OPENING PAGES: NASA/JPL/USGS. LEFT: NASA
MOON MEMORIES
Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge Among my favourite things to read during my childhood in the 1950s was a comic called The Eagle, especially the adventures of Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future, where the brilliant artwork depicted orbiting cities, jet-packs and alien invaders. When spaceflight became real, the suits worn by NASA astronauts (and their Soviet cosmonaut counterparts) were therefore familiar, as were the routines of launching, docking, and so forth. My generation avidly followed the succession of heroic pioneering exploits: Yuri Gagarin’s first orbital flight, Alexey Leonov’s first space walk, and then, of course, the lunar landings. I recall a visit to my home town by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. He was asked what he was thinking while in the rocket’s nose cone, awaiting
later became a US senator, and, later still, the oldest astronaut when, aged 77, he became part of the STS-95 Space Shuttle crew.) Only 12 years elapsed between the flight of the Soviet Sputnik 1 – the first artificial object to go into orbit – and the historic “one small step” on the lunar surface in 1969. I never look at the Moon without being reminded of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Their exploits seem even more heroic in retrospect, when we realise how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. Indeed, President Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire had drafted a speech to be given if the astronauts had crash-landed on the Moon or were stranded there: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. [They] know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” The Apollo programme remains, half a century later, the high point of human ventures into space.
launch. He responded, “I was thinking that there were 20,000 parts in this rocket, and each was made by the lowest bidder.” (Glenn
Reprinted with kind permission of Martin Rees from On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, published by Princeton University Press
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I never look at the Moon without being reminded of Armstrong and Aldrin. Their exploits seem even more heroic knowing how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment Above: Buzz Aldrin walks on the Moon. Neil Armstrong, who took the photo, can be seen reflected in his helmet. Overleaf: a close-up view of an astronaut’s bootprint on the lunar surface
