I have two very vivid memories of the Apollo programme.
First was watching the moonlanding on television. Not live, but the next day at school. Our headmistress invited the class to watch on her (gasp!) colour TV. The rest of the class was excited by seeing a colur TV for the first time; I was excited by seeing the moon landing.
The second memory is during Apollo 13 – sitting around in the cloakroom at school with all the other kids, all being very worried.
I have lots of other memories of the whole programme, but I don’t know if they are memories from the time, memories of repeat showing on TV, or just memories of memories.
Thinking back, one thing that strikes me is how impoverished our information sources were then: TV (real time only), newspapers (whichever one was read in the house), and the odd special isue of a magazine. No videoing late night programmes to watch later, no iPlayer catchup, no YouTube clips, no NASA website, no googling for more info. How did we survive?
Since Apollo we’ve learned so much more about our solar system. Other vivd memories are the pictures from the surface of Mars sent back by Viking (these images really made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up: pictures from the surface of another planet that is just a mere dot in the night sky), and the pictures of all the moons of the outer planets sent back by Voyager. And, of course, the recent Pluto pictures from New Horizons.
The solar system is a much richer, more detailed place than it was 50 years ago.
But 50 years on from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, we still don’t have a moonbase.
I blame you for the moonlit sky
And the dream that died with the eagle’s flight
I blame you for the moonlit nights
When I wonder why are the seas still dry?
Don’t blame this sleeping satellite
Did we fly to the moon too soon?
Did we squander the chance in the rush of the race
— Sleeping Satellite, Tasmin Archer, 1992
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