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.
Asleep on the Moon
The Apollo 11 lunar module (LM) Eagle touched down on the surface of the Moon at exactly 20:17:39, July 20th, 1969 UTC (previously known as GMT). That’s 40 years ago today. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, huddled in the ungainly LM had left the command module (CM) Columbia almost three hours earlier. Alone in the CM sat Michael Collins, intensely following Eagle’s progress. After visually inspecting Eagle for damage he watched it slowly disappear from sight below him.
Collins’ view of Eagle shortly after seperating from the Columbia
The ride down was not uneventful. A number of alarm signals distracted the astronauts but these were simply training errors, not faults. The tiny computer on board could not process all the tasks in real-time so had to postpone them, at which point an executive overflow alarm would sound. Their training had not catered for this.
Much more serious were the navigation problems. Armstrong had to take semi-manual control of the spacecraft when it appeared that it wasn’t going to land on the designated spot. When the rockets were turned off, they had only 25 seconds of fuel left.
It was a Sunday. The radio had been on all day. Lights-off for the juniors in the boarding house was 8:30. Not being in bed by this time or making any noise after it was an offence, punished by a caning. But this evening was different. The ever-vigilant prefects who usually made our lives a misery were away, listening to the radio. Our domitory was a cacophany of crackling radios. Sadly, it wasn’t long before an officious boy-Hitler put a stop to this. Then, like most of the other boys, I lay in bed in the darkness with a little earphone in my ear, literally glued to every sound popping out of my little radio.
Normally we would all be asleep by 9 PM. But I couldn’t have slept even with nothing to listen to. It was so exciting. That unexpectedly long descent made me start to fear the worst. But then at almost 10:20 (local time) a flurry of activity and Armstong’s, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” What relief!
Confident that they would immediately step onto the surface of the Moon, I woke up the boy in the bed next to mine. “Wake-up! They’ve landed! They’re going to walk now!“, I whispered. After a bit of swearing he plugged his earpiece in. And then we waited and waited. I drifted off for a while but woke up a little later only to hear that the astronauts were resting! Resting? How could they possibly be resting? I felt sorry for Michael Collins. What wouldn’t he have given to be on the Moon? And all his colleagues could do was rest!
By now it was past midnight and I happily gave up the fight. It was the next day – July 21 – and my heroes would take their first steps on the Moon on my birthday!
First Moon landing images released
Earlier than I had hoped, the first LROC images of the moon landing sites have been released by NASA. These images were captured before the LRO reached its final mapping orbit, and are at about of a third the resolution of future LROC images. Click on the image below to see the original uncropped image of Eagle sitting in its landing site.
This image of the Apollo 14 landing site is a lot more interesting showing the astronauts actual foot marks.
I think it was marvellous of NASA to release these images before the 40th anniversary of the first landing by Apollo 11.
However, even though these images were taken within the last week, I doubt that the conspiracy theorists will accept this evidence either.
Conspiracy Theorists and Creationsts
The Apollo moon landing missions represents the pinnacle of human achievement. It embodies all the traits that we like to think makes us human. Things like vision and inspirational leadership (“We choose to go to the moon“), individual brilliance (Wernher von Braun), purposeful administration (NASA), practical creativity (the more than 4,000 engineers and designers who worked on the project), great enterprise (Boeing, North American, Douglas, and Rocketdyne) and enormous personal courage (the Astronauts). As President Kennedy called it, “The most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked.”
It was a triumph for humanity. It showed us what we are capable of. Humans had broken the bounds from which we had evolved and were exploring the Moon. For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors had gazed at the moon in the night sky, trying to make sense of it. Now we had stepped on the surface of this mysterious place and left out imprint.
But, I suppose predictably, the conspiracy theory kooks have slithered out of their holes and are once again defaming this magnificent, inspiring achievement with their nasty inane Moon Landing Hoax. This is not a small little fringe group of hopeless eccentrics – for instance, 25% of Britons believe it was a hoax. Hardly any popular article or TV news item about the Moon landing is complete without some reference to the CTists. I suppose they are best ignored but this really does irk me. Of course this is being driven by a smaller hard-core group of tinfoil hatters, but their anti-science delusions are having a bad influence on a generation that should rather have been inspired by the Apollo mission.
I won’t waste my time debunking their nonsense. It’s been done over and over again. Phil Plait, as usual, does a good job of that. But I have been pondering on what drives these nutters to besmirch this enormous achievement. You can read a few opinions on the psychological make-up of conspiraloons here, here and here. One thing that is beyond doubt is that CTists’ belief in their particular hoax is unshakeable. Hard, irrefutable evidence will not sway them from their beliefs. As Cumbrian Sky notes:
The HBs are never, repeat, NEVER going to be convinced that NASA went to the Moon. It doesn’t matter how many times they read, or you explain, that there were no stars in the Moon’s sky because the photos were exposed for the bright surface and foreground, so obviously teeny tiny faint starse wouldn’t be picked up by the camera. You can tell them a million times that the flags left by the astronauts aren’t “blowing in the breeze”, they’re actually flapping about because they’ve got supporting wire frames to stop them hanging there all limp and embarrassing for the photographs. They slap their hands over their ears and sing out “lalalalalala!” when you try to explain that the shadows cast by objects on the Moon look different to shadows cast by objects here on Earth because LIGHTING CONDITIONS ON THE MOON ARE NOTHING LIKE THEY ARE HERE ON EARTH!!
Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this exactly how Young Earth Creationists behave? No scientific evidence – no matter how slam-dunk conclusive – will sway them from the central idea that a supernatural deity created the universe – with the Earth at its centre, and of course man at the centre of that – about 6,000 years ago. And all living things were created by this imaginary dictator and we remain at the mercy of this space monster. So there! If there is any scientific work to be done it’s within this absolute framework. As Ken Ham would say: “Any so-called fact that appears to contradict the bible is not a fact and needs to be re-interpreted in terms of the bible”. No arguments. Don’t bring the evidence.
Like the religious types, CTists like to gather with like-minded believers and believe that they will “find the truth” and spread it to the heathen out there and foster social change. They believe they have “secret” knowledge which they impart to their inner circle of true believers. This sounds remarkably like the Pagans and Gnostics – and even Jesus himself: “The mystery of the kingdom of God has been granted to you. But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that ‘they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand, in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.’” (Mark 4:10-12 NAB)
Charles Darwin gave us the priceless gift of knowing that we can actually explain the world around us – including our own origins. Creationists with their deep fear of reality would rather have us believe that we are merely pawns in the hands of an all-powerful, all-knowing celestial ruler and that their is no value in pursuing knowledge since the question of the universe and our origins is settled.
The Apollo mission gave us the priceless gift of knowing our capacity for achieving amazing feats – that humans are capable of understanding the Universe and all its wonders. Conspiracy theorists with their deep fear of anything that is beyond their control would rather have us believe that we are mere powerless pawns in the hands of secret, pervasively evil forces that conspire against us for their own nefarious ends.
These fearful little people should not be entertained and their paranoid ravings should be given no further oxygen.
The Moon Shot: like yesterday
The world is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Today – July 16 – marks the day exactly 40 years ago when the massive Saturn V rocket lifted itself off the surface of the Earth and accelerated its payload of three brave astronauts towards the Moon.
Liftoff of Apollo 11, July 16 1969
Unlike millions of people around the world, I didn’t see the launch on TV. Not because I was too young – simply because in those days South Africa didn’t have a television service. (Interestingly, it was the outcry from not being able to see this event live that, more than anything else, eventually forced the rabidly autocratic and Calvanist apartheid government to allow a television service).
I remember the launch as if it had happened yesterday. I was a 12-year old boy at boarding school in Johannesburg. It was a cold Wednesday afternoon and we had just finished a shortened soccer practice. A bunch of about eight boys gathered around my small Panasonic transistor radio, huddled against the cold wind on a grassy embankment on the side of the field. The excitement had been building all day and now it was almost unbearable.
When, at around three-thirty in the afternoon, the countdown began, our silence was only broken by our soft mimicking of the commentator: “Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts report it feels good. T-25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T-15 seconds, guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9 … ignition sequence start … 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 … All engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff … 32 minutes past the hour, liftoff on Apollo 11. Tower clear.” (Play audio)
We knew the sequence exactly. We had listened to many of the previous Apollo mission launches and even mimicked the commentator’s American accent. We’d heard it all before.
But this was different. This was the mission: to the Moon! My heart was racing faster than the soccer coach could drive it up. There was an audible sigh of relief when Armstrong crackled, “OK, we’ve got a roll program”. We all made the roll with our hands. It was a moment to hug each other. Of course, we didn’t.
Later, when the broadcast stopped, we walked back to our House as if floating on air. The biting wind went unnoticed. I think we intuitively understood then that we were citizens of the World and together with millions of our fellow World citizens, we were celebrating this fact, looking up to the sky. It was a very special moment, and I wonder if my son – the same age as I was then and at the same school playing on that same grassy bank – will ever experience a moment like it.
I will be reliving the entire mission – this time with the visuals I missed the first time round – on the site We Choose the Moon. And I hope that a bit of my excitement rubs off on my media-numbed kids.
First hi-res images of the moon
The first high-resolution images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have been have been released. The LRO reached the moon on June 23 and the two cameras on board, collectively known as LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera), were activated on June 30.
The images were taken over the region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds).
This image shows a region 1,400 metres wide and features as small as 3 metres wide are discernible. What makes this exciting to me is that this is a very human scale. You can actually imagine yourself walking the short distance, through a museum of craters. The smaller craters would be no bigger than a suburban swimming pool.
I also can’t wait for images from the original landing sites – presumably the tracks left in the sand by the lunar buggy would be visible.
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