There’s been a huge media focus on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing this week. I’ve followed it with interest, just as I did as a youngster at the time.
Imagine seeing that on your doorstep!
The landing occurred on Sunday 20th July, about mid-evening UK time. There was then a wait for a few hours while the astronauts prepared themselves for the moon walk. Instead of staying up, my mother, father and I went to bed with the intention of getting up in the early hours to watch the historic moment when man would set foot on the moon for the first time. I continued listening on a transistor radio before falling asleep.
I woke with a start shortly before 4.00am and turned the radio on. It was clear that Neil Armstrong was just getting out of the Lunar Module and about to climb down the ladder. I jumped out of bed to find my father, who had also just woken, on the landing and we hurried downstairs to turn the television on, followed by my mother.
Televisions took a few minutes to warm up in those days, before a picture appeared on the screen, but we just made it. A fuzzy, black and white image, which could have been anything had we not been so familiar with the shape of the spacecraft, appeared, initially upside down, but this was quickly corrected by the people at Mission Control in Houston. Armstrong was on the ladder of the Lunar Module, his image ghosting as he hopped down each step. He arrived on the footpad at the bottom and then stepped off.
I’m not going to repeat his first utterances as they’re too well known, but that moment, indeed that whole day, was one of the most exciting of my life at that time.
By lunchtime we were in town buying copies of all the newspapers which had photographs from the moon walk on their front pages. I’ve still got them in the attic somewhere.
Because of the time difference between us and the USA, it was of course the early morning of 21st July here when Armstrong stepped out, but in America it was still the previous day, which is why 20th July is the date always given, yet to me it will always be Monday 21st.
The late 1960s seemed a time of hope and the promise that new technologies and advances in science and medicine would rid the world of all its ills, banish poverty and provide everyone with a high standard of living. It didn’t happen of course but it was the Apollo moonshots which seemed to epitomise this brave new age. If we could put a man on the moon, then surely we could do anything.
Interest in the moon landings soon waned though. It was as if, instead of wanting to plough on in this exciting development of the conquest of space, people took the attitude that they’d seen that, done that and lost interest completely, except for a brief thrill when Apollo 13 ran into difficulties and the world held its breath waiting to see if the astronauts would return safely to earth or not. After that Apollo 14 was a success and the world yawned again.
Change the tune America! Give us high speed internet access!
In fact it’s fair to say that there is probably more continued interest in the regular launches of the space shuttle today than there was of the final Apollo missions to the moon. The program was initially to have run to Apollo 20, but the final three were cancelled and the last time man set foot on another celestial body was in 1972.
I know all the arguments about money being better spent on solving problems on earth, but I still feel sad that the manned spacecraft programme was put back so much. Only now are we completing the things which in the early seventies we thought would have occurred by the end of the eighties. In fact it was expected that man would have landed on and colonised Mars by the end of that decade.
This could be your martian view
And has the world become a better place for cutting the space budget back then? Of course not. In fact all of the communication devices and even home entertainment systems which we all take for granted these days are reliant on satellites in space, to say nothing of systems like the GPS in our cars. Without those pioneering days of space research, none of these would have happened and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Footnote
But for all the romantic ideals about space travel, if we did go out into the stars, would we lose the romance? Check out our blog on fly for the same question for air travel. If you thought flying to New York was a pain imagine flying to Mars!
