Forty Years Ago Today

Buzz Aldrin unpacks the picnic hamper

So where were you when the Eagle landed on the surface of the moon back in 1969? I can't remember to be honest, my memory comes from events surrounding the landing: the Airfix model of the Saturn V rocket, James Burke being breathlessly excited for what seemed like weeks on BBC television and a friend at school collecting every last scrap of information on the Apollo moon project and putting it all together in a file that was the size of a house brick.

The Apollo Project, that was the title of his file, we all had to choose a subject and for a bunch of nine year olds the choice was quite impressive: I choose football (surprise, surprise), my best mate Deek choose rugby (although he spelt it ruby on the cover), but the most memorable choice came from a lad called James who decided he would produce a school project on the subject of Raquel Welch. I'm sure that these days if a nine year old choose Katie Price as the subject of his school studies the social workers would be called in, but then again who knows....

Anyway Jonathan was the original school geek. He was so geeky (long before the word had even been invented) that both Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro would have found him too leftfield - sorry if that cultural reference means nothing to you, where have you been? Whilst the rest of us were playing football or kiss chase he was trying to invent a wrist watch that was combined with a calculator, or some sort of personal teleportation device. The adverts at the back of Mad magazine were his personal field of dreams, you know the glasses that enabled you to see through your friends clothes, the coat that made you invisible, the pen that wrote words that would only be revealed by using infra-red lights. He was James Burkes 'mini-me' and everyone would listen open mouthed as he told the class about how the space adventure was going to work, how the rocket would separate and how this tiny little landing craft would appear from the cone at the top and land on the surface of the moon and then eventually would lift off and return to earth.

I had a talk a few years ago with, and I make no apology for name dropping here, the technical advisor to Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park about the parallels between the cold war and the stream of 'alien' films that emerged from the American film studios during the 1950's onwards. The alien metaphor for the Russian 'threat' being somewhat heavily handed from such classics as The Day The Earth Stood Still down to those lesser known wonders of the genre including Radar Men From The Moon. I had the feeling back then, and it has to be said nothing has changed my perception since, that the space race was know more than an expensive grandstanding exercise - the Americans had to get there first to prove that they, and not those damned Russians, were the true carriers of the white hot torch of technology.

Of course any discussion of the benefits of the space race inevitably run close to becoming a parody of Reg's 'what did the Romans do for us?' question if the Life of Brian. The most important, and certainly the most long lasting, was probably the passing of the 1958 National Defense Education Act in the States. The Americans were aware that after the Second World War, despite the defection of many of Germany's finest scientific brains to the States (including Werner Von Braun the man behind the V1 and V2 rockets), Russia led the way by some distance in the fields of engineering and science. That one parliamentary act (if I may call it that) changed both the race for the moon and American scientific education policy forever and would eventually lead to such diverse product developments as: freeze dried food, stay dry clothing and the development of the nascent fastening product Velcro.

Of course it could be argued that any long lasting benefits of space exploration would have been developed anyway, man's sheer curiosity indicates that clothing and food technology advances would have happened. It also seems a shame that some fifty plus years after the space race took its first tentative steps that we have still witnessed only twelve men actually walking on the moon, whether or not they took giant steps as Sting once wrote remains a mystery in itself. The debate over whether or not the moon landings actually took place is one of many that man regularly induces to keep those long winter nights less long and wintery. You can stare at the photographs for hours on end, the discussions about the flag, the light, the shadow etc are up there with the argument over the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza or Federico Borrell Garcia falling backwards in Robert Capa's 'Death of a Loyalist Soldier,' you will see what you want to see.

For me as a nine year old, who stood and looked at the moon wondering if that little landing craft on top of the Saturn V had really made it, those questions were years away, along with adult cynicism and the knowledge that politicians will always do whatever it takes to look good and get elected.

When I look back some forty years on I can honestly say that only two phrases from the whole of the space race experience have any sort of resonance, "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," as spoken by Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell's "Houston, we have a problem," from Apollo 13 and the irony is that the latter is actually from the film directed by Ron Howard because Lovell's actual words were, "Houston we've had a problem." The blurring of the lines between reality and fiction being ever present.

work in progress - not completed as at 21st July 2009