That Giant Leap

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fountainhall

That Giant Leap

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Fifty years ago to the day was one of the most glorious for American vision, determination, science, technology, courage and the breaking of so many once-thought impossible barriers. Mankind flew to the moon, landed, walked around, blasted off and returned safely to earth. It was an unbelievable feat.

Eight years earlier, I can remember sitting on the floor by the fire in our living room late on a cold January afternoon listening to the inaugural address of the new American President. What he proposed then seemed an impossible dream.

But JFK meant what he said. And America jumped into action. I loved the whole idea of travelling in space and latched on to it grabbing all the news I could. The Soviets had already put the dog Laika into space. Soon after Kennedy’s speech Yuri Gagarin would become the first man to orbit the earth and return. It seemed that America had a mighty job on its hands to beat the USSR to the moon.

But in addition to its own developing expertise, NASA had the former Nazi Werner bon Braun, the German who had masterminded the V2 rocket programme and surrendered to US forces as the war was ending. In 1960 he had been appointed the first director of NASA’s Space Flight Center. Known as the “Father of Rocket Science”, he headed the team that developed all the moon programme rockets, including the mighty Saturn V.

I recall Alan Shepherd’s sub-orbital flight. Coming just a few weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, it seemed such an almost pitiful up and down compared to Gagarin’s round-the-world trip. I stayed up for John Glenn’s three orbits, and then was shocked along with the rest of the world when a test of the 3-man capsule intended for the moon caught fire on a launch pad in 1967. All three astronauts died. The capsule was substantially redesigned.

Walks in space were later eclipsed when Borman, Lovell and Anders circumnavigated the moon in December 1968. This seemed to be the real miracle for me. I remember many pundits advising that it was too dangerous to go around the moon and be out of contact with ground controllers. One was Sir Bernard Lovell, Britain’s foremost space expert. Quite what these people expected Apollo 8 to find behind the moon I cannot recall. All I know is that I was utterly enthralled

For some years I had pinned on my bedroom wall the now iconic photograph taken by William Anders of half the earth floating in the blackness of space above the moon’s surface.

Image
Photo: NASA

After the tension and success of that first flight around the moon, I found I was fractionally less engrossed in the Apollo 11 moon landing itself. It was almost as though it was bound to happen given all the preparations that had gone before. Yet I was not then aware of the huge problems that had had to be overcome for the LEM to land and take off again.

It was all a phenomenal achievement.
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