Susannes Folksong-Notizen
[1969:] The big news for weeks and months past has been the landing on the moon. The astronauts are now on the way home and face re-entry as the last hazard. It is an immense technological achievement. In all the American space missions only three men have been killed and that was on the ground before leaving. The foresight involved has been miraculous. The men's courage has been admirable. They have been in an unknown world an in great danger fro a week, and have never faltered. But having said all that, it is hard to see what of real value has been achieved. The Americans are beset with problems: their big cities, the Negroes, Vietnam, inflation, the armament race and the rest. The moon is not urgent and not a purely American problem, and in any case the biggest problem facing all of us is a spiritual and moral one, not a political or technological one at all; I regard the moon as an escape. (Cecil King, Diary 1965-1970, Tuesday, July 22nd, p 267)
[1969:] The only thing in the news today was the American astronauts' second landing on the moon. The lack of interest is astonishing. [note: Apollo 12, with a three-man crew, had been launched from Cape Kennedy on November 14th and on November 19th Commander Conrad and Lieutenant-Commander Bean landed on the moon. The space craft returned to earth successfully on November 24th.] I had always thought it would be an anti-climax but in this case the rapidity of the fall-off is phenomenal. I think it's got something to do with the fact that the action itself is not intrinsically interesting. Once it has been shown that they can land accurately with absolute precision and walk about in their space suits, there is very little they can do which is interesting and relevant, so the only real excitement is whether they get killed or not. I hope that people will now begin to consider whether it's worth investing these vast sums in the technology of space travel. Is it really justifiable to divert them from other more helpful scientific activities? [...] no doubt the real justification is simply the easing off of the cold war between America and Russia. When their energy goes into space flights instead of wholly into nuclear weapons and when ambitions can be satisfied in this way, I suppose the motivation for world war is slightly reduced. (Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume Three, Saturday, November 22nd, p 741)
[1980:] The writer of this song, John Stewart, was a member of the American folk group, The Kingston Trio. It's a song which questions the value of what is called progress and which spotlights the poverty in the world while the television cameras spotlight a man called Armstrong. (Notes Sands Family, 'High Hills and Valleys')
[1996:] In 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, a first brave
step into the icy ocean of space, and in 1969, Neil Armstrong
landed on the Moon and became, I thought, the only human being
from our millennium who would be remembered in 50,000 years'
time. But after those first triumphs something began to go wrong.
[The] great vision of galactic exploration had begun to fade. The
suspicion dawned that outer space might be - dare one say it -
boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting
to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn't very much
to do there. [It was] the most hostile environment ever
encountered. Besides, absolute zero was not a temperature at
which anything very interesting ever happened. We began to
realise that the most fascinating planet in the universe, and by
far the strangest, was the one that the astronauts had left
behind them. (J. G. Ballard, Observer 22 Dec)
[1998:] Vielleicht begann jene merkwürdige Globalisierung,
die seitdem so global geworden ist, am 20. Juli 1969, als Neil
Armstrong und Edwin Aldrin mit ihrer Apollo-Mondfähre auf dem
Erdtrabanten ankamen und in seinem Staub herumtapsten. Sie sahen
die Erde, den Globus, als eine leuchtende Kugel, so wie wir den
Mond sehen. Dabei geschah noch etwas anderes; die Bodenkontrolle
fragte nämlich den dritten Astronauten, Michael Collins, der in
der Mondumlaufbahn auf die Rückkehr der beiden anderen wartete:
"Bist du dir eigentlich darüber im klaren, daß du der
einzige Mensch bist, der im TV nicht sehen kann, was heute
geschieht?" Er hatte scharfsinnig erkannt, daß das
Zeitalter der virtuellen Realität angebrochen war: Nur wer etwas
auf dem Bildschirm sehen kann, sieht es wirklich. Die armen
Mondfahrer sind nur Akteure im Film der anderen. Auch die
technischen Voraussetzungen der Mondfahrt gehören zur
Globalisierung. Bei dieser Reise wurden manche jener Instrumente
und Verfahren erprobt, die bald darauf die
Informationsgesellschaft einläuten sollten. (Ralf Dahrendorf,
Spiegel, 2. Nov.)
[1999:] There is a glorious
urban myth told about Neil Armstrong. As he climbs on his Apollo 11
spaceship to return to Earth, he mutters the following, strange
words: 'This one's for you, Jablonski.' The message is taped and
stored by Nasa. Years later a baffled space historian tries to make
sense of it - and fails. So he contacts Armstrong. 'Ah,' says the
first man on the Moon, 'It's simple, really. I grew up in Ohio. Mr
Jablonski lived next door, and one night I heard his wife shout:
"Oral sex! You want oral sex! You'll get oral sex on the day
that the kid next door walks on the Moon!" I just wanted to
tell him the good news.'
It's a lovely idea.
Unfortunately, the tale is utterly untrue, although it is revealing
in one way, for it is easily the most interesting story ever told
about Armstrong. Before 1969, no one had heard of him. Afterwards,
he became the most famous man in the world, and promptly fled from
public attention, returning to Ohio where he became professor of
aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, living on a
farm with his first wife Janet. [...] Take Buzz Aldrin, who stood
beside Armstrong on the Moon 30 years ago. He became a Nasa PR
spokesman, and quickly spiralled into depression, a spell in a
psychiatric ward, divorce and finally alcoholism, before emerging as
a teetotal author, product endorser and after-dinner speaker. 'When
we got back from the Moon, none of us was prepared for the adulation
that followed', says Aldrin. [...]
It is wrong, however, to assume
Armstrong was selected from the start to be the first Moon explorer
and utter those carefully scripted words about 'a small step for
man, a giant leap for mankind' (which he got wrong, incidentally,
missing out the indefinite article before 'man' - an error he
admitted for the first time last week). In its bid to meet Kennedy's
Moon landing aspirations by the end of 1969, Nasa imposed an
incredibly tight, seemingly unrealistic schedule on the Apollo
missions. Most astronauts expected slippage to occur when gremlins
afflicted the complex test manoeuvrings and dockings of Apollos 8, 9
and 10, and that Apollo 12's Pete Conrad [...] and Al Bean would be
the first men on the Moon. No serious glitches occurred, however,
and Armstrong got the glory.
Armstrong [...] now seems
thoroughly disillusioned with the whole space business. At one
stage, he announced that he was 'profoundly disappointed that the
whole point of the Apollo 11 mission seems to have been lost,
dissipated and buried in hucksterism and other attendant nonsense'.
[...] Armstrong's achievement has led to nothing. America went to
the Moon merely to frustrate Russian lunar ambitions. Once that was
achieved, it shut up shop. As a result, for the past 30 years, Nasa
- just like Armstrong - has struggled desperately to find a role for
itself and, by and large, it has failed. The space agency went to
the Moon for political reasons and is now committed to a $90 billion
International Space Station mission, which has also been pursued for
diplomatic, not scientific reasons. [...] Prestige and political
pragmatism will once again triumph over the search for knowledge.
(Robin McKie, Observer, 18 July)
- [1999:] When Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on 20 July 1969, they were supposed
to go to sleep for four hours. Instead, Armstrong radioed to mission
control to say he was going to moonwalk five hours ahead of
schedule, at 8pm Houston time (and 2am UK time). Charlie Duke, at
mission control in Houston, radioed back his go-ahead, saying "You
guys are getting prime TV time."
In the UK, ITN had thoughtfully
included an alarm call in its coverage to wake anybody dozing.
Meanwhile on the BBC, historian AJP Taylor, when asked for his gut
reaction to the ghostly black and white footage of Armstrong's small
step, said: "I have just seen the biggest non-event of my
life." In the White House, Richard Nixon greeted the landing as
the greatest week in the history of the world since creation [...].
A global audience of 600 million watched Armstrong's moon walk, a
record at the time but comparable now - in terms of audience share -
to the numbers who tune in to Baywatch.
Officially, the world was united
in acclaim and yet a sizeable minority took the view of Astronomer
Royal Professor Sir Martin Rees who says: "I was so repelled by
the quasi-military and triumphalist aura surrounding the Apollo
programme that I didn't make the effort to watch the first landing."
The sequels to Apollo 11 produced,
in pure entertainment terms, diminishing returns. By the time Apollo
13 was launched in April 1970, the US networks turned down a NASA
offer of a free live link-up, deciding they'd get bigger audiences
with their usual fare, led by the Doris Day TV show. The only place
Marilyn Lovell could watch her husband and his crew, John Swigert
and Fred Haise, live was at NASA. Then came the Apollo programme's
second most famous soundbite, "Houston, we have a problem",
and TV reporters were begging Mrs Lovell to have a broadcast tower
put up in her garden - naturally, she refused. [...]
Nixon's aides, scared another
disaster would hurt his ratings in the polls, immediately suggested
he cancel the Apollo programme. Meanwhile millions more questioned
the financial and scientific wisdom of the whole exercise. A year
after his moonwalk, Armstrong admitted in a press conference: "I
had hoped the impact would be more far-reaching. We seem to be sort
of tied up with today's problems".
It had taken the US seven years and
$25bn to get to the moon. It took the American public just two
missions to get bored with the whole enterprise. Even as Armstrong
climbed down the ladder on to the surface of the moon, there were
those at mission control who said they preferred Kubrick's vision in
2001: A Space Odyssey which Armstrong, Aldrin and command-module
pilot Mike Collins had watched a week before lift-off. (Observer, 12
Sep)
[1999:] I asked Mr Cronkite to name the most significant event of the twentieth century. 'Man's landing on the moon. Definitely. Without a question of a doubt.' 'You put the lunar landing ahead of the discovery of penicillin, contraception, the computer -' 'Or even the splitting of the atom, yes, for heaven's sakes. The development of vaccines, the X-ray, all the rest, fall in some way behind. Of course, the advent of the birth control pill has changed the whole societal relationship between the genders and helped to elevate women to an equal role with men, but the landing on the moon is in a different league - not because I was there to report it, but because it marks man's first escape from his environment on earth. One of the few dates the modern American child knows is 12 October 1492, the day Columbus landed in the New World. One day people will be living on other moons, flitting about at the speed of light, and they will look back to a time they can barely imagine when three men climbed into a funny little vehicle they called a spaceship and took almost four days to reach their destination. Five hundred years from now the one year of our century that will be memorised by schoolchildren [...] the one year they'll know is 1969, when man first walked on the moon.' (American broadcasting legend Walter Cronkite talking to Gyles Brandreth, Sunday Telegraph)
[2008:] It has proved to be the most enduring image we have of our fragile world. Over a colourless lunar surface, the Earth hangs like a gaudy Christmas bauble against a deep black background. [...] Our atmosphere is too thin to be seen clearly from the Moon: a striking reminder - if we ever needed one - of the frailty of the biosphere that sustains life on Earth. This is Earthrise, photographed by astronaut Bill Anders as he and his fellow Apollo 8 crewmen, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman, orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve, 1968. His shot, taken 40 years ago next month, has become the most influential environmental image, and one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Arguably, his picture is also the most important legacy of the Apollo space programme. Thanks to this image, humans could see, for the first time, their planet, not as continents or oceans, but as a world that was 'whole and round and beautiful and small', as the poet Archibald MacLeish put it. (Robin McKie, Observer, 30 Nov)
See also
Chaikin, Andrew, 'A Man on the Moon'
1969: America lands man on the Moon
Erste Mondlandung: Alles nur gelogen?
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