Luniversary

The press is atwitter this week about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,with Michael Collins orbiting the getaway vehicle. (I suppose Twitter is atwitter, too.)

Sunday will be the highlight of the weekend's reminiscences, when there will be a rare joint appearance of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins in Washington.

According to an article in today's Times of London:

The crew of Apollo 11, however, have not shared the cosy friendship one might have expected since they splashed back to Earth on July 24, 1969. “Amiable strangers” is how Michael Collins — the third astronaut, who remained aboard the command module orbiting the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and took a walk — once described their relationship.

On Sunday, the eve of the 40th anniversary of their return to Earth, the three will be reunited in public for what is likely to be the last time. With all of them nearing their 80th birthdays, they will deliver a joint lecture on space history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Perhaps the best news of the week is that Hollywood restoration artists are using digital magic to piece together the videotapes of the 1969 moon landing, which had been erased and reused by NASA in the early 1970s. (The same thing happened at NBC, which reused the videotapes of the earliest episodes of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. People had a different attitude toward archival videos back in those days.)

Maggie Fox of Reuters explains:

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The preview is available at http://www.nasa.gov.

A NASA news release gives more details:

A team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources for the restoration effort. These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA's Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for 36 years.

"The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video," said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11. "The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event." ....

On July 20, 1969, as Armstrong made the short step off the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module onto the powdery lunar surface, a global community of hundreds of millions of people witnessed one of humankind's most remarkable achievements live on television.

The black and white images of Armstrong and Aldrin bounding around the moon were provided by a single small video camera aboard the lunar module. The camera used a non-standard scan format that commercial television could not broadcast.

NASA used a scan converter to optically and electronically adapt these images to a standard U.S. broadcast TV signal. The tracking stations converted the signals and transmitted them using microwave links, Intelsat communications satellites, and AT&T analog landlines to Mission Control in Houston. By the time the images appeared on international television, they were substantially degraded.

At tracking stations in Australia and the United States, engineers recorded data beamed to Earth from the lunar module onto one-inch telemetry tapes. The tapes were recorded as a backup if the live transmission failed or if the Apollo Project needed the data later. Each tape contained 14 tracks of data, including bio-medical, voice, and other information; one channel was reserved for video.

A three-year search for these original telemetry tapes was unsuccessful. A final report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the near future and will be publicly released at that time.

NASA also gives a more specific link to the preview of the restored footage.

In 2005 and 2006, I mused about my own memories of the Apollo 11 landing.




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Sputnik Plus 50

Archbishop Ussher might have placed the creation of the world, with academic precision, at the evening preceding October 23, 4004 BC, but future generations might have a less speculative date upon which to base their calendars.

Most calendric systems today are built on religious foundations. The most common calendar is Christian in origin, devised at the direction of Pope Gregory XIII; year one is more or less the year of the birth of Christ. (This event is now calculated to about 4 BC, owing much to Archbishop Ussher's research.) The Muslim calendar begins with the hejira in AD 622. The Jewish calendar dates its year one to the creation of the world, and so forth.

If humanity someday decides to replace its religiously- and mythologically-based calendars with something else, it would come as no surprise if "year one" is what we now know as 1957, with year one beginning on October 4.

October 4, 1957, was the date that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, and thus the beginning of the Space Age -- and the opening of the wider universe to human exploration.

Setting aside the Cold War context of Sputnik's launch -- Khrushchev wanted to demonstrate Moscow's military and technological superiority over the United States, which had its own satellite launch planned for only weeks later -- one can take pride in it as a human achievement.

In George Furth and Stephen Sondheim's musical play, Merrily We Roll Along, a key scene is set in October 1957, with three young people on a New York rooftop, scanning the skies for Sputnik overhead. One of them says to the others, "Too bad it's not ours," and gets the reply, "It belongs to all of us." The scene ("Our Time") is meant to portray the unlimited optimism of a generation, and of those three individuals in particular. (Never mind that they are destroyed by cynicism, infidelity, and substance abuse in the next two decades ....) Despite its militaristic origins, Sputnik represented the sort of horizonlessness that characterized the 1950s and early 1960s.

Within a dozen years, humans walked on the moon. Before the end of the century, manmade objects had traversed the solar system (and are still moving farther away). Satellites have transformed daily life in communications, agriculture, transportation, telemetry, cartography, meteorology, and -- of course -- astronomy.

The Cold War is over. We can simultaneously acknowledge that Sputnik was a propaganda ploy with little intrinsic scientific value and that it was the first step on a millennial journey whose final destination is still unknown.

A Lunar Memory

Today is the anniversary of the safe return to Earth of the Apollo XI astronauts. They landed in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, after two of them -- Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin -- became the first two humans to walk on the surface of the moon.

Two years ago, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the lunar landing, I wrote a madeleine for The Metro Herald that recalled my own feelings as a 10-year-old boy on the night of the first moonwalk. (Funny -- today, putting the terms "10-year-old boy" and "moonwalk" in the same sentence conjures up an entirely different image. But I digress.)

Here is that article, published in The Metro Herald's edition of July 23, 2004:

Celebrating Humankind’s Greatest Achievement
Richard E. Sincere
Exclusive to The Metro Herald

(Charlottesville, July 20) --- It was a sultry midsummer Sunday evening, warm even by Wisconsin standards.

Only recently had the Milwaukee archdiocese permitted local churches to expand their weekend Mass schedules beyond the traditional Sunday morning services to include Saturday and Sunday late afternoons and evenings. (The first time my family went to church on a Saturday for the new “vigil Mass,” the church bulletin had a headline, “Do you feel Jewish?”)

Despite the Vatican II reforms that had shortened the Sunday liturgy significantly, I was anxious for this evening Mass to end. Normally a well-behaved, quiet 10-year-old, on this occasion I persistently tugged my mother’s sleeve, silently asking, “When will this be finished? When can we go home?” She replied with a motherly, “Calm down. We won’t miss it.”

What was it I was so afraid of missing? What had transformed a languid, leisurely Sunday into a mess of preteen anxiety?

The date was Sunday, July 20, 1969. If that does not sufficiently explain my addled state of mind that day, you were probably born much later.

That was the day, 35 years ago, that man first set foot on the moon.

That was, perhaps, the last time the nation united as one to celebrate an accomplishment of peace and science. The New York Times reported the news with a front-page headline in 96-point type. (By comparison, this article you’re reading is in 10-point type.)

The entire country was riveted to its television screens. Normal programming was pre-empted by coverage of this momentous event. Lassie and Bonanza reruns would have to wait for another Sunday evening.

There have been other occasions when all Americans were as absorbed by a news event, so absorbed as to fear blinking on the chance that something might pass them by. But those events have been almost uniformly tragic ones: the Kennedy assassinations, Nixon’s resignation speech, the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

What made this event even more remarkable was that the nation was at war, not only abroad but, metaphorically speaking, at home. The Vietnam War had divided the country politically. Protest demonstrations often erupted into violence while American soldiers, sailors, and Marines were fighting and dying overseas.

Yet on that hot summer night, the fabric of the nation was noticeably unrent. We shared a communion of fascination that is unlikely to be repeated in the jaundiced age in which we live today.

There is a current comic strip called “Red and Rover” by cartoonist Brian Basset, which looks at the world through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy and his dog at about the same time as the moon landing. Young Red’s obsession with the space program may be exceeded in intensity only by his crush on Marcia Brady. To him, as to many of his contemporaries, the names Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were not just words in a history book – they were genuine, visible, vibrant heroes.

And Walter Cronkite, Frank McGee, and Wernher von Braun were not just television talking-heads – they explained and made accessible to youngsters and adults alike the wonderment of lunar travel.

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”: The words are as familiar – or should be as familiar – to Americans as “Four score and seven years ago . . .” or “When in the course of human events . . .”

Armstrong’s well-chosen ten words sum up the ingenuity, courage, and incredible virtuosity that took us to the moon – man’s destination from time immemorial – within a decade of the decision to go there.

Today we live in a world of technology we take for granted. Home computers, cellphones, iPods® are simply parts of daily life. A visitor to Cape Canaveral can look at the banks of computers in its 1969-vintage control room and shake his head in bewilderment at how such primitive technology could have taken not just one, not just three, but some two dozen men safely to the moon and back. (I know, because I was that visitor to Cape Canaveral just a few years ago.)

We have made many scientific advances in the past 100 years. Didn’t we just celebrate the centenary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk a few months ago? In the 65 years and seven months between that achievement and the moon landing, we saw the development of jet engines, the atomic bomb, television, and satellite communications. Since 1969 we have developed more technologies and inventions than anyone could count. The recent prospect of privately-underwritten space travel is exciting in an economic and political sense, but hardly awe-inspiring.

Really: In the past 35 years, has any scientific or engineering achievement been so dramatic, so earth-shattering, so emotionally satisfactory, as man’s first steps on the moon?

To ask the question is to answer it.

* * *

Richard E. Sincere is a noted author and regular contributor to The Metro Herald; he resides in Charlottesville, Va.

Fly Me to the Moon

Today is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the flight that culminated in man's first landing on the moon.

Last year, to commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary (years ending in zero or five are more natural for celebrating anniversaries than those ending in six), I wrote a piece for The Metro Herald. It was something of a childhood memoir, sort of like Truman Capote's -- er, Harper Lee's -- To Kill a Mockingbird, but without the style, story, or substance. But it's a sketch, not a novel. (If I have a novel in me, it has not neared the surface.)

This article appeared in the July 23, 2004, edition of The Metro Herald:

Celebrating Humankind's Greatest Achievement
Richard E. Sincere
Exclusive to the Metro Herald

(Charlottesville, July 20) --- It was a sultry midsummer Sunday evening, warm even by Wisconsin standards.

Only recently had the Milwaukee archdiocese permitted local churches to expand their weekend Mass schedules beyond the traditional Sunday morning services to include Saturday and Sunday late afternoons and evenings. (The first time my family went to church on a Saturday for the new "vigil Mass," the church bulletin had a headline, "Do you feel Jewish?")

Despite the Vatican II reforms that had shortened the Sunday liturgy significantly, I was anxious for this evening Mass to end. Normally a well-behaved, quiet 10-year-old, on this occasion I persistently tugged my mother's sleeve, silently asking, "When will this be finished? When can we go home?" She replied with a motherly, "Calm down. We won't miss it."

What was it I was so afraid of missing? What had transformed a languid, leisurely Sunday into a mess of pre-teen anxiety?

The date was Sunday, July 20, 1969. If that does not sufficiently explain my addled state of mind that day, you were probably born much later.

That was the day, 35 years ago, that man first set foot on the moon. That was, perhaps, the last time the nation united as one to celebrate an accomplishment of peace and science. The New York Times reported the news with a front-page headline in 96-point type. (By comparison, this article you're reading is in 12-point type.)

The entire country was riveted to its (mostly black-and-white) TV screens. Normal programming was pre-empted by coverage of this momentous event. "Lassie" and "Bonanza" reruns would have to wait for another Sunday evening.

There have been other occasions when all Americans were as absorbed by a news event, so absorbed as to fear blinking on the chance something might pass them by. But those events have been almost uniformly tragic ones: the Kennedy assassinations, Nixon's resignation speech, the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

What made this event even more remarkable was that the nation was at war, not only abroad but, metaphorically speaking, at home. The Vietnam War had divided the country politically. Protest demonstrations often erupted into violence while American soldiers, sailors, and Marines were fighting and dying overseas. Race riots had scarred America's cities in the previous few years, most notably in the days following the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., only 15 months earlier.

Yet on that hot summer night, the fabric of the nation was noticeably unrent. We shared a communion of fascination that is unlikely to be repeated in the jaundiced age in which we live today.

There is a current comic strip called "Red and Rover," by cartoonist Brian Basset, which looks at the world through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy and his dog at about the same time as the moon landing. Young Red's obsession with the space program may be exceeded in intensity only by his crush on Marcia Brady. To him, as to many of his contemporaries, the names Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were not just words in a history book -- they were genuine, visible, vibrant heroes. And Walter Cronkite, Frank McGee, and Wernher von Braun were not just television talking-heads -- they explained and made accessible to youngsters and adults alike the wonderment of lunar travel.

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind": The words are as familiar -- or should be as familiar -- to Americans as "Four score and seven years ago ... " or "When in the course of human events ..." Armstrong's well-chosen ten words sum up the ingenuity, courage, and incredible virtuosity that took us to the moon -- man's destination from time immemorial -- within a decade of the decision to go there.

Today we live in a world of technology that we take for granted. Home computers, cellphones, iPods are simply parts of daily life. A visitor to Cape Canaveral can look at the banks of computers in its 1969-vintage control room and shake his head in bewilderment at how such primitive technology could have taken not just one, not just three, but a dozen men safely to the moon and back. (I know, because I was that visitor to Cape Canaveral just a few years ago.)

We have made many scientific advancements in the past 100 years. Didn't we just celebrate the centenary of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk a few months ago? In the 65 years and seven months between that achievement and the moon landing, we saw the development of jet engines, the atomic bomb, television, and satellite communications. Since 1969 we have developed more technologies and inventions than anyone could count. The recent prospect of privately-underwritten space travel is exciting in an economic and political sense, but hardly awe-inspiring.

Really: In the past 35 years, has any scientific or engineering achievement been so dramatic, so earth-shattering, so emotionally satisfactory, as man's first steps on the moon?

To ask the question is to answer it.