July 21, 1969: One small step .. Three smart cuts …
Neil Armstrong on the Lunar Surface, July 21st 1969
Granted, it was an American achievement. The Apollo mission was quintessentially American and set the iconography for the next generation. They paid for it. They did it. It was theirs to use as they pleased.
But dammit – the Moon is not the 51st State of the Union. And just because there are 5 US flags scattered on its surface (fluttering, the CTists would have us believe), does not mean the Moon resides within an American time zone. When events happen on the Moon (or anywhere else in the Universe except Earth), we conventionally mark the time in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Even NASA does this.
But ask anyone and they will tell you man first walked on the Moon on July 20th, 1969. You see it in books, on quiz shows. Yet NASA agrees with me that Neil Armstrong took his first lunar step on July 21st, 1969 at exactly 02:56:15 UTC. I know this because July 21 happens to be my birthday.
It had been a long night following the landing and I was dead tired when the wake-up bell rang and it was really frosty outside. The first thing I did was to listen to my radio and caught the news a replay of Armstrong’s, “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” I couldn’t believe my luck – the first moon walk on my birthday! And I was a teenager!
That luck didn’t last long. I was slow in getting up and was late for everything. I was so late that I was still showering when I was supposed to be at breakfast and I was summoned to a visit with the housemaster – the fearsome Rocco Erasmus, part-time radio DJ, part-time teacher and full-time sadist. He gave me three vicious cuts with his long cane, and sent me on my sorry way.
That evening after supper, my friends and I huddled together against the cold, looking at the moon. It was high in the Western sky – a half moon. One of the boys thought he could see the lunar module. We laughed. Then another wondered, “What if the rocket doesn’t fire?”, and we stopped laughing.
Before going to sleep on my first night as a teenager, I took one last look at the setting moon through the window, and sighed in relief that the rocket had fired and that the astronauts were safe. I felt my welts. All in all, it had been a good day.
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