The 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing
20th July 2019
More a blog than news - this evening I attended a series of talks and presentations at the Buccleuch Centre, Langholm, celebrating Neil Armstrong and the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. As a peddler of comic strip Moon stories, this was a personal indulgence.
Neil Armstrong's biographer, Jim Hansen talked about and presented 'The Armstrong Tapes' - the National Geographic channel's documentary based on his 50+ hours recorded interviews with Neil; Jim will be presenting a screening of First Man - the film based on the biography he wrote - tomorrow. It was a pleasure to talk to him and to so unexpectedly be linked to the first man on the Moon.
Space writer and Apollo historian Ken MacTaggart presented a brief history of the Apollo programme and then narrated a screening of the Apollo 11 landing, in real time, exactly fifty years after it happened - I've only ever seen extracts, but to see the film shot by Buzz Aldrin out of the LEM window, in colour, on a cinema screen with framing of all the speed, altitude and fuel consumption data, complete with the mission control/ Eagle communication was utterly gripping - only watching it did I realise the level to which Neil Armstrong piloted the craft down - slowing, speeding up, falling rising, nearly hovering until satisfied of the landing site. Ken's talk afterward, his recollections of conversations with astronauts, involvement with NASA and the Apollo 11 Flight Journal really broadened my understanding of the landings - I'll add a link to the flight journal and the terrific photographs used in the presentation (I hadn't seen these before, they are more recent NASA commissioned digital scans from original negatives and were beautiful to see on a large screen).
Great to chat to both presenters afterwards - and somehow strange, but fitting, that it was in pretty much the spot where Neil Armstrong was given the freedom of Langholm back in 1972, when he came to trace his family origins to this small town in Dumfriesshire. I live in sight of the Armstrong family's Pele Tower, not really aware of the link when I first took the house, but happy there is such a link for a happy enthusiast for all things to do with space.
The Moon? It's time we went back; then on to Mars, then out into the solar system and the galaxy, it's the only chance the human race has to survive.
'Save the planet!', the ecologists rather erroneously chant - how long for, I ask? In a billion years, our Sun will start to die; over the next four or five billion, it will swell into a red giant and engulf the Earth. We cheat the starvation that threatens our teeming billions, only with scientific and agricultural tricks that will eventually lose against our combined mass of humanity, however carefully we conserve our resources they will eventually run out, unless we go to the stars. The same scientific methods as tell us we're warming the planet and should recycle stuff tells us this; but unless we seriously plan how to live beyond the Earth, no amount of 'saving' it will eventually stop our species' death. We've been around for a blink of an eye compared to Earth's age, and may be gone as quickly, either by our own carelessness with our environment or some natural disaster we are doing little to look for or plan to avoid. There is only one plan if you want to save us, but no plan will ever save the Earth for ever: plan to leave - to spread - to explore. Shoot for the Moon, then beyond.
John R Reynolds
20th July 2019
Neil Armstrong's biographer, Jim Hansen talked about and presented 'The Armstrong Tapes' - the National Geographic channel's documentary based on his 50+ hours recorded interviews with Neil; Jim will be presenting a screening of First Man - the film based on the biography he wrote - tomorrow. It was a pleasure to talk to him and to so unexpectedly be linked to the first man on the Moon.
Space writer and Apollo historian Ken MacTaggart presented a brief history of the Apollo programme and then narrated a screening of the Apollo 11 landing, in real time, exactly fifty years after it happened - I've only ever seen extracts, but to see the film shot by Buzz Aldrin out of the LEM window, in colour, on a cinema screen with framing of all the speed, altitude and fuel consumption data, complete with the mission control/ Eagle communication was utterly gripping - only watching it did I realise the level to which Neil Armstrong piloted the craft down - slowing, speeding up, falling rising, nearly hovering until satisfied of the landing site. Ken's talk afterward, his recollections of conversations with astronauts, involvement with NASA and the Apollo 11 Flight Journal really broadened my understanding of the landings - I'll add a link to the flight journal and the terrific photographs used in the presentation (I hadn't seen these before, they are more recent NASA commissioned digital scans from original negatives and were beautiful to see on a large screen).
Great to chat to both presenters afterwards - and somehow strange, but fitting, that it was in pretty much the spot where Neil Armstrong was given the freedom of Langholm back in 1972, when he came to trace his family origins to this small town in Dumfriesshire. I live in sight of the Armstrong family's Pele Tower, not really aware of the link when I first took the house, but happy there is such a link for a happy enthusiast for all things to do with space.
The Moon? It's time we went back; then on to Mars, then out into the solar system and the galaxy, it's the only chance the human race has to survive.
'Save the planet!', the ecologists rather erroneously chant - how long for, I ask? In a billion years, our Sun will start to die; over the next four or five billion, it will swell into a red giant and engulf the Earth. We cheat the starvation that threatens our teeming billions, only with scientific and agricultural tricks that will eventually lose against our combined mass of humanity, however carefully we conserve our resources they will eventually run out, unless we go to the stars. The same scientific methods as tell us we're warming the planet and should recycle stuff tells us this; but unless we seriously plan how to live beyond the Earth, no amount of 'saving' it will eventually stop our species' death. We've been around for a blink of an eye compared to Earth's age, and may be gone as quickly, either by our own carelessness with our environment or some natural disaster we are doing little to look for or plan to avoid. There is only one plan if you want to save us, but no plan will ever save the Earth for ever: plan to leave - to spread - to explore. Shoot for the Moon, then beyond.
John R Reynolds
20th July 2019