How can it really be forty years to the day since the first human beings walked on the surface of a celestial body that was not our own little world? How can it be that we've never surpassed that magnificent achievement after four decades? Oh don't get me wrong, there have been other incredible, world changing endeavours - the Human Genome project springs to mind - but after four decades not to have striven beyond that Moon walk is dreadfully sad. Its like Concorde being retired without a next generation bigger, better, faster, more efficient replacement coming in, or the Shuttle due to finish its flights next year. Sometimes it feels like we've gone backwards a bit, not a good thing as a species.
Yes, I know there are other important priorities needing world resources, not least feeding the hungry and controlling runaway populations. And some will say we shouldn't 'squander' money on space when we have these problems to look at here. But as Bill Hicks used to say, if we didn't spend so much on every more devious ways to kill one another we could spend the money we spend on weapons to feed the hungry and still have plenty left over to explore space. Hell, if we took what women collectively spend on make-up every year we could do that! But still I feel sad that those things which marked the wave of a bright future when I was a wee boy now turn out to have been the highwater mark and the tide of progress has receded. Although I did really enjoy the image of all three of the Apollo 11 crew with Obama on the news. Three of my boyhood heroes. Still three of my heroes.
my signed copy of Two Sides of the Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov, a memento of the day when an Apollo astronaut came into my bookstore and I got to shake his hand.
Hard to believe that on this day forty years ago human beings, for the first time in all of recorded history, were on their way to the moon. July 16th, 1969, and the enormous Saturn V lifts from its pad, its gigantic bulk suddenly no longer earthbound, and it reaches into the sky... and then beyond the sky. Humans have made many great explorations of new lands, uncharted oceans, jungles, deserts, mountains, but this, this was something completely new. Less than a decade after Gagarin had become the first man in space (an event itself which came only a couple of decades after jets made their first appearance, those in turn coming only four decades after Orville and Wilbur's historic first flight at Kittyhawk) humans were travelling to the Moon.
Its hung over every human culture there has ever been, since the days of hunter-gatherers, its been observed by the early priest-astronomers of the first civilisations in what we now call the Middle East, worshipped as a goddess by many cultures, observed by the first modern scientists like Galileo and Copernicus, its affected our weather and our tides for billions of years. But the idea of men on the Moon was a dream, a work of fantasy. Until July 1969. When it became something truly remarkable. An event that for one brief spell drew together all the peoples of our divided world into one species, dreaming the same dream, hoping the same hopes, willing Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong to succeed in the daring, dangerous endeavour. A magnificent moment.
NASA's restored video of Neil Armstrong's 'giant leap' (link via Boing Boing)
