Forty years after the culmination of arguably the most monumentous events in scientific history and every boy’s imagination, I am reminded of my own fascination with the original Moon Landing. I remember trying to calculate Neil Armstrong’s age as a kid and whether I’d be old enough to know English sufficiently well to speak to him about Apollo 11 in time. That was in 1989, twenty years ago, twenty years after the original flight. I’ve seen the now-famous footage, of the launch of the immense Saturn V rocket and videos in and outside the module more times than I can tell.
The immensity of the events can hardly be overstated. Armstrong’s comment, before the “One small step” remark, tells of the novelty of it all: “the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder”. They really had little clue of the conditions they would encounter, of the material makeup and what it would be like to walk around there. A fascinating fact about the Moon that got me all jittery and mystified like a kid was how it was so still that recent pictures show decades-old footprint trails around the landing sites to this day.
Nixon’s phone call to Armstrong and Aldrin summarised the optimism and hope that has since worked at least in the field of space exploration: “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all people on this earth are truly One”. But, much like the Martin Rowson cartoon above shows, that optimism has not prevailed. Or, if it has, it has not provided a continuation of unity for humanity.
Of course, Neil Armstrong received my childhood adoration for having been the first man to step on the Moon. It is interesting, then, that he is the member of the Apollo 11 crew perhaps the least open about talking about his experiences and I remember thinking why I’d never seen a television interview with him. In fact, I admire Michael Collins precisely because of his friendly, outgoing demeanour and humility. Today, all the men who have been to the Moon and are still around to tell their tales are old gentlemen, many with gaunt and fit features that betray their regimented backgrounds. They have fascinating and inspiring stories to tell, and though the Apollo 11 mission overshadows many of the previous and subsequent flights, the entire project showed scientific optimism, unwavering trust in human adaptability and ingenuity and determination in the face of adversity and loss of life.
During the decade that brought to attention the internal turmoil within the United States, from the civil rights movement to the rifts being created by the Vietnam war, the space programme galvanised and unified a population in a way that inspired children two decades on, halfway around the world. I would only hope that the work could continue to genuinely inspire children of 2009 too.
(Picture above by Martin Rowson, from the Guardian)
