My grandmother once told me that when she heard on the BBC that America had dropped an atomic weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, she suddenly thought how, with man now possessing the true might of Gods, the world had fundamentally changed. She would say that there was a pre-Hiroshima world and a post-Hiroshima world and they had very little in common.
Today, as we celebrated and commemorate the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping on to the Moon at 10:56 PM ET on July 20, 1969, I think the same is true of that “small step” and that “giant leap.” There was a world fundamentally held in check by Earthly bounds and one, with the world truly watching Armstrong and Aldrin’s every movement, quite suddenly that wasn’t.
If Hiroshima, not long followed by the bombing of Nagasaki, was human beings unleashing the wrath of God, the successful mission of Apollo 11 was the species reaching out to touch the face of God.
It was amazing, and, as we too often forget in an era when space has become incidental tales of clogged toilets -- and space stories are just another sandpit for movies, comics, videogames and others to play in -- real. They were up there, they looked back at us and they could -- as President Nixon took preparations with a speech on the hypothetical tragedy -- perish returning.
It was not an easy landing, and the real drama wasn’t on TV. With less than 30 seconds of fuel, Armstrong, with Aldrin calling out altitude info, had to take manual control of the Eagle because the onboard computer system, which had less real power than your cell phone, was overloaded with radar data and unforeseen lunar conditions. They were almost two dozen miles off course -- the navigation system was bringing the men down in a far rougher and more potentially dangerous area than NASA had planned.
Later, Armstrong descended to the moon’s surface and took that “one small step” and the “giant leap.” No wonder there are still those who get a little "Capricorn One" wiggy and claim, based on light reflections and shadows, that the whole thing was staged in a studio in Burbank. The fact is the moon landing was a perfectly scripted and improvised TV moment.
And a relatively low-tech one at that.
Everything we saw from the celestial body came from a tiny camera off the side of the capsule. NASA’s final tab for the Apollo program was almost $160 billion in today’s dollars -- and not a ton of that went to the tech that actually got the images that made it all actual to the world.
That camera then sent low-grade imagery surging from the moon to the antennas at the Goldstone Observatory in the Mojave Desert and the NASA station at Honeysuckle Creek outside Australia’s capitol of Canberra.
