'An upturned bowl we call the sky - trapped under which we live and die.'
What the hell happened almost forty years ago ? Its easy to overlook the import of that first manned lunar excursion all those dim decades away - especially if you weren't lucky enough to experience that fabulous period - the Space Age. It was everywhere, you could wear it, eat it, play with it and sleep in it. But oddly enough at the time, the actual event was something of an anti-climax. Compared to today when its possible to view almost any extraterrestrial object in glorious detail, via the internet or Google Moon or Mars or watch mission control on a NASA webcam - the moon landing appeared on tv as a hazy, indistinct blur. Ok, tv technology of 1969 wasn't exactly the high definition, 1080p widescreen, popcorned extravaganza it is today, and the tv in my house was still a black and white - colour didn't arrive there till a little later.
It turns out that the pictures we were shown from NASA were not actually live - the transmission was run through a compression routine to beam it back to Earth, received by NASA, decoded, displayed on a video monitor and then recorded - from the TV - onto 16mm cine film. this was then broadcast to the news agencies and main worldwide feed. Recently, it was revealed than NASA had actually lost the tapes of the original transmission and all that was available was this 16mm cine copy - but after an extensive search, the tapes have appeared in Australia, where they have been languishing for decades. If they can be used and haven't deteriorated over time, NASA plans to recover the footage and release it in time for the 40th anniversary.
With Transformers 2 riding high on the movie charts and also on a wave of technical excellence in terms of computer imagery, its easy to believe that giant, alien robots actually exist - such is the quality of the hyperreal effects in the film. When you compare some of the amateur videos shown on Youtube showing supposedly 'real' UFOS and alien contacts with the clumsy, fuzzy, almost comical video of Armstrong climbing down the ladder of the LEM onto what some people still insist is a movie set - its very easy to forget the magnitude of the event and the risks taken by three men to reach the moon.
At the time of the landing, Neil Armstrong was quoted as comparing his mission as a 'match lighting a bonfire' and that some people began to confuse the light from the match with the bonfire itself and he became the (accessible) focus of the media attention, rather than the event itself and the simple fact that humankind had for the first time in its entire history, escaped the jealous bonds of Earth and stepped on another world. It would appear that thanks to a modern Prometheus we are now able to make our own small bonfires and that blaze which was ignited forty years ago has now burned cold for want of fresh fuel. The moon was our closest neighbour and probably one of the least impressive objects in our system, lets hope that discoveries in the near future rekindle that sense of wonder and desire to leave Earth and a new Space Age will begin.
To get an idea of the extremity of the loneliness of the mission and the stark beauty of the lunar landscape, check out these Quicktime Panoramas, the Apollo Mission photograph archive and have a look at the project to restore and reprocess the original photographic material collected by the Lunar Orbiter missions, which paved the way for the first lunar landing:
http://www.panoramas.dk/moon/mission-apollo.html
http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html
http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-111408a.html
