Moon Landing

We watched one of the BBC's programs on the moon last night - it's forty years since the first manned landing on the moon. Seems incredible, thinking about it now. And the space race in the 1960's was greatly fueled by Cold War competition and advanced basically by ignoring, financially and politically, desperate social issues in favour of this urge to explore. Explore and plant the flag.

Brian Cox, TV physicist, introducing this as so many other popular science programs, talked about just remembering some of the Apollo missions and moon landings as a young child, and I do too. Space age fantasy was where it was all going on in the early seventies, including Blue Peter presenters donning the latest astronautical gear, and of course the sci fi series such as Doctor Who (arguably in its finest phase - well, my favourite Doctor-and-producer combination anyway), the Tomorrow People, Sapphire and Steel...for Cox, this formative time helped set him on his path to a career as an astrophysicist. I guess I just got hooked into the imaginative and narrative potential of sci fi and space operas. But I'm sure I do remember those moon landings along with the drama programs - I 'm pretty sure my dad was also immensely excited by them and emphatic that I should watch and be awed. He wasn't a religious man (putting it mildly) so, perhaps like many adults at the time he put his faith in scientific progress and technological advances as potential saviours of the human race.

Dad worked in television for most of his life, so would also have been especially aware of the moon landings as a huge television event; with millions of people watching world wide - as NASA had very carefully ensured, with the multi-camera armour of the moon landing pods. So the event was one of those historical events which became enshrined in the collective memory - and one that is especially notable for NOT being the death of a famous person, NOT being a terrible disaster. For those are the events that are most often remembered collectively through the power of the mass media - JFK, Princess Diana, 9/11, and of course most recently Michael Jackson.

Instead, the moon landings have a unique position in collective memory, in all senses of the phrase, for stepping onto the moon was in a unique location - and the moment had a verbal as well as a visual mnemonic in Neil Armstrong's poetically brilliant 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind' (the syntactical gap in the first clause has been much debated recently, but the phrase is much more memorable as it is, without the indefinite article). It is a moment of first and momentous steps.

Of course there is plenty of lunar poetry: the earth's only natural satellite has been extensively mythologised and used in poetic and metaphysical symbolism. In astrology it is second in importance to the sun, when looking at someone's chart (I have the moon in its home astrological sign of cancer which makes me a bit of a sensitive soul - now you know). But here's the end of poet Stephen Blythe's poem 'The Sceptics' about the moon landings which echoes these themes of early memories, collective recall, first steps:

His earliest memory – watching the first men on the moon.
’69. That would make him just over one.

To think that those blurry pictures are still clear in his mind.

We won’t have it. No chance. Surely he’s mistaken,
Must have been older and watching some later Apollo mission.

But he insists. He gets back up

Just when we think our argument will keep him knocked down.
Just as he would have learning to walk back then,

Finding this new stuff underfoot so strange. Like Armstrong himself.


I like this poem, with its personal mythologising of the moon landings, and have used it in classes to get poems written that are prompted by first steps and early memories. Though the experience of finding 'new stuff' underfoot is one that is periodically revisited throughout life. Of course there are always moral and social questions to consider when investing massive amounts of money in non-medical scientific projects. But I do hope, along with the ever enthusiastic Brian Cox, that we continue to invest in space exploration - the quest and challenge of finding new stuff underfoot out in the universe as well as in our individual journeys.