Today - 20 July 2022 - is the is the 53rd anniversary of the first crewed landing on the moon - official touchdown time was 20:17:39 UTC.
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| NASA LRO / Jatan Mehta photo |
Last year the United Nations declared that 20 July would be recognised as International Moon Day. To be honest, Moon Day hasn't made much of an impact - even Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for it.
The Apollo Programme was a huge undertaking, from it's inception in 1960 (during the Eisenhower administration), it took only nine years to reach to goal of landing a person on the moon - mainly due, of course, to its adoption by President Kennedy as his flagship programme to demonstrate US technological superiority over the Soviet Union. Starting with Apollo 7 in 1968 and culminating with Apollo 17 in 1972, NASA launched 33 astronauts on 11 Apollo missions. Twelve humans walked on the Moon. That the programme petered out there, was due to the fact that this was overall a political and not a scientific endeavour and that once the 'flags and footprints' were done, that political interest deminished.
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| My namesake, Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon NASA photo |
Sadly, the massive effort to get Apollo done created an areospace-industry complex that saw NASA as a milk cow. The efforts of this industry and its tools in Congress have blighted space exploration ever since, and continue to do so. Nevertheless, lunar exploration continues.
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| Lunar rover Yutu-2 Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) photo |
For anyone interested in the history of the programme, I'll point to a post I made back in March of last year, in which I highlighted two podcasts - the BBC's 13 Minutes to the Moon and the Planetary Society's A Political History of Apollo. Both are excellent and informative listening.
How will I celebrate Moon Day? Other than writing one of my increasingly rare blog posts, I don't know. I'll wander out tonight and look up at the sky - I fondly remember lying on the grass on a warm summers day in 1989 marking the 20th anniversary of the landing, and being struck by the sheer beauty of the moon.
I still have that pile of books I bought in April to read, but quite frankly, I find the biographies of astronauts to the the least interesting aspect of the Apollo Programme. I'm off to listen the the Political History podcast linked to above, which has some insightful thinks to say.
