Epilogue

APOLLO IN RETROSPECT

As soon as Eugene Cernan and his crew stepped off their recovery helicopter, Apollo’s lunar programme began its recession into history. Many commentators have tried to weigh up its historical position with arguments that range from Apollo being a shallow political stunt hatched from the hubris of America’s political establishment, to it being the first step in the movement of our species off this planet into the wider cosmos. Perhaps it depends on whether the glass is seen as being half empty or half full.

Journalist William Hines of the Chicago Sun Times took the glass-half-empty approach when he characterised Apollo’s quest for the Moon as being like the quest of a little dog he once watched as it stalked after his car, caught up with it when he stopped, then marked it territorially before walking away. To Hines, Apollo was the same. "We caught the Moon, we peed on it and we left.”

Futurist and science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury had higher aspirations for the lunar programme’s long-term meaning. In 1994 he said, “I’m willing to predict to you that 10,000 years from now, the people of the future will look back and say July 1969 was the greatest month and the greatest day in the history of mankind. It will never change because on that day, mankind freed itself from gravity. We’ve been clinging here on this planet for millions of years and hoping someday to reach the Moon. We dreamt about it when we were living in caves. And finally we broke free and the spirit of mankind soared into space on that night and it will never stop soaring.”

As for myself, I am with Bradbury and his glass-half-full notions. In my perhaps naive optimism, I cannot help but see Apollo as having been a strange, mad but ultimately satisfying adventure of the human spirit. Whatever basal national posturing created it, or filthy pork-barrel politics spread its wealth around, I see in the people of Apollo a generation who rose above such narrow concerns to take one of the most powerful nations on Earth to the Moon and realise a dream that had haunted us since culture existed, and do it in a way that was laid bare to the world – mistakes included.

W. D. Woods, How Apollo Flew to the Moon, Springer Praxis Books,

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7179-1. © Springer Science+Business Media. LLC 2011

On the penultimate day of the Apollo 11 mission, the crew held a press conference from their spacecraft. During the proceedings. Buzz Aldrin pul Apollo’s optimism in these terms on behalf of his crewmates. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this has been lar more than three men on a voyage to the Moon. More, still, than the efforts of a government and industry team. More, even, than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown.”

As I studied Apollo, I was always impressed at the monumental dedication of the people associated with the programme; people who would gladly work 16- to 18- hour days, 6 or 7 days a week in buildings where the 5 o’clock rush home was unknown, and without the weight of totalitarian dictatorship bearing down on them; people who felt in their bones that Apollo contained a historic significance that transcended its genesis; people who thought that going to the Moon was just the greatest, coolest thing to have ever been involved with. I count myself as having been hugely blessed to have lived in an age when dedication could achieve such a difficult goal. 1 rejoice that 1 grew to see a new form of bravery in the men who rode the rockets. This kind of heroism did not require that they engage in the slaughter of fellow men and women for the sake of an ideal, but instead it required trust in the brilliance, hard work and imagination of hundreds of thousands of people who placed them at the top of a fantastic machine that could easily kill them, but thankfully on most occasions, did not. Rather, it took them on a voyage of momentous discovery.

Just prior to the first moonlanding, NASA commissioned film director Theo Kamecke to make a reflective documentary about Apollo ll’s journey. One section pondered on the dawn of the mission’s launch day. Over shots of sunrise, the narrator asked, “In what age of man will the meaning of this morning be understood?” The short answer is: Probably not in this age. Detractors who ask why Apollo should have consumed so much of America’s resources while poverty, disease and hatred exist in the world, are asking the wrong question. It is not in the nature of our species to resolve every problem before embarking on something creative, otherwise we would never have had impressionist art, theories of relativity or Egyptian pyramids.

Perhaps Apollo was really about going and seeing what is out there; and who. as a child, did not want to do that?

[1] Hypergolics are a family of chemicals that ignite spontaneously when mixed.

[2] The concept of the orbit is explained in the next chapter.

[3] See Chapter 6 for a fuller explanation of the RHFSMM AT, a defined orientation in space.

[4] The EMS or entry monitor system was discussed in Chapter 5 where we saw how its ability to measure velocity change could be used for manoeuvres to retrieve the LM from the S – IVB. It will be discussed further in Chapter 15. where we shall sec how it is used for its prime purpose, monitoring re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

[5] Zener cards are familiar tools for paranormal researchers. Each card has one of five

symbols; a circle, square, cross, star and wavy line.