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Forty years ago this week, men from Earth set foot on the moon while the world watched through a live television feed and legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite helmed the news coverage. The technological achievement signified by both the landing and the real-time coverage are probably difficult for younger people to appreciate.
But I was born in 1957, the year that the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite, and Pres. Kennedy's quest to put a man on the moon was a regular staple of my childhood. We were reminded of it in school, where our teachers told us that we needed to excel in science and math in order to compete against the Soviets. The Cold War push led to huge US investments in science and technology that yielded benefits far beyond the space program -- including the communications satellites that made real-time televised coverage of news events from across the globe possible. In 1965, as an eight-year-old, I remember watching the funeral of for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the announcer explained that the grainy, gray images from Westminster Abby were being transmitted live.
I learned a lot more about the role of space research in the advancement of communications technology during the 1980s, when I worked for Bell Laboratories. In 1989, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the moon landing, I interviewed several alumni of BELLCOMM, a Bell Labs spinoff that provided systems engineering support for the space program. Among other contributions, BELLCOM built the telemetry and guidance systems for the Apollo spacecraft. I remember asking Ian Ross, the former president of BELLCOM, whether he had been excited about the prospect of participating in the moon landing effort. He was excited for a little while, he told me, but after that, it was just hard work.
Lane Wallace has a fascinating article that details what an unlikely technical achievement the moon landing actually was:
"In the early days, communication systems were also limited and unreliable, requiring cumbersome back-up strategies and an extraordinary level of innovative thinking. On a test flight of the Saturn V vehicle that would launch the Apollo spacecraft, for example, the phone lines to the remote western Australia tracking station of Carnarvon went down. (NASA set up a worldwide network to keep track of the launches and keep in touch with the astronauts at all times.) Undeterred, the Australians sent launch times and data back and forth to the station over more than 1,000 miles of the Outback--using the top wire of cattle ranchers' fences as a makeshift telegraph wire.
"As for the high-tech systems that allowed the Apollo astronauts to operate their spacecraft and navigate to the moon and back ... the Apollo computer was digital, but it had a whopping 36KB of memory. Think about that. We went to the moon on 36K..."
This weekend, as we remember the joy that the late Walter Cronkite took in announcing the moon landing, younger people might not remember that a lot of people thought that the money spent on the space race had been wasted. Marvin Gaye spoke for a lot of people when he sang:
"Rockets, moon shots
Spend it on the have-nots"
The astronaut corps was all-white and all-male then, of course - a fact that played into Gil-Scot Heron's critical response to the space program, "Whitey on the Moon."
Of course, not everyone believed that humans had actually landed on the moon, even though Cronkite had said so. Jim Heintz reports in the Huffington Post that the Russians are still "skeptical:"
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When state TV channel Rossiya reported last week on the restoration of video footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the account gave a lot of attention to dubious conspiracy theories that the landing was faked.
"In the United States, more than anywhere else, they are sure of the believability of the steps on the moon," the report said, adding that Armstrong keeps a very low profile. "This also seems strange to many people."
Armstrong seems to be enjoying a quiet retirement, his fellow moon-walker, Buzz Aldrin, has been quite public. As the National Space Society Blog reports, Aldrin has a new memoir out about his struggles with alcoholism and depression in the years after the lunar landing. He is also urging a new space initiative -- to Mars. And he has recast
