Western Daily Press (Saturday)
THE SOUND OF VOICES A QUARTER OF A MILLION MILES AWAY WAS JUST SO THRILLING
West-based journalist KEITH ROSSITER reflects on that magical moment 50 years ago when the whole world was on tenterhooks as Neil Armstrong took those famous steps
FIFTY years ago this weekend, a small boy was hunched by the radio in a small town in Africa, thrilled by the sound of voices from a quarter of a million miles away.
That small boy was one of the millions around the world who lived and breathed the Apollo 11 moon landings.
In the early hours (GMT) of July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on another celestial body.
Nasa’s official timeline for the moon landing records, “First step taken lunar surface. That’s one small step for man… one giant leap for mankind.”
The lunar module, codenamed ‘Eagle’, or LM in Nasa’s documents, had touched down on the Moon’s surface at 20:17:39 the night before, the 20th.
Neil Armstrong, the mission commander, set foot on the moon at 02:56:15 on July 21.
Memory fades, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have managed to stay awake until almost 4am local time to listen to a live broadcast, so it must have been a recording.
While audiences in Britain and America were able to follow the drama on TV, all we had was radio. But as an avid science fiction fan, the pictures in my own head were better than any of the ghost-like images beamed over the airwaves.
It was weeks or months before the British Pathé ‘Man On The Moon’ documentary arrived in our local cinema, a shabby palace of fun and fantasy we dubbed The Bughouse.
For me, the moon landing was the culmination of a childhood spent reading science fantasy – most of it old paperbacks and comics from the 1940s and 1950s.
I grew up on tales from dogeared back issues of magazine by authors such as Isaac Asimov, who would later become household names.
The cover illustrations alone were beyond astounding, and the titles of the stories were often as much as a boy needed to be transported to other worlds: Iceworld, Cosmophyte, The Currents of Space, to name a few found on the internet.
Space for me was not the void it has become. Fiction had peopled it with a selection of creatures worthy of
A book that had pride of place on my bookshelf was an exciting piece of futurology dating from (I think) 1953. The long-forgotten author of the long-forgotten title confidently predicted that man would land on the moon in the 1990s, and the first manned voyage to Mars would happen in, if I recall correctly, 2020.
He wasn’t counting on John F. Kennedy, who decreed that
America would leapfrog the Russians and land on the moon by the end of the Sixties, whatever the cost.
But as for manned flights to Mars, we’re a very long way off because the passion seemed to go out of space exploration through the recession of the 1970s, which brought to an end the era of post-war growth.
Just 12 people walked on the moon before the Apollo programme was canned in 1972.
So here I sit, earthbound, when I should have been holidaying on the moon and thrilling to the growth of a new colony on Mars.
Over the years many people have voiced the view that space exploration is a waste of money when there are problems on earth to solve.
There will always be terrestrial problems to solve. That’s no excuse for doing nothing.
In 2017, the famous astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking warned that the human race must start leaving earth within 30 years to avoid being wiped out by overpopulation and climate change.
He said it was crucial to establish colonies on Mars and the moon, and take a Noah’s Ark of plants, animals, fungi and insects, to start creating a new world.
Prof Hawking said it was only a matter of time before the Earth as we know it is destroyed by an asteroid strike, soaring temperatures or over-population.
So the news comes not a moment too soon that, 50 years after Apollo 11, Nasa is planning a return to the moon as the first step to Mars.