrote a speech that was never given. It might in fact be the most famous undelivered speech in history: the words that President Nixon would have read aloud, if the Apollo 11 mission had failed, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had perished in the attempt.
One of the more chilling and macabre details of the piece—and perhaps the reason it sticks in the memory—is that it does not contemplate the astronauts' sudden and fiery death mid-orbit or upon reentry (an appalling fate, but one that would be mercifully brief). Instead, the speech was concerned with an even more ghastly contingency: one in which the men were unable to leave the moon's surface after landing, and were left stranded on that alien surface indefinitely to wait out their slow and agonizing end.
Fortunately, as we know, the speech never had to be given. It remains instead as a glimpse into counterfactual history. A creepy missive from a parallel universe that somehow strayed into our reality through a glitch in the spacetime vortex.
But even if Nixon never had to deliver Safire's speech—at least not in our world—other presidents would have to eulogize other astronauts who perished in the attempt to explore the heavens. There was the Challenger explosion in 1986, which—horribly enough—was witnessed live on television by schoolchildren across the nation. There was the disintegration of the Columbia on its reentry into the Earth's atmosphere in 2003.
With the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, there has of course not been a similar catastrophe since. But there also has not been a public cause of space exploration to which anyone might be sacrificed.
There has of course been a recent revival of interest in space travel, and it will no doubt claim martyrs of its own. But it's harder to know what people are perishing for now. A privatized space program funded by billionaires out of mixed motives of ego-expansion and the eventual pursuit of profit inspires far less sentiment than the old publicly-funded space program. It's hard to believe that anything Musk does could be "for all mankind," let alone a projected scheme for high-priced space tourism.
I can't imagine, that is to say, Musk's program ever meriting the high-flown rhetoric of a Safire. No "epic man of flesh and blood" is Musk; and a merely profit-seeking space endeavor will never "stir the people of the world to feel as one."
Meanwhile, though, public sector space probes are heroically sacrificing themselves in the old vein, and for the good old cause of human knowledge and betterment. NASA's successful effort to redirect an asteroid by deliberately crashing a probe into it is truly an undertaking from which all humanity might one day benefit, if there were an asteroid sighted on a dangerous path. If there is room in our contemporary space program for Safirean pronouncements, perhaps it is here.
And should there ever again be a need for such a future Safire to once again eulogize someone who gave their lives heroically in outer space, in the service of human knowledge or security, I think I have found the epigraph he—or she, or they—should use. Reading through the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, I came across the poem "Flyer's Fall."
It was penned, of course, long before the space age. It was a wartime poem, and Stevens no doubt had aviation in mind. But its imagery puts one in mind of the people who died tragically and horribly in the Challenger explosion—as well as of the hypothetical contingency Safire was forced to contemplate, of living men stranded on the dead moon.
Stevens's poem, after all, is concerned not only with the heroism of the person dying under these conditions—but also the emptiness of space; and the difficulty of reconciling that fullness of sacrifice—the last full measure of devotion—with that emptiness.
If there is ever another Safire writing speeches for another president, in the event of another tragic loss of life in the service of the exploration of space, I commend this poem unto them. I think it would form the most fitting elegy for any astronaut who perished—as the crews of the Challenger and the Columbia did—in the cause of the public and human welfare. I offer it here as well as a belated epitaph for these martyrs and everyone else who has died in deep space or the upper stratosphere so that the rest of us might aspire:
This man escaped the dirty fates,
Knowing that he did nobly, as he died.
Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,
Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space—
Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which
We believe without belief, beyond belief.
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