Missions for all of humankind
After they spent 21⁄2 hours on the Moon’s surface, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left some items behind as relics of humanity’s first steps on a new world. They included a gold replica of an olive branch, and a plaque attached to the ladder of the Eagle landing craft.
The plaque said in full: ‘‘Here men from Planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. They came in peace for all mankind.’’
When we remember the first Moon landing 50 years later, we
think of the immortal sentence spoken by Armstrong and broadcast live to one-fifth of the world’s population. We picture the grainy images and think of one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind.
In that rhetorical gesture, Armstrong made the Moon landing a global expression, a global statement, in contrast to the mood of a space race that was born of Cold War rivalry and had unfolded against a backdrop of growing social dissent.
Up there, in the endless dark and silence of space, Armstrong could imagine a divided humanity as one. He looked back at Earth, which must have appeared small, bright and utterly vulnerable.
The sense of vulnerability has only increased in the five decades since. We know more about the stresses and pressures we have put on the planet, the damage we have done to its ecosystems, the species we have destroyed and the seas we have warmed and acidified. Our climate emergency does not affect just one nation or one culture, but all of us. All mankind.
The climate emergency has been called a generation’s nuclear-free moment. But that is too narrow. Others compare the threat to World War II, with a similar need for rapid mobilisation and collective effort. But perhaps the response could be seen as akin to the Moon shot, as an expression of our higher values and our optimism, our use of technological solutions and our dawning awareness of a global picture.
Seven years before the Moon landing, at Rice University in Houston, US President John F Kennedy delivered a speech that is remembered as another expression of the deeper, even moral meanings of the Apollo programme. ‘‘We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,’’ he said.
When that speech approached its 50th anniversary, in 2012, Texas Monthly executive editor Paul Burka recalled the spirit of the address, which ‘‘speaks to the way Americans viewed the future in those days . . . Unlike today’s politicians, Kennedy spoke to our best impulses as a nation, not our worst’’.
Only poets can reach higher than speechwriters. When Apollo 11 landed in July 1969, the New York Times put poet Archibald MacLeish on the front page. He wrote: ‘‘To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.’’ It is knowledge we easily forget.