After Witnessing The Moon Landings On Television As A Youngster I Have Been Completely Fascinated By Space Exploration And There Is A Whole Lot More Of The Universe Still To Be Interpreted
As a child I recollect being encouraged to stay awake until very late one day with my parents and watch on an ancient black and white television set as Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong made history by setting foot on its surface. The anticipation prior to the moon landing and the frequent news reports about the ongoing ‘Space Race’ between the Americans and the Russians made a huge impression on me as a young child and even now I am still interested in space and space travel. I make no claim to be highly intellectual about the subject, but the concept of a universe so huge that we can’t even start to conceive its size is very humbling. Humans really are the most insignificant animals when considered in the context of everything else that exists.
Humans have been watching the skies since the dawn of time. Many ancient civilisations had rites and traditions based on the movements of the stars and planets, and even today our lives are affected by the sun and the moon a lot more than we ever realise. Over the centuries, humans must have gazed up at the skies and wondered what some other planets were like. In fact, there is a complete industry that has been built on the notion of life elsewhere in the universe – aliens, little green men, unidentified flying objects, the whole science fiction genre of cinema and literature, imaginary weapons with light pouring from a Laser eye – would any of these concepts exist if there were no distant planets visible for them to supposedly hail from?
With huge advances in technology in the last century, the desire to head out into space and go to other planets slowly progressed from a dream to a potential reality and the Cold War competition between the USA and the USSR resulted in the fairly fast production of equipment which could travel further than the earth’s atmosphere. The V2 rocket, developed by the Germans was the first man-made object which could be launched into space without technical problems, and after the end of the Second World War, when both the United States and Russia had gained knowledge of the technology, initial development work had the intention of using the knowledge for weapons. But after the Russians succeeded in sending a human into space in 1961, the Americans immediately took the decision to progress with their own programme of manned space exploration.
The first American to travel into space did so only one month later than Yuri Gagarin and from then onwards, both countries began to consider the moon as their aim for exploration. In the 1960’s unmanned crafts were landed on the moon and sent back information about its surface, and the Russians also successfully sent an unmanned craft into orbit around the moon, which provided the very first images of the other side of the moon.
In a short number of years, the USA launched the first manned spacecraft intended to fly to the moon. Apollo 8, launched in 1968, orbited the moon and landed safely back on earth. It’s mindblowing to realise that it was actually the following year when Apollo 11 achieved the feat of satisfactorily setting down on the moon in order that two people could actually walk on its surface. It’s an even more outstanding feat when you know that the whole trip to the moon and back again was achieved with less computer ability than my home PC, a games console, Laser eye surgery equipment or many mobile phones!
Apollo 11 is one of the first proper news stories that I can recollect being aware of, particularly I suppose because it had so much public interest, but I was utterly fascinated by the whole thing and have continued to take an interest in space related developments to this very day. But it’s a sad indication of the media’s control of what is considered to be news, that just two moon trips later, Apollo 13 only became newsworthy when events took a turn for the worse.
Experience gained from the disaster (and final triumph) of Apollo 13, along with the cost of the space programme led to a gradual wind-down of manned space flights, and the most recent man to stand on the moon did so in 1972. Since then, of course, countless unmanned craft have been rocketed into space by a number of nations and the International Space Station is orbiting the earth right now, and is clearly visible if you are located in the right place at the right time – a flash of light travelling across the sky as if sent out from a Laser eye beam.
As science and technology progress (just consider how far we’ve progressed in the past century – from the Ford Model T to the Bugatti Veyron, bi-planes to supersonic jets, fountain pens to computers, monocles to Laser eye surgery – the list is endless), mankind will carry on sending spacecrafts further and further into the deepest points of the universe and in the future will no doubt discover countless things which are way beyond our imagination at the moment. But I am quite certain that ever since that late night when I watched Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon, I will always be fascinated by the latest discoveries about the universe.