Forty Years Ago

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Apollo 11 Launch -- 9:32 AM, July 16, 1969

 ”If God had wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon.” — Krafft Ehricke

Q: “Was there ever a moment on the moon when either one of you were just a little bit spellbound by what was going on?” — A: “About two and a half hours.” — Neil Armstrong (Postflight Crew Press Conference, 8/12/1969)

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 11 astronauts started out on the first journey of humans to another world. At that time I was a 10-year-old boy, and very much caught up in moon fever. Of course I watched the launch, the landing, and Armstrong’s famous first step on the moon. The astronauts’ moon walk occurred after my usual bedtime, so it was kind of like getting to stay up late on New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve.

I spent some time today checking out websites about the fortieth anniversary. Probably the coolest one has to be www.wechoosethemoon.org, a production of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which has streaming audio of the mission just as it was recorded 40 years ago. Unfortunately, when I visited the site it was 40 years after the astronauts went to sleep, so there wasn’t any conversation going on, just static! But still there was a nice animation of where the astronauts were at that time, and some little factoids about the 60s in the corner of the screen.

NASA has a list of anniversary events going on around the country. I’m planning to attend one of them, the Moonfest at NASA Ames Research Center on Sunday, which will be followed up by the second annual Lunar Science Forum from Tuesday to Thursday next week. To my mind, the latter is really the most exciting moon event next week. That’s because unlike all the other events, it focuses on what is going on right now, instead of looking back forty years. I plan to attend on Tuesday at least, and I definitely plan on blogging about it.

Smithsonian Magazine has a couple of interesting articles on its website. One, “Moonwalk Launch Party,”  was written by a photographer who took pictures of people watching the launch. Be sure to check out the comments. Several readers talk about their memories of the launch, and one reader even says that he (at age three) is in one of the pictures! (Click on “Photo Gallery” to see the pictures.) Another article, “Apollo 11′s Giant Leap for Mankind,” is about the Lunar Module — perhaps the most unique piece of technology developed for the Apollo landings. Nothing like the Lunar Module had ever been made before. It would be useless on Earth; it was technology that only made sense on the moon.

Smithsonian’s sister magazine, Air & Space, has a treasure trove of articles, some old and some new, on the Apollo missions. They call it “An Apollo Anthology.” I’ve just begun to dig into it. Check out, for example, “Apollo’s Army,” which talks about the other 400,000 people (besides the astronauts) who worked on Apollo. The reader comments on this one are really good, too. The article and the comments make you realize how the missions were a shared endeavor of our whole country. Also, Air & Space has a blog, Apollo Plus 40, that will be running all this month, so you can keep coming back to it.

Finally, after reading all the rah-rah stuff, maybe you will be ready for a rather dyspeptic article that basically bids good riddance to the moon. If so, check out Robin McKie’s article in the Guardian. As you might guess, I don’t really agree with McKie’s point of view. But I think that it’s important for all moon supporters, like me, to listen to and think about his arguments.

Tags: Apollo 11, looking back, looking forward, websites
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