In Apollo We Trust
It just gave me chills to read this speech that was written in case the first astronauts to land on the moon ran into some sort of disaster. The eeriest part is the assumption not that they are dead but that they are stranded there, left to die. It's a realistic possibility of space exploration, and one that's been explored in plenty of science fiction stories, and certainly it was a possibility the Nixon White House had to be aware of and prepared for. Still, reading the actual words was disconcerting, as if I had momentarily slipped into an alternate reality wherein that was what had actually happened.
I think I feel this way because my childhood memories of the space program are of success. Three astronauts died in the Apollo program, but they died on the ground (in a fire), not in space (and that was well after the first moon landing). Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn . . . they went, as the TV show said, where no (American) man had gone before, and they came back to tell the tale. They were heroes, but I never doubted they would survive. We had faith in rockets, and rockets never betrayed that faith.
(The shuttle? More like an airplane. And we all know those fall out of the sky.)
I was in England, in the coastal village of Leigh-on-Sea, when the first human beings set foot on the moon. We watched it on the black-and-white TV in my aunt's front parlor, and my sister and I enjoyed a modicum of celebrity in the days following by the simple association of being the same nationality as the guys who were walking on another world. I sat on the floor in front of the set, and I remember starting to say something and being hushed. "Space travel--it's routine for these girls," my grandmother said. Yes. Exactly. Exciting, thrilling--but routine. We believed in astronauts and rockets, and we were never wrong to do so.
How devastating it would have been to me as a little girl who believed in rockets if that speech had been delivered. I can't even imagine it . . . or at least I don't want to.
Maybe this is part of why the recently announced plans for a Mars mission focus on an Apollo-like rocket. The people making these plans are, many of them, about my age or a little older. Maybe at some visceral level they too trust rockets.
By the way, I know you can name the two guys who walked on the moon (especially if you clicked the link and read the speech); do you remember the name of the guy who went all the way to lunar orbit, then waited in the orbiting Apollo spacecraft while his colleagues took off in the lunar module for the surface and a place in history? (I do, but I'm a space geek.)
I think I feel this way because my childhood memories of the space program are of success. Three astronauts died in the Apollo program, but they died on the ground (in a fire), not in space (and that was well after the first moon landing). Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn . . . they went, as the TV show said, where no (American) man had gone before, and they came back to tell the tale. They were heroes, but I never doubted they would survive. We had faith in rockets, and rockets never betrayed that faith.
(The shuttle? More like an airplane. And we all know those fall out of the sky.)
I was in England, in the coastal village of Leigh-on-Sea, when the first human beings set foot on the moon. We watched it on the black-and-white TV in my aunt's front parlor, and my sister and I enjoyed a modicum of celebrity in the days following by the simple association of being the same nationality as the guys who were walking on another world. I sat on the floor in front of the set, and I remember starting to say something and being hushed. "Space travel--it's routine for these girls," my grandmother said. Yes. Exactly. Exciting, thrilling--but routine. We believed in astronauts and rockets, and we were never wrong to do so.
How devastating it would have been to me as a little girl who believed in rockets if that speech had been delivered. I can't even imagine it . . . or at least I don't want to.
Maybe this is part of why the recently announced plans for a Mars mission focus on an Apollo-like rocket. The people making these plans are, many of them, about my age or a little older. Maybe at some visceral level they too trust rockets.
By the way, I know you can name the two guys who walked on the moon (especially if you clicked the link and read the speech); do you remember the name of the guy who went all the way to lunar orbit, then waited in the orbiting Apollo spacecraft while his colleagues took off in the lunar module for the surface and a place in history? (I do, but I'm a space geek.)
posted by Maines at 9:13 PM
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