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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The Moon landing was wonderful but the real emotional moment for me was Apollo 8, the first mission out of the gravity well and the first look back at the Earth with the Christmas Eve broadcast with Frank Borman reading from Genesis. Very moving.
Phil Brown
I remember explaining to my grandmother, who’d seen covered wagons, how people were at the moon. She listened very seriously, and was amazed. I had to explain to her that the moon was a world circling our world, and not just a light in the sky.
And I can only regret that we didn’t keep up the momentum: where’s my Space Travel?
The deep link for that post: http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=38779 in case anybody wants it. 😉
This is one of those major events that we should all be writing down for the great-great-grandchildren to come. I’ve got a list started and work on it as the spirit moves me.
I really enjoyed the link to Tor.com. Thank you.
For a laugh, I brought in Moon Pies to work today. I also posted a note above them commenting on how primitive the computers were by our current standards. (Moon pies, marshmallow creme between two graham crackers, dipped in chocolate. It’s a Southern thing.)
Heh, yes and so many people hitting that site that you can hardly get in. 😉
(Relatedly, did you notice that Nasa admits to having erased the tapes of the original lunar landing, to reuse the tapes for other things? See http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre56f5mk-us-nasa-tapes/ for the story.)
I know a guy who was responsible for trying to recover NASA records on punch cards, which had been soaked, mildewed, and nested in by mice. All it takes to erase a tape is one secretary grabbing a box of tapes and dumping them in with others. Unless somebody is assigned to collect significant tapes…they’re often toast.
The Apollo Moon Landing was a supremely wondrous event. For the first time in human history, one of our race stepped foot on another celestial body. Not just Earth, but our moon has footsteps, too. Soon the Chinese and the Indians will follow suit.
I hope that space shots will be so common place that our children may one day stroll on the moon, on Mars and other bodies orbiting the sun. I hope that soon we will have Space Based Solar Power satellites beaming energy to earth so cheaply that all the poor will have as much electricity as they want without destroying the earth to get it.
I would also like to note that all the above could have been done by 1976 had we as a race not fought the cold war and now the jehadist war. We hope that we as a species will get our collective acts together and create something for our decedents to be proud of, not a war torn and stinking cesspool of a planet.
Science fiction notwithstanding, I always hoped we’d get our collective acts together BEFORE we were able to colonize anywhere else. For all the amazing stories it makes, I’d hate to think we’d just dump our species’ issues all over other places. I’d rather read about it than live it!
We were going to make a moon cake today to celebrate the landing, but my friend’s birthday was last Thursday, so we made it then: a carrot cake with white cream cheese frosting, craters edged with black sugar, and a lunar lander made of licorice gumdrops, toothpicks, four gold Werthers candies, Fig Newtons, and jelly baby astronauts (a few more than necessary). Caption: ONE SMALL STEP—HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALICE! It was very tasty—a moon made of cake beats a moon made of cheese any day!
I’ve always been a strong supporter of the space program. After all, how can we expect to understand ourselves and our world without learning about what else is out there? It’s sad that our race, Americans especially, is introspective enough not to consider exploration and science for its own sake as important.
Equally sad is that it took the Russians to push us there. Then, without further stimulus from either them or anyone else, we let the project fail. Now the Space Program is going into the hands of individual companies. I hope that they put it to better use than the government, and I hope that the Indians and Chinese will will be able to go where our hearts failed to take us.
I wasn’t born yet when all the exciting stuff happened. As I read elsewhere recently, it feels like we are in the middle of the dark ages of space exploration. We wasted the momentum. Back on the day we landed on the moon did anyone, thinking of year 2000 and beyond, believe we would be much further than we are? One of my biggest space related memories was us screwing up millions of dollars on a robotic lander because we confused the metric and English measurements up. Woo-hoo. *sigh*
I enjoyed reading all those comments on the event by so many wonderful writers – like 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. So many different emotions sparked by the same amazing event. Yours was rather haiku-like – very simple and evocative. I also liked Kage Baker’s.
I watched every second of the landing. I had a personal stake: my father worked at Rockwell International–North American Aviation at the start of Apollo–as Director of Program Management for Apollo. North American was the prime contractor, so Dad’s department tracked the million progress items for the entire project.
It’s interesting to see the different perspectives here in this blog. I was two when we landed on the moon, and not born when Kennedy died (the other apparently really big seminal event for a generation). I am told that I watched the landing, but have to admit that I am not sure if I remember seeing it, or just have seen the re-runs of the landing enough to make it seem like I saw the real thing. Most of what I remember about space exploration is the Shuttle, and that gets kind of boring rather fast. You hear about the latest launch, and it’s pretty much what we have done multiple times before. I think that, coupled with the fact that we live in an age that has come to realize that Science, for all its polished metal and flashing lights, doesn’t necessarily have ALL the answers to mankind’s problems, is what keeps use in the doldrums space-wise. We realize it’s going to be lots of baby steps to get to the other planets, and baby steps are boring to watch, so there’s no strong push to make them.
If anyone is interested in an excellent movie with an unusual take on the first moon landing, I recommend “The Dish”.
It’s an Australian movie set at the Parkes radio telescope, which was used to relay the live broadcast of the moon landing.
It’s an intelligent, warm comedy, based on fact, which follows a small group of scientists and engineers in remote, small-town Australia as they deal with crises such as a power outage wiping their computer, and high winds threatening the telescope dish, to bring live coverage of the moon landing.
Here’s the trailer on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc4MSie-P0k
I strongly echo the endorsement of the Dish – a great movie!
Me three! I saw it in the theater, and bought a copy on DVD because it was so good. The culture clash between Sam Neill’s crew of laid-back Australian engineers and Patrick Warburton(!) as the high-pressure NASA administrator from the States is a hoot.
Philosopher77 this is one of those topics that can’t stand alone. You have to see the entire picture of what was happening in the world to understand part of the reason we slowed to a crawl. The moon landing was 12 years after Sputnik, when the space race began during the Cold War. Televisions had not been around for that long and I’m not sure when they became common in every home, but it was around the time of Sputnik. I’ve recently learned that the national evening news had only expanded from 15 to 30 minutes in Sept., 1963.
Space news had become too common for the average American. The Moon landing was special as was our second major disaster, Apollo 13, because it went on for days. From what I understand, the Russians had a lot of disasters, but we had so few that when Challenger exploded, we almost shut down the space program for a time. Mistakes were not acceptable.
Basically, Americans became bored and other things were more important.
I spent the day yesterday wishing I had a copy of SOLAR SAILORS, I so wanted some pro-space filk. A Leslie Fish CD.
Some of those songs are on YouTube – I sent links for “Hope Eyrie” to a couple of people at work.
Part of it is that NASA made it sound too routine, and part of it is that the politicians thought it was safe and easy, stuff we didn’t need to spend lots of money on, and decided that money was better used on other things with payback more in forms they understood. (Having the shuttle being designed by engineers to specs by Congress didn’t help any, as neat as those are.)
My father looked at Viking’s pictures of Mars, and said that if they got the bugs out of the life-support systems, he’d like to go there.
Here’s Leslie’s page. http://www.lesliefish.com/frameset1.htm
She has Hope Eyrie up for the occasion.
The book shown in the video, “What If the Moon Didn’t Exist,” is interesting if you’re found of popular science books. I had an email conversation with the author. The most interesting thing I got from it is that most of Earth’s warmth is from radioactive decay in the core. This is why it gets warmer as you go down in mines. Little energy comes from tidal forces or sunlight.
This makes the whole life zone concept more than a little off, but in a good way. We have at least three power sources to run a planet’s biology: radioactivity, sunlight, and tidal warming. With Io bubbling like a witch’s cauldron, there’s no question it has enough energy to support life–too much. Maybe Europa is in the Goldilocks zone.
Since plants grow in shade, we have way more energy than needed for photosynthesis. We know of a number of chemosynthesis species, not big but edible by herbivores. This opens the door for chemosynthesis-based biospheres, so even bitty L and T class “stars” (no fusion) have the possibility of holding life. And how much easier on evolution on a tidally locked planet. The only real stellar limit is stars much bigger than Sol burn out too fast for life to evolve.
And since it now appears planets are everywhere….
Wow…just…wow. I forget sometimes what a glorious voice Julia has. Time to dig out the tapes and get them transfered to CD. She’s evidently working on another album, too. YAY!
Thanks, Carolyn. I didn’t know Leslie had a page. I’m glad to have the link.
For that You-Tube video of The Eagle Has Landed, I tear up every time I see that video of the orbiter breaking up over Texas. Willie McCool was one of my plebes at the Naval Academy, when I was a firstie. That guy just had the touch…
God speed you, Willie.
Jeff
I remember the big protests of 25-30 years ago about why we should “waste” our money exploring space when there were people here on Earth who were poor, hungry, sick, etc. My feeling is that those wonderfully compact electronic toys that the protesting parties had stuck in their ears, as well as the advances in medical science, were a result of the space programs need to shove as much stuff into a small package and have a fully functional device, as well as new medical tests to ensure the astronauts were healthy before and after their missions. A lot of “questionable” projects that are funded by tax dollars become commonplace parts of our daily lives – i.e. the Interwebs, personal computers (yes, that includes Macs), .mp3 players, smaller and smaller cell phones, etc.
Why should we explore space? We’re a one-planet species, perhaps we should employ “Arks” to hold as much genetic material from every life form we can collect on Earth.
In the meantime, I’ll support NASA, and any other peaceful space program, for their research and exploration. Otherwise, how will the human species ever achieve the things we read about in science fiction?
We had a flurry of letters to the OKC paper about why we had sent billions into space with all the people starving on Earth. I followed them up with a letter explaining that if we compacted the vehicle we had just sent into space, we would have about the size and weight of metal of a crushed Volkswagen beetle, while that money was still on Earth, in the pockets of welders and electricians and engineers in Huntsville, hot dog stand owners in Houston, and the miners and makers and designers and the people who fed, clothed and sheltered all of the above. Not even to mention that the GAO has reckoned that for every dime we spend on space research we get back a dollar in increased productivity and new products and processes.
Mine was the last letter for a considerable while.
I live about 17 miles from Neil Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta. I was in one of the bands that marched in his homecoming parade in 90 degree weather and heavy winter uniforms (I was a drummer.)
I’d tell the story of the 4 words he said before he left the LEM and stepped onto the ladder, but I’m not sure it’d go over in a “family” forum. The guys I knew that worked at NASA Langley in Virginia knew the story. It’s somewhat adult, but certainly not obscene.