The week in radio Charlotte Runcie How the Moon landing found its home on radio
An estimated 600m people around the world watched the Moon landing live on television in 1969, the pictures grainy and indistinct. I was born in the Eighties and my earliest memories of learning about the event are mostly sound: the roar of the blastoff, the hush of the journey punctuated by equipment bleeps and crackling American-accented radio transmissions, and, at last, “the Eagle has landed”, and Neil Armstrong’s awed voice announcing one giant leap for mankind.
The Apollo 11 Moon landing couldn’t have happened without radio communication and radio is the perfect way to experience the wonder of it afresh. Everywhere you turn on the radio at the moment, someone from Nasa is marking the 50th anniversary by talking about how the great mission was achieved, with archive sound recordings of that world-changing moment. And it proves how much of our cultural memory of the Moon landing is based on what it sounded like rather than what it looked like.
“Apollo 11 was essentially a very long radio show,” said broadcaster and science historian James Burke in James Burke: Our Man on the Moon (Saturday, Radio 4), because there were so few TV transmissions coming
down from space. TV broadcasts were too complicated for Nasa to organise throughout the mission, and so the descent itself was only available in sound, with no pictures.
In this spellbinding programme recorded in front of an audience, accompanied by archive clips, Burke recalled how he had been the presenter of the BBC’S live TV coverage in 1969, recruited because he was a Tomorrow’s World presenter and the BBC “needed a geek” to explain what was happening. Burke described the “stone-age” TV capabilities at the time meant that the presenting team had to ad lib for long periods with occasional guidance from their producers given over a landline phone call to the studio.
Burke conveyed the enormity of the moment from a British perspective. As a presenter by trade, while other programmes had technological insight from people working at Nasa, Burke excelled at actually telling the story, focusing on the really exciting bits.
He related the terrifying moments where things went wrong, the immense amount of preparation that had gone into Apollo 11, and the sense of humanity amid the technology. We heard a clip of the radio communications in the preceding Apollo 10 mission, for instance, when a piece of radar equipment wasn’t working and would prevent the craft from being able to descend. The astronauts couldn’t get it working again. Mission Control sent one last-ditch instruction: “How about trying to recycle the power switch?” In the command module, the astronauts duly turned the switch off and on again. The reply was swift. “Hey, that did it you guys! It’s on!”
Burke’s storytelling was funny and insightful, his enthusiasm infectious, and he conveyed the grandeur of the achievement beautifully.
The sense of awe was more muted in Eno and Cox on the Moon (Saturday, 6 Music), with the now well-established 6 Music broadcasting partnership of two Brians, one from the world of music and the other from physics, both passionate about space. They talked in a laid-back pub chat sort of way about why it was all so amazing, and played some Moonthemed tunes (highlights were The Marcels’ 1961 doo-wop version of Blue Moon, and Public Service Broadcasting’s euphoric 2015 indie song Go! from their concept album The Race for Space, which sampled and recreated Apollo 11 transmissions), and got quite philosophical towards the end. “We were born of this planet and this planet is our mother,” said Eno, before suggesting that it’s now time to leave our mother and be free to explore on our own to see what else the Universe has in store.
And what would that entail? Well,
Moonbase 2029 (Tuesday, Radio 4) was a fascinating meditation on what’s next, focusing on the push to establish a permanent base on the Moon, for starters. Presenter Dallas Campbell encountered some key research projects, such as using Moon dust as a building material, and work towards being able to grow food on the Moon’s surface. We learned that urine – a readily available resource on the Moon, as long as astronauts helpfully provide it – can be converted into a fertiliser which Moon residents could use to grow tomatoes. One person could feed 10,000 square metres of growing area with their urine.
And on that bombshell, there’s been so much Moon-related broadcasting that I think we’re all a bit mooned out. I may need to spend the next month staring at the Earth, for balance.