www.tor.com asked me to do a short piece for their series on the moon landing. Which I did, if you’re interested.
moon landing
by CJ | Jul 20, 2009 | Journal | 40 comments
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In 1952 I bet my mother 100 pounds (about 10 weeks pay) that a human would land on the moon during our lifetimes. On July 20, 1969 I rang her to arrange to collect my winnings. Strangely she had no memory of the bet.
How convenient for her!
I was 10 at the time of the moon landing: my mother, baby brother and I, along with my aunt and uncle, were all huddled around the old, B + W television at my Grandma and Grampa’s summer camp on LIttle Bay in New Hampshire. I remember the suspense as the lander slowly, slowly came down to the surface. One of the TV commentators had said earlier that there might be up to 10 feet of lunar dust on the surface and would the lander sink in and get covered up? I breathed a great sigh of relief as it landed solidly on compact ground.
Oddly enough, I have no other memories of watching television at the Camp. Indeed, I almost wonder if we didn’t bring it in for the occasion (it was old: in a blond wood cabinet and a smallish, embedded screen: maybe 12 inches by 12 inches). Most of the night times we sat out on the porch watching that moon rise orange-red over the bay or us kids were madly chasing fireflies while the adults remained relaxed on the screened porch.
I had a fight with my dad over it. We were having one of many picnic/get-togethers with our riding club at our Ravensdale barn. Our TV was in our house …a good half-hour drive away. He thought I should stay with the group; I insisted on going home.
I thought at the time, as teenagers will do, that he just didn’t understand. I think I was wrong. My dad was a pilot. He loved to fly. He owned a flight school and was an FAA examiner as well as licensed mechanic. Years later, after age had forced him to retire from flying (and into a second career of raising horses), well into the shuttle years, he admitted to me that his greatest regret in life was that he never got a chance to fly the shuttle.
He never really talked about it, but I don’t think the dream was dead in him; I think he just resented the “monkey on a rocket” direction the space program took in the sixties, and in a way, I understand why. As thrilling as the lunar landings were, technologically, as a space program, they were a dead end. Yes, we got lots of great spinoffs, but it was a side track.
I knew it at the time. I wished we could have gotten there in something a bit more proactive. All of which didn’t stop me from watching every televised instant of every landing we ever made…including the simulations when they turned the camera into the sun on 12! I even still have a big poster from the Pacific Science Center’s 10th year anniversary of the landing.
Thanks to my dad, the movie/book The Right Stuff achieved a very personal resonance.
I was just barely 13 that night. Can you say impressionable? 😉
I was already caught up in the whole rockets-and-space thing, mainly from stuff like “Thunderbirds” more than the real thing – but herre it was, real men landing on the moon – this was the first step on the road out.
Many years later I read a comment by Jerry Pournelle that resonates within me still: “I never thought that we would stop!”
Sigh. Perhaps I’m just impatient. Looking back it took how long for the first European settlers to create a permanent settlement in the New World? In the meantime we’ve had Voyager, and Hubble, and and and…
I just got goose pimples listening to the Eagle Has Landed. Thanks for sharing that link!
Oh what the heck…here goes…
I don’t know the name of the people who lived next door to him, so I’m going to make up a name. Let’s just call them Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky.
Most people know what Armstrong said while he was on the bottom run of the ladder just before he stepped off onto the lunar surface. (“That’s one small step for a man…..”),
but not everyone knows what he said while he was getting ready to step out of the lander and onto the ladder. According to the folks at NASA, he said, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.”
and then proceeded out the door and into history. This was only heard through NASA’s systems, not over the TV broadcasts.
When Apollo 11 returned to Earth, Armstrong was asked who Mr. Gorsky was, and why was Armstrong wishing him luck? Armstrong replied that the issue was very sensitive and
he didn’t want to embarrass Mr. Gorsky in any way and that he would tell the story when the Gorsky’s had both passed away.
Several years later, the question arose again, and Armstrong said that enough time had passed, and he could now tell the story.
“When I was a boy growing up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, I was playing out on the front lawn. It was a summer day, and quite warm, and so everyone in the neighborhood had their
windows up. I could hear the Gorsky’s next door arguing quite loudly. At one point, Mrs. Gorsky’s voice became much louder than before, and I distinctly heard her say to her
husband, “You want sex? You’ll get sex WHEN THE BOY NEXT DOOR WALKS ON THE MOON!”
😆 I love it!
That is hilarious!
On another note did you all see that there is a big hole in the atmosphere of Jupiter? Something “earth” sized apparently hit the planet. I read somewhere that without a Jupiter and a moon to absorb alot of stuff flying through space that life on earth would have likely not happened. Hmmm…
It’s true. Jupiter has such a strong gravity well, that incoming comets, rocks, etc., can be snagged and go into orbit around Jupiter, or if the orbit is far enough out and the velocity of the object is high enough, Jupiter can give it a “boost” and sling it away, most of the time it goes back into “empty” space, but once in a while, it sends one our way.
Also, every time Jupiter encounters something like that and adds to the object’s velocity, Jupiter slows down in its orbit by the same amount – conservation of entergy/momentum.
Every month I have lunch with a bunch of guys from my first job, 30-mumble years ago. Many of them worked on the guidance computer software for the Apollo missions. (Their work is chronicled in the Discovery Channel’s “Moon Machines” series in the “Navigation” episode.) It’s an excellent series, available on DVD here.
I finally got the straight story about the “1202” errors you can hear on the audio of the Eagle’s descent. (The on-board computer was over-loaded because Aldrin had turned on the ascent stage radar just in case they had to abort the landing.)
BTW, the Eagle’s computer had about 70Kb memory, and ran at 100KHz. But that was all right, it didn’t have to run Windows.
Grin.
My first computer, an Atari, had more memory than one of the Pioneers, as I recall.
So does my microwave oven!