Kate Chisholm

Fly me to the moon

Looking back it was a nuts idea, to attempt to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him back safely, as JFK declared on 25 May 1961.

Looking back it was a nuts idea, to attempt to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him back safely, as JFK declared on 25 May 1961. And even more incredible that the Americans actually achieved it, on schedule in July 1969 while engaged in a costly war in Vietnam and Cambodia. But when the Soviet Union laid down the challenge by launching Yuri Gagarin into space on the jolly ship Sputnik, the Americans had to think of something they could achieve first. Nasa’s rocket programme was nowhere near ready to launch manned flights into space, and so it was out of desperation rather than from calculation that President Kennedy’s advisers came up with the idea of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back again. They reckoned this was so far beyond the imagination of the Soviets they would never dream of attempting it.

It was quite a coup for Radio Four’s Archive Hour on Saturday night to get Buzz Aldrin who, with Neil Armstrong, walked on the moon on that Apollo 11 mission, to guide us through a recreation of those nail-biting moments when the lunar module, with only seconds of fuel left in its tanks, glided down towards its soft landing on the moon’s powdery grey surface. That such an extraordinary feat should now appear so far in the past is weird.

You might think that a radio programme about it would disappoint. Surely we need to see those miraculous pictures of a truly spherical earth hanging in space? Or Armstrong and Aldrin walking about on what some conspiracy theorists have claimed to be the Nevada desert? But hearing again those conversations between mission control in Houston and the astronauts relived the craziness, the sheer madness of the venture.

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