Tonight I watched the excellent "Apollo 11" documentary by Todd Douglas Miller that was produced by CNN films. I don't know whether it was in theaters, or if it was shown on CNN - I got my copy from the library, on dvd, as usual, and I am glad it arrived just a few days ago so that I could time my screening perfectly to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing.
I can still remember that day, July 20th 1969. I was nine years old. Me and my brother Chris, who was five, were playing out in front of our house on Osborne Street in Northridge. If I recall correctly, we were gathering up walnuts for yet another walnut throwing battle, or perhaps to make a line of walnuts spanning the street for cars to run over. We always got a kick out of that. But that afternoon our activity was interrupted by Dad, who opened the front door and called out to us.
"Boys! Come inside! The astronauts are about to land on the Moon"!
The landing was televised - can you believe that?! That was some absolutely incredible technology for 1969, or even today. Dad, an Air Force veteran, was a big fan of the space program and had been watching all morning when the live coverage first went on the air. Chris and I went out and played because it seemed to be taking forever. But when Dad called for us to come inside and watch the landing, we dropped our shirts-full of walnuts (t-shirts pulled up to make a collection pouch) and went into the house.
There, in the living room, on a black and white set that had perhaps a 17 inch screen, we stood and watched as the Lunar Excursion Module made it's final approach to the Moon. If you saw any of the JPL replay footage today, then you saw the exact same thing. I watched it myself, on Facebook. Or maybe you also saw it on July 20, 1969, as it was happening. It was a very big deal as you can imagine. People all over the world stopped whatever they were doing to watch.
I can remember standing there in the living room of our house, excited but impatient, listening to the radio patter between Mission Control and the LEM. It sounded like code to me, official "pilot speak" in monotone technical language. Imagine being Neil Armstrong, who was actually flying the LEM, guiding it to it's landing spot on another planet. No doubt he had to pay close attention to what he was doing! He couldn't afford to get excited. But as a nine year old boy, I couldn't wait for the astronauts to touch down. Like millions of other kids, and humans worldwide in general, I'd been following the space program since I was old enough to understand it. Now they were about to culminate the experience with the moment we had all been waiting for.
I can still remember the moment of touchdown. It gave me goosebumps to see it again today on Facebook, replayed at the exact same time of day by JPL. I remember it seemed to take forever for Armstrong to exit the capsule, but I can remember watching him come down the ladder, and then finally his feet touched the surface of the Moon.
We stood and watched the fuzzy black and white image on TV, and then he uttered his famous line :
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind".
To this day, I think it's the greatest human achievement the world has ever seen.
We went to the Moon five more times (six if you count Apollo 13, which had to abort), and after a while it seemed like old hat. By 1971 they were driving a dune buggy around up there. I mean, holy smokes, can you even imagine that? And they were exploring some really weird craters and venturing much further from the landing site than Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ever did. Everybody still watched every takeoff from Florida and every landing on the Moon for the later Apollo missions, but it will always be Apollo 11 that is most remembered and celebrated, because it was the first.
It's amazing to me that it happened a half century ago now, and that conversely it seems futuristic, like it was ahead of it's time, even now. Because now, even though we have Rovers on Mars, and SpaceX rockets in test orbits, it's like we are back in 1960, spacewise, when we already had the same level of achievement with out first satellites and early Redstone rockets. And we've been doing the Mars Rover thing for forty years now, so we've gone backwards and it's as if we are learning to do it all over again, with private money instead of the great power of NASA.
It's as if it still hasn't settled in what a remarkable achievement it was.
For Christmas in 1968, Dad got me a Moon Globe as a present. At the time, Apollo 8 had just launched. This was another historic mission, the first one to orbit the Moon, ten times. Apollo fans will remember astronaut Frank Borman's Christmas Day prayer from the book of Genesis, which was broadcast worldwide from the capsule of Apollo 8. As an aside, it was used as an overdub sample on one of my favorite albums of all time, Mike Oldfield's "The Songs Of Distant Earth".
But that Christmas Day, I had received my Moon Globe as a present, while the first astronauts were orbiting the Moon and while Frank Borman was delivering his long distance prayer.
Fifty one years later, I am happy to report that I still have my Moon Globe. It sits atop my refrigerator in The Tiny Apartment that I live in. For some crazy reason - and I know not why - it has remained with me all these years, through the long period when it was stuffed in a closet in the 70s and 80s, to when my house was destroyed in the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, and though several moves from house to house in the crazy late 1990s....
Man, I have no idea how that Moon Globe stayed with me, because when I became a young adult, rock and roll was all that mattered (well, that and a few other things). But in my 20s and 30s, and up to my mid-40s, the memories and importance of the space program was in my rearview mirror.
So I have no idea how that Moon Globe stuck with me during that decades long interim and has now been in my possession for 51 years. But there it sits on top of my fridge, and as of last year I have a Lunar Atlas to go with it.
Life is weird, and sometimes all you can say is "wow".
That's all I know for tonight. See you on the Moon during the dreamtime, then in church tomorrow morning, with tons of love beamed in all directions in between. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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