It hit me last Wednesday when the guy checking me out at the grocery store pointed to the TV and said “Looks like they’re going to the moon today!” Chatter turned to my having watched the 1968 Christmas Eve Apollo 8 broadcast when humans first laid eyes on the lunar surface from a spacecraft, while Bill Anders, Milwaukee’s own Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman read from the Book of Genesis as a stunning narration to what was shown on TVs around the world. It turns out the checkout guy wasn’t born until a year later, and at that moment I officially became an old guy. But watching the Artemis II mission makes this old guy feel like a kid again.
Just to put things into perspective, growing up in the 60s often felt like a wild ride keeping up with the changes. A Russian – Yuri Gagarin – became the first human to reach space, orbiting Earth in April of ‘61, and so we sent Alan Shepard up – and down again – in May. The Redstone rocket Shepard rode up and down was adapted from its original role of delivering nuclear weapons and eventually sent John Glenn into orbit just like Gagarin. A year later President Kennedy challenged America to send the first humans to the moon and back. And the race with the Russians was on.
Back then we couldn’t watch nonstop TV coverage like watching youtube today. What we didn’t see on nightly news had to wait for color film to be developed on the ground after each mission, printed full-page in National Geographic almost monthly…and boy did I eat that up. Then came the Apollo 1 tragedy that took the lives of 3 astronauts on the launch pad, teaching the tough lesson that space travel is always dangerous…even on the ground. But we kept pressing on until, on Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 achieved what humans had only dreamed of for millennia. It was only the second ever live broadcast from a spacecraft, and the first time we could watch the moon pass below. Even if we didn’t reach out and touch it, we had reached the moon the moment Earth’s tug on the craft was outdone by that of the moon’s gravity. The Integrity spacecraft crossed that point a little before midnight last night on its way to today’s flyby.
In the five-decades-plus that have passed since Apollo, spaceflight has been done within 250 miles or so of Earth. Moon flights faded into history. Historic events that one never lived through are like science fiction. Back in 1968, we blew science fiction right out of the fiction section of the library and into reality for the first time. Today, we re-make a story from the depths of history and turn it into something new for those who weren’t there the first time. For anyone born after 1972, flying to the moon was only a story. Not anymore. It’s real for all of us. And what a feeling that is!
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