Forty years ago today three American astronauts were drifting purposefully towards the moon, on the verge of making history. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins had trained for years for their eight day trip, repeatedly risking life and limb to develop the futuristic technology that would allow them to escape Earth’s atmosphere and fly half a million miles to the moon. All were brave, but Armstrong, the leader, truly had ice in his veins. On one occasion, in May 1968, after ejecting himself from a Lunar Landing Research Vehicle seconds before it crashed and exploded, he went straight back to work for the rest of the day, without comment. Asked about the incident later, he replied, apparently without irony, “It’s always a sad day when you lose a machine.”
The astronauts’ lengthy training proved invaluable. Not even Hollywood could have scripted the cliffhanger their final approach and touchdown became. While colleagues in Houston turned blue looking at the rapidly depleting fuel gauge, Armstrong and Aldrin calmly executed the landing sequence that brought the Eagle to its historic landing. On the audio recordings of the touchdown it is barely possible to detect the stress of the moment from Armstrong and Aldrin’s calm voices, but the relief at mission control is palpable. It could not have been much closer, the rocket landed with about 20 seconds of fuel left in its tanks. Without Armstrong’s sangfroid – Collins said he was “notable for making decisions slowly, but making them well” – the mission could easily have failed just a few metres short of its goal.
President Nixon understood the risks all too well. Nervous that the launch might end catastrophically, he avoided a public appearance at the launch and had his speechwriter William Safire drat an elegy (‘In the Event of Moon Disaster’) lest the worst come to pass. The speech begins, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” The rest of America remained more hopeful. A week before the launch, tens of thousands of spectators were making their way to Cape Canaveral. On the day itself, cars were parked four deep on nearby highways and 1,000,000 spectators woke early to watch the lift-off. Worldwide the live television audience was more than a billion.
In addition to the nerves that would have beset any rational humans sitting above a massive bomb in the hopes that a controlled detonation – comparable in size to that of an atomic weapon – would send them safely into space, the crew also went into the mission with the successes of the Soviet space programme hanging over them. Eight years earlier the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space, four years before that Sputnik had orbited the
planet. The Americans were catching up, but not fast enough to win. The Apollo 11 mission was a Hail Mary pass. The Russians were almost ready to send men to the moon but were not confident that they could bring them back. The American gamble paid off by the tiniest of margins. Had the astronauts stranded themselves, irrecoverably, Russia’s Luna 15 was just a few miles away, ready to land, scoop up moon rocks and steal the Americans’ thunder. (Luna 15 tried to land a few hours before the American craft began its journey home, but malfunctioned and crashed.)
After the moon landing further exploration became more collegial. Years of mutual distrust and suspicion gradually gave way to international initiatives. This, in turn, helped pave the way for many technological marvels we take for granted today – such as satellite television and global positioning satellites. Remarkably, however, the landing did not spur further attempts at interplanetary travel. Forty years later there is some talk of manned missions to Mars, but space exploration has shifted towards the deployment of ever more sophisticated technology. One recent example is the Planck satellite which the European Space Agency launched from French Guiana in May, to examine the microwave background radiation which may hold clues to the creation of the universe nearly 14 billion years ago.
An unprecedented level of technical wizardry sent Americans to the moon, but beyond their justifiable national pride in the science and gadgetry which had been developed en route, there was also a wider, more inclusive sense of achievement. Mankind had put a man on the moon, and America’s part in leading the way cemented its status as a pioneering democracy in a way that no event has since. After the September 11 attacks there was a brief period of global
sympathy with the United States, and a grudging recognition that it was a symbol of ‘the free world’ – but this hardly compares with the collective wonder that the moon landing inspired in its day. The Apollo mission is a memory from a less sceptical age, one capable of talking about our common humanity without reservations or apologies.
