MEN ON THE MOON
That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind. – Niel Armstrong
On March 15, 1961, President John F. Kennedy said that his nation should dedicate itself to the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth” before the end of that decade. I remember listening to this on a radio in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.
At the height of the Cold War, the Apollo 11 project became the first to land two human beings right there on luna firma. Two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, were the first to set foot on lunar surface. I was among 650 million people all over the world who watched on TV that momentous event in history, the most significant event of the 20th century on July 20, 1969.
For a few billion years the Moon has been whirling around our little ship in the universe, shining and darkening periodically from our perspective. Its precise and periodic waxing and waning add magic to the star-studded sky.
Human eyes have watched the Moon for millions of years, wondering at its changing phases, imagining gruyere-cheese and rabbit-face on its surface. Hippocrates (5th century BCE) thought the Moon terrorized people. It was suspected for a long time that the Moon had an impact on our sanity. As late as in the 18th century patients in a psychiatric ward of a hospital in London were flogged during lunar phases to prevent hyperactivity.
Goddesses Selene and Luna were once worshiped by Greeks and Romans. In Mesopotamia and Japan, the Moon was a male-God. In the Hindu world, the Moon appears in Puranic lore as a character, and to this day it dictates an observance called Karva Chauth. The waxing crescent is taken as a symbol of spiritual growth, and this was adopted by the Ottomans for their flag. Since then every Islamic state has had a crescent on its flag and is now regarded as an emblem of theocracy.
In the seventeenth century, the telescope reduced all the poetry and pleasantry about the Moon to factual appraisals such as that it is a celestial body some 200 thousand plus miles away. The telescope revealed the dark patches on it to be shadows of huge mountains. The discovery of gravitation and associated calculations gave more details of the Moon’s motions and orbits. To astronomers and mathematical physicists all this was more thrilling than Moon-worship.
For the next few centuries, while people still believed that the Moon influenced the fates and fortunes of earthlings, for scientists this, our huge neighbor in the sky, simply became a rotund rock caught forever in the Earth’s gravitational pull, causing tides to rise and fall periodically.
In the 19th century, some astronomers believed that there were cities on the Moon, inhabited by Lunarians. In the 1860s, Jules Verne wrote two famous science fiction narratives about voyages to the moon which were read by millions as imaginative tales. In De La Terre à la Lune, Verne expressed his conviction that a rocket would be free from the earth’s gravity. In his story, the craft was fired by a cannon, and the passengers were ecstatic when they catalogued the craters on the Moon. Also called the Baltimore Gun Club, in this novel it took 97 hours and 20 minutes to reach the Moon. This book was followed by another, called Au tour de la Lune (Around the Moon) in which the three passengers escape collision with an asteroid which is captured by the earth.
The real Moon-landing was a major collective scientific project. Some “400,000 scientists, engineers, technologists, machinists, electricians, worked on the Apollo program.” Science is a collective enterprise. As the French poet Paul Valéry put it succinctly, “L’art, c’est moi; la science, c’est nous”: “Art is I, Science is We.”
But conspiracy theories slowly emerged, crediting Hollywood with the make-believe hoopla that was meant to dupe millions. Hollywood seized on the idea and made the movie Capricorn 1 about a fake Mars landing.
Today, the USA and Russia no longer hold monopoly on these enterprises. In July 2020, NASA launched its Mars 2020 Rover. Its ultimate goal is to make a human landing on that desert of a planet where there is no water and only thin air with little oxygen to breathe, and of course no restaurant whatsoever. With all that, or rather without all that, some thought that human landing on Mars would happen in 2024. Visionaries dream impossible dreams; science and technology actualize some of them.
Spurts of Thought 