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One Small Step, 55 Years Ago
Dateline July 20, 1969: My immediate family was ensconced in the UK, visiting our grandparents, aunts, uncles and sundry other long-lived relatives and friends before they kicked off, and happy to belong to the tribe that Mr. She would–decades later–come to refer to as the Dúnedain, because of our long-livedness and generally extraordinary compos-mentisness. (A few failures along the way. You can’t win ’em all.)
At the same time, the United States was, in an effort to fulfill JFK’s promise, about to put a man on the moon. My Dad, who was–just like the late Mr. She–a gadget freak extraordinaire, was fascinated and we rented a television for the summer for the singular purpose of watching the moon landing. (Just to clarify, Mum and Dad kept the house they bought in the Worcestershire countryside shortly after their 1950 marriage for £1,800 until their deaths. So we always had a place to land when we went “home.”)
At that time (1969) many homes in the UK didn’t have a television at all. Just as they didn’t have a telephone. My parents had the first phone in the neighborhood, and for a couple of decades we had a piggy-bank on the shelf by the phone, and neighbors who came round to use it would feed the money into the slot to cover the bills. DROitwich Three-Oh-Double-Two, if anyone wants to check.
So late at night, July 20, 1969, we–and quite a few of our neighbors who didn’t have a TV of their own–gathered in front of our rented television for a party and celebration. It’s a fond memory, one I’ll never forget.
Fast forward, about forty years.
Dad has been dead for two years. Mum has–effectively–lost her marbles. And the only close family member who remembers that night is me. (Or “I” as the grammar Nazis might posit.)
My sister, God bless her, has taken Dad’s slide collection and had the thousands of them digitized into JPG format. I wish we’d done it several years before and could have gone through it with him before he died. (Just a thought for you all.) The pictures were impressed on a CD, and–on a subsequent visit to the UK–I got my own copy and, when I got home, loaded them onto my PC photo editing app.
“Hang on,” I thought while I was going through them. WTH are these? Mistakes? (Why are we paying for mistakes???)
There were these, and several more.
Eventually, the memory.
Dad, taking photos of the television screen. Dad, running outside with his camera at the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon (surely–if you look hard enough–you can see him, stepping onto the moon, in the first photo above? I know I can).
Dad, excited like a small child. That was the best of him.
That was then.
Decades later I came to discover that others shared such memories with me, including my eventual husband and his children who celebrated the fourth birthday of his oldest son–and their older brother–that same night.
Soon, all of us who remember that event will be dead. And it’ll be up to the intelligence of the ages, either real or artificial, to decide whether it was real or not. I’m hoping, and voting, for reality over artifice.
But–although I’m pretty clear on reality–I’m not sure it will prevail.
What say you?
Note: Photo at top of post was taken by Armstrong, of Aldrin, on the moon on July 20, 1969 and is in the public domain. See here.
Published in General
The anniversary of the moon landing reminds me of a film made by North American Aviation in 1964, which puts the space program in the context of the American history of exploration and development. Music, a mix of traditional and composed, is by the Kingston Trio, with the new songs composed by John Steward. The film is on YouTube, here.
The cultural gap between the America of 1964 and the America of today is clear.
(edited to actually include link to the video)
I would have been in 1st grade that day, and have no memory of the moon landing.
The next landing occurred during 2nd grade and the teacher brought in a small TV. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t make anything out of the small picture. Your father’s last slide looks better than what I recall seeing.
That very picture, in this very room.
It was hard to tell who was jazzed the most; my father or me.
I chastised My Parents for years for not getting Me Here in time to witness the moon landing.
“And it’ll be up to the intelligence of the ages, either real or artificial, to decide whether it was real or not. I’m hoping, and voting, for reality over artifice.
But–although I’m pretty clear on reality–I’m not sure it will prevail.
What say you?”
Oh, I think most people will believe it was real, to the extent that they think about it at all…I’m more worried about how many people will view it as important, rather than ‘why did they want to do that?”
There’s an old science-fiction story…“Ambition,” written by William Bade in 1952. The idea is that a scientist working on space travel finds that he has somehow been brought by time-travel to an era hundreds of years in the future. He is thrilled, because he assumes that the people of the future will have developed space travel to a high degree, and that he will actually be able to fulfill his dream of journeying to the planets. “Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus…Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars!”
And he finds that the future civilization indeed has created vehicles that would easily be capable of such exploration…but they are used only as super-airliners. Nobody has any interest in traveling into space, indeed, they can’t imagine why anyone would want to do such a thing. A sympathetic woman explains to the protagonist that “this is the Age of Man. We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists…are studying human rather than nuclear reactions.” There appears to be no thirst for adventure in a form likely to be recognized by a 20th-century man. (Indeed, it seems that the reason the future people chose the protagonist as a research subject is that they found his interest in going to the moon and beyond to be so bizarre as to be worthy of psychological investigation.) The story’s subtitle is:
To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail!
So…when a society reaches a certain level of wealth and sophistication, does the desire for adventure tend to die out? I’m reminded of a passage from another SF story, this one by Heinlein, in which a Martian is asked why he and other members of his species just sit around all day, “growing together,” as they called it, never actually doing anything. The Martian’s reply is: “My fathers have labored, and I am weary.”
Is there psychological truth in this remark? Are many modern-day Americans and Europeans “weary” because of the heavy lifting done by their forefathers in creating civilization? To what degree has the desire for adventure and achievement been replaced by first, low-risk faux adventure (play a videogame rather than start a business, for example), and second, obsessively narcissistic self-focus?…and, to the extent this has actually happened, is it an inevitable consequence of a certain stage of social evolution?…or is it rather a consequence of certain current reversible social factors?
I think I have previously related how the whole space adventure captured my family (my father and three of his four boys went into the space business designing and build unmanned stuff that goes into space (think Hubble and various other observatories, and imaging systems that probe our Earth in many different spectrums). It started with the space race and the older boys remember watching the TV well past our bedtime (on the east coast) to see the first man walk on the moon.
I had the opportunity to listen to Michael Collins discuss and riff on his time during the Apollo period and his post astronaut years at a several hour long live discussion at the 50th anniversary at Oshkosh Airventure in 2019, a little less than 2 year from when he passed. I think it was one of his last large public venues, and some of us were laughing thru tears at some of his remembrances and where each of can recall where we were at that time.
God speed to all of those intensely brave men from that era when failure was mostly cheated, and it took many years to be admitted how close we came on more than the several missions that we all knew about at the time … and they flew anyway.
Apollo 11 launched on my 14th birthday. Best birthday present ever. Best birthday candle EVAH!
I remember where Michael Collins was. One of the guys on TV said that he was on the dark side, out of communication with everybody else in the universe and probably listening to country and western.
I wish I knew what songs.
Hitchhiking round Europe, completely missed it.
It was an exciting day. In 2015, I chatted with Michael Collins about it and met his charming daughter.
I just put up a post about Movies Featuring Courage, especially moral and intellectual courage. What movies about the space program would best fit under this heading?…any thoughts?
Edited my comment at the top to fix the link to the movie, With Their Eyes on the Stars.
Sounds like an excellent post. Care to write one about Yer experience?
For perhaps many reasons, a preoccupation among many of my peers is security, and they do not enjoin that term with risk. For whatever reason, my wife and I do and so started a business because we saw that as securing our family’s future. Exploration has, so far, been limited to this continent and always with our two children. I’m unsure how to count an island 40 miles from Venezuela and a road trip in Panama that veered a relative few miles before the border with Colombia in terms of continental plates. It’s adventure, but not to the ends of the Earth.
Is it narcissistic to personalize the adventure, or should we be more vocal and encouraging of more organizational efforts? Perhaps this idea was affected by our lack of institutional faith. Even while appreciating past efforts, the NASA event formative in our youth was, actually, a disaster. That is our generation’s version of “Where were you when…?” Then they lost another one.
Fear is what was chiefly transmitted, not vision. The previous generation had free love, we had AIDS. You had Apollo, we had Challenger. Many of our peers thought they’d work the factories, then the factories went away. Do I have time for going gaga over Musk’s Mars vision? You bet I do, even while some my age and many younger believe Florida will be underwater in 30 years “if we don’t act now!”
They’re preoccupied with fear because of a steady diet of it, amplified the last couple of decades. Heavy lifting? We’re in a fight to make others believe a future is possible, and that decline is not inevitable.
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law–a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
–Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
I can understand a certain type of weariness, in the sense that to some degree, the labors of the past seem in a way actually easier than the labors now. Maybe that’s just how hindsight works, but I think it’s valid to how people think about it today. I’m sure that sounds odd or even ridiculous/impossible to many people. But consider the extent to which labor – especially manual labor – in the past might have been exhausting etc, but to a large extent it was known to produce benefit. Much of today’s “labor” may be expended and end up producing nothing, or even negative results. So the risk-vs-reward calculation changes. Especially when so many people are renting, cannot possibly raise their own food, etc.
And even before that, Star Trek did a lot.
Great post, but at the risk of embarrassing myself enormously, I am going to admit I remain perplexed by its title. It said, yesterday evening, and it still says, this morning, “54 years ago today.” Which would be July 20, 1970. Did something momentous happen precisely one year after the first moon landing?
Same here.
I remember I was at the beach with my parents, watching the historic “One small step” moment. Right afterward, I ran outside to look up at the moon . . .
55 years ago.
And there was a gorgeous full moon last night. We were at an outdoor performance of the play “Ring Around the Moon” at American Players Theater. No relationship to the space program, but it was nice to see rising above the stage.
(Apparently full moon was 6 AM this morning. Close enough.)
Whoops. As I’ve often said, math isn’t my strong suit. I’ll fix it! Many thanks!
I was 7 years old, we were in California (Pacific Standard Time), and my brother, about ten years older than me, I remember saying, “You need to watch this. It’s history and you’ll be glad you did.” And he was right.
The moon here was beautiful last night. I think there must have been a lovely sunset too, but I only caught the last bit of it.
This is a very important subject. Let’s discuss a little further.
Apollo…the first crewed Apollo mission, a test flight planned to launch in February 1967, never got off the ground because a fire broke out in the command module during a rehearsal and killed all three of the crewmembers. Yet this did not lead to the same kind of reaction that the Challenger disaster did.
‘Climate Change’…you didn’t mention this, but many have cited it as a factor in driving fatalism and despair. Yet the very real danger of thermonuclear war during the worst times of the Cold War did not lead to the same sort of reaction (although maybe it did lead to a certain amount of ‘eat, drink, (have sex) and be merry, for tomorrow we die’, which still seems better than fatalism and despair.
Factories closing…true, but there are all kinds of job opportunities that have opened up that didn’t exist in 1969.
All of which makes me think there is something going on in addition to factors such as these. As possibilities, I’d suggest (1) more family instability (maybe related to that ‘free love’ point), (2) the dominance of academia, combined with the very negative image of America inclucated by so much of it, and (3) runaway credentialism, limiting the opportunities of those without appropriate degrees, or at least those that don’t have the spirit to walk through walls.
Yes, but, many/most of the new opportunities are in higher-tech positions that fewer people are qualified to fill.
True, but sometimes overstated. Tech-related startups and growth companies also hire sales reps, for instance: in some cases, the reps need to be pretty well technically-educated themselves, in other cases, not so much. But the individual does need to be able to face rejection, which implies a lot of psychological resilience, and also to be able to accept an income than may fluctuate significantly based on their performance.
Such companies also hire lawyers, paralegals, contract managers, electricians & HVAC people (direct or outsources), sales administrators, accountants, etc, sometimes lab technicians and machinists. It’s not all Computer Sciences graduates and electrical engineers.
True, but even those people were probably not working in factories before. On the assembly lines, etc. The overall general shift is definitely towards higher IQ demands etc, but the IQ availability hasn’t changed.
Maybe. An awful lot of jobs still exist, but have been deskilled significantly. A traditional checkout clerk in a store needed basic math skills that are now subsumed by the POS system. A store manager had to do his own inventory planning, whereas now the product choices are made by a buyer in corporate headquarters somewhere and the resupply orders are placed automatically by a computer system. A machinist using a CNC machine tool *may* need to know how to program the tool, or he may only need to put news stock in and let the machine run with a program someone else supplied.
Hard to know what the balance is between the higher-IQ-requirement jobs and the lower-IQ-requirement jobs is, but an interesting question. Also, IQ isn’t all that matters…emotional resilience, as with the example of the sales reps, matters, as does ability to interact with others well and to be persuasive.
Agreed, but this thread should honor the OP. It’s a great post about a beautiful moment for so many. There are moments since that brought people together, but none so ascendant in its immediate shared significance “…one giant leap for mankind.” Just amazing, and a testament to the power of vision, and the leadership and toil of so many.