I can't lay claim to remembering the landing of the first man on the moon.
Oh, I was around, but I had more important things to attend to, like being potty trained and improving my newly found speech patterns.
That being said, I've always had a fondness for the Apollo missions, the last of which occurred when I was still a young grade schooler. There are few events that drew us closer together as a nation and as a world people than the missions to the moon.
Astronauts were the revered heroes of our time, the men in the shiny white suits with the American flag on their shoulders. Their adventures, although unfathomable to our parents and grandparents, were only just beginning. Or so we believed. The future, it seemed, was limitless.
The intervening years of trials and travails of the space program - U.S. or otherwise - has advanced our understanding of the universe in so many ways, but no other holds the hallowed place in our collective conscience as July 20, 1969.
And along the way, the tidbits of trivia and knowledge - some real, some imagined - have allowed this middle-aged man to hold on to a little piece of those dreams of the boy.
Are they as valuable as the knowledge that filled the young grade-schooler's mind? No. Can they replace the dreams of the boy? No way.
But I hold on to them nonetheless, a sort of bread crumb trail back to a time when the dream of traveling to the stars certainly seemed within our grasp.
Here's a few of those bread crumbs.
Far more people watched the Beijing Olympics than the moon landing
Television had long been established as the medium of choice by 1969, breaking away from its technical limitations in the post World War II era to become THE way most people got their breaking news.
That got its first test in earnest with the assassination of President Kennedy more than a half decade earlier, but its hard to imagine something so immediate and visceral than the live streaming of the moon landing that would be better suited for the advent of TV.
That's why it is equally hard to imagine that it generally doesn't rank highly among the most-watched programs ever.
Why is that? It's a simple matter of mathematics.
At James Hibberd's "The Live Feed" blog in which he talks about the most watched televised event in history - the 2008 Beijing Olympics - he leaves the following note.
"Note: Some readers in the comments below questioned NBC's claim, asking about historic television events such as the 1977 airing of the miniseries "Roots" or the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Good questions. NBC analysts say that the U.S. television viewing universe was less than 211 million when those events occurred. Population growth and the increasing availability of television play a major factor here, all but ensuring that this record - like movie box office tallies that don't account for inflation- will continue fall as the years pass … so, yes, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have been trumped by Michael Phelps and Nastia Liukin."
I couldn't say it better myself.
Apollo 11 computers had as much oomph as a cell phone
Until the iPhone was introduced a few years back, the analogy is that many of today's calculators were more advanced than the computers that sent a man to the moon. And to me, that is a little more impressive.
I worked the early computers, and today's iPhones are worlds ahead of even those.
And while even today's most rudimentary computers are significantly more advanced than those that were used to guide Apollo 11 and the ensuing missions to the moon, the effort that went into those mammoth (but functionally teeny weeny) computers is spectacular, as noted in this fascinating story by the BBC.
Beyond the technological advancements it took in programming the mammoth beasts, there's the story of the original LOLs. This was no Internet shorthand for laughing out loud. Instead, it referred to the people who hand stitched binary computer code into the fabric of the vessel's computing core - a buch of Little Old Ladies.
That, and the other efforts to build the computer system that NASA used, are among my favorite elements of the story of how we sent a man to the moon.
Static or not, Armstrong uttered no "a" in famous moon speech
It's kind of like those nuggets of knowledge that you learn in a lifetime that are generally avoided by textbooks but alot of people have heard. A few of my favorites are:
- Abraham Lincoln wasn't a fan of civil rights, but went to war on the grounds of simply preserving the Union.
- Water rotates the opposite way down the toilet when you are south of the Equator.
- Interference in the transmission of the radio transmission wiped out a key article in Neil Armstrong's first words on the moon.
The last of the trio is the only one pertaining to the subject of this column, but none is true. Lincoln believed strongly in all men being created equal, water doesn't spin any one direction in the toilet in Perth or in Philadelphia (although hurricanes and typhoons do), and Armstrong flubbed his line, uttering "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
The "a" was supposed to go in front of the word man. As uttered, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But it is still one of the best known quotes of our time.
NASA and Armstrong tried to do a bit of revisionist history, saying that he had originally included the article. But, according to Snopes.com, those around when Armstrong spoke disagree. In real time - 40 years ago - it caused quite a bit of an ethical dilemma for journalists covering the landing, so much so that they got together in conference to discuss whether they would buy the NASA story or report what they heared. They agreed as a group to report it as the latter.
And it seems like that was the right move, as Armstrong all but agreed later that he had flubbed the line, albeit reluctantly.
My Great Uncle Sam used to love things like this. My father, mother, sister and I lived in the family home with him for a period of a few years in the late 1970s. And he would often refer to things like this as the absolute gospel - or at least imply strongly - that UFOs on the moon and other "Chariot of the Gods" type stories were the real deal.
And I was in grade school. Who was I to argue? It seemed plausible at the time, and the UFO fervor that had gripped the nation in the 1950s was still running pretty good through the 1970s.
In retrospect, um, maybe not.
It's not that I'm a stone cold disbeliever in the existence of UFOs, whether they are of the Earthly or extraterrestial sort. It's just that the evidence put forth by those who say there's solid, scientific evidence of said spacecrafts seems a stretch - a big stretch.
The video above does have Buzz Aldrin talking a bit about some odd lights observed on the Apollo 11 trip, but to say - as the narrator does - that they can only be one thing is a bit ridiculous. And then there is the whole purported recording of Neil Armstrong going crazy about flying saucers all over the moon.
I'll leave the heavy lifting to debunker.com on this one. Suffice it to say, I'll keep an open mind on some UFO sightings; just not this one.
And yes, Virginia, there was a moon landing
Elvis is dead. Princess Di wasn't killed off in an elaborate scheme by the British powers that be. And men have walked on the moon. (And they didn't get there in UFOs, by the way.)
One of the great hoax rumors of the past 50 years, millions of people have bought into the possibility that the moon shot was actually a hoax carried out in a movie studio and with the immense cooperation of a broad swath of people that included members of the media, thousands of contractors and virtually everyone that has ever worked at NASA.
There's a vast of amount out there on Internet, and even if you are inclined everything you read there (God help you, God help us all), it lands largely in two camps: All out support and full debunking. And while the former is far more entertaining, the latter is almost certainly the case.
The believers like to the grainy video available, point to what they say are supporting strings, note the slowed down movements, the massive problems NASA encountered leading up to Apollo 11, and so on and so on. Some debunkers, such as the popular TV show "Mythbusters," enjoy tackling these arguments one by one. That, too, is entertaining.
But two key elements come off on dealing with the conspiracy theories. First, we can look through telescopes and see the remnants of missions past. That, in most cases, will wipe out a big chunk of the purported 6 percent of Americans that allegedly believe in a moon hoax.
The second is put forth well on, of all sites, Wikipedia, in which it quotes Dr. James Longuski, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University. According to Longuski, the "size and complexity of the alleged conspiracy theory scenarios make their veracity an impossibility. More than 400,000 people worked on the Moon landing project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. Hundreds of thousands of people (astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers) would have had to keep the secret."
Besides, Longuski says, it would have been "significantly easier" to land on the Moon than generate the massive conspiracy as attested to by the 6 percenters.
http://blogs.rapidcityjournal.com/copy/?p=260">Could it all be faked? Well, Hollywood considered the possibility. Check out the Copy blog to see their best attempt.
