Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong & buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon. Where were you? I certainly know where I was. I remember it well.
I had a sore throat, so I missed school and spent the day at home. I probably would have stayed home anyway, as I wanted to listen in to as much of the live radio broadcast as possible. I was more interested than most, as I had been very interested in astronomy since about 1965 when I was 11, and saw Fireball XL5 on our first TV. Soon after I attended a few night sessions at the observatory owned by the amateur Whangarei Astonomical Society, and was taken there to look through their telescope a few times by a very kind senior member, Mr Kerr.
At that time got a transistor radio, so at night I would spend hours listening in to the first pirate radio, and more interestingly, to short-wave stations from all round the world. I got to know the times when the BBC and Voice of America stations transmitted towards New Zealand.
Soon after we moved back to Wellington. At my school there we had an American history teacher in 1969, Peter Maunder. He took us to the US embassy to check out their library. When the Apollo 11 mission was approaching, Voice of America advertised availability of a Moon Landing information pack from US Embassies. I posted a letter ordering it, and got it a few days before launch. It included a program tracker: a plasticy double layered round device with an aperture in the front layer, so you could read programmed events written on the bottom layer. There was a metal grommet in the centre so the front could be spun round relative to the back, to expose the program through the aperture, hour by hour as the mission progressed. I wish I had kept that tracker, as it would have significant interest value today.
I would never have thought that after Apollo 17, no one would go back to the moon. In those days I thought we would have been colonising it by now. However, since then some of us have learned a lot more about ourselves, and space, and what our urgent priorities should be. Fireball XL5 and the conquest of space were nice escapist dreams for childhood. Those memories remain, but that was another time, a long time ago. There is an enormous amount to do right here on Earth, if we are ever to be in any condition to venture back out into space in any sort of useful and meaningful way, and I cannot see that we will ever have the capability to actually get to any other inhabitable body anyway. Its time to concentrate on looking after this little planet and making seriously long-term plans for true sustainability, right here.
