Why we never got over the Moon
SOME 50 years have elapsed since our first landing on another heavenly body. In all that time, the achievement has never been beaten.
Now, with the anniversary of Apollo 11 upon us, a plethora of film and TV documentaries have arrived, ready to remind us of just how fantastical their achievements were. None of them will really succeed.
If you want to know what it was like to go to the Moon, try locking yourself in a typical family car with two close friends. Don’t open the doors or the windows for a full ten days. Go to the toilet in plastic bags and whatever else happens, never come out to shower or stretch your legs.
This was the reality that awaited Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.
Not everybody revelled in the achievements of the Apollo programme. For many in the creative community, the astronauts of the 1960s seemed a boring lot, mindless automatoms who never showed dissent. In truth, the kind of man who can stay sane in a tin can is a difficult character to question at a press conference.
Neil Armstrong, publicly at least, seemed to have little in the way of emotional range. The crew of Apollo 11 had been trained and motivated to function within a military setting, so rebellion just wasn’t in their nature.
In each of the five decades that
followed the Moon landing, it has been suggested that Armstrong achieved his status through luck.
There were more than 30 astronauts in the Apollo programme and NASA had given most of them a mission. His was Apollo 11 and that just happened to be the first manned landing. More recently, this has been challenged and it is clear now that Armstrong was consciously chosen by the NASA hierarchy to take the first step.
The new Moon documentary, Apollo
11, is more than just a factual account of a great achievement. It is a frozen vision of a dazzling future, unwrapped for our delight, a full half century down the line.
Its central character – Armstrong – was 38 years old when he led his men into the command module.
It is clear that Armstrong himself was frustrated by the slow pace of progress that came after his mission. At times, it must have seemed that the crew of Apollo 11 had delivered the greatest pass in history – but the man up ahead had simply stumbled and fallen, completely failing to run with the ball.
Rationing his public appearances to a minimum, Armstrong’s criticisms of such stunted progress were few and far between, but when he did speak, people listened.
To understand the calmness of the Apollo astronauts, it is perhaps, necessary to understand where they came from.
All but one of the 24 men who flew to the Moon had experienced risks and horrors in their military service that wildly exceeded those associated with manned spaceflight.
In spite of this, the Moon was a different proposition.
Nobody knew what they would find there or whether their hardware would even function in that environment.
The kind of mentality that drives men to compete for Love Island is not the mentality that drove Armstrong to the Moon.
He was a reluctant hero who was visibly exhilarated by the technical thrill of his work.
His command module pilot, Michael Collins, did not set foot on the Moon but managed to survive in lunar orbit to retrieve his colleagues from the surface.
Collins wrote several books about his adventures in outer space. Carrying The Fire was first published in the early 1970s and was republished in the early 21st Century. To this day, it is widely regarded as the best first person account of the Apollo programme.
Armstrong’s partner on the lunar surface, Buzz Aldrin, had a harder time.
In the years that followed his departure from the programme, Aldrin succumbed to the bottle and experienced his first divorce.
Shaking it all off, he eventually remarried and found a new purpose in the popularisation of science.
To some, Aldrin became the antithesis of Armstrong, attending one speaking engagement after another and always taking his cut. Pitch up to the right meeting and he’ll sign a science-themed book for you, so long as you’re willing to stand in the queue and pay the designated $20.
He’s frail and elderly figure now, but he’s still out there and still doing his best to urge us on to Mars.
Let’s face it, Mars would be something else, a truly different target and a challenge fit for the 21st century.
In the 50 years since the landing in the Sea of Tranquillity, nobody else has had the strength or the courage to follow suite. Steve Cutts is a Worcestershire-based
science writer