IN a recent book, Fred Kaplan makes the case for 1959 as a turning point in modern history. His thesis has attracted a fair amount of skepticism, not least because equally convincing arguments could be articulated for 1979 and 1989. But what about 1969?
That’s a bit harder, not least because it is so comprehensively overshadowed by 1968, the year when it seemed, in so many parts of the world, that the old order might perish as a consequence of the younger generation’s withering contempt. It didn’t, of course, and in many cases the forces of reaction had their revenge. But the notion of a better world did not recede everywhere. In the US, although 1969 began with Richard Nixon’s swearing-in as president, it was also notable for two landmarks that grabbed the popular imagination.
One of these was the Woodstock music festival in mid-August, which brought together an estimated half a million young people, by and large united in their vague idealism and their broad opposition to the Vietnam War. Somewhat surprisingly, none of the performers at the festival alluded even tangentially to an event that had occurred less than a month earlier: man’s first steps on the moon. That’s right, Neil Armstrong and 11 other astronauts had a go at moonwalking long before the late Michael Jackson popularized the concept on MTV.
It’s possible the tribes gathered at Woodstock ignored the moon landing because it was clearly the ultimate in Cold War one-upmanship. John F. Kennedy had declared his intention of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade after the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth.
The space race was an extension of the arms race. In the latter, the US had always been well ahead of the USSR, but it pretended otherwise so that it could continue enhancing its nuclear arsenals. However, the Soviet Union was indeed ahead in the outer atmosphere: it was the first nation to launch a craft that orbited the earth, the first to put live animals into orbit, the first to put a man into orbit, the first the put a woman into orbit. It was blindsided, however, by the unexpected demise of Sergei Korolev, the chief scientist behind its Soyuz program – and a veteran of Stalin’s Gulag.
His American counterpart, Wernher von Braun, was a Nazi SS officer who had been behind Germany’s devastating V2 rockets in World War II; he surrendered to the Americans in 1945 and was promptly co-opted into the US military-industrial complex. This former Hitler loyalist provided the impetus for the Apollo program, which cost the equivalent, in today’s money, of about a trillion dollars.
Initially, it seemed to be a price worth paying. The world watched as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lowered themselves on to the lunar surface from a module that resembled the craft conjured up by H.G. Wells in The First Men on the Moon (1902). Earth’s satellite had inspired poets and astronomers since time immemorial: the first fantasy about landing on the moon apparently dates back to 160AD.
Inevitably, there were those who, in 1969, looked upon it as a transgression on celestial terrain – a case of man going not only where no man had gone before, but where no man was supposed to go. Others looked upon it as a hoax: a drama filmed in a dusty Hollywood backlot. These tendencies have persisted; on the 30th anniversary of the moon landing 10 years ago, a survey revealed that six per cent of Americans believed it to have been faked. A few years later, a spoof television documentary that featured the likes of Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld reinforced the idea of a conspiracy, tongue firmly in cheek.
Of course, had the 1969 moon landing indeed been faked, the USSR would have called Nixon’s bluff. The most important question about “one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” revolved around why, not whether. It wasn’t a question that was widely raised at the time. That it was a monumental achievement seemed like reason enough. Arguably, the primary motivation was relatively mundane: the conquest of the moon by the Soviet Union would have signified the superiority of communism.
Besides, the supposed struggle against communism on another plane was not exactly proceeding according to plan: Vietnam may have been pockmarked with as many craters as the moon on account of the most relentless aerial bombardment campaign in history, but the Vietnamese had given notice they had no intention of crying uncle. On the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin, both veterans of the Korean War, left a plaque saying “We came in peace” (and, in a nod to détente, a medal for Gagarin). It was a vacuous gesture, given that on Earth the US was, as Martin Luther King Jr had put it, “the greatest purveyor of violence”.
If Woodstock was, to some extent, a reaction to the Vietnam War, the moon landing was partly a distraction. There were further missions to the moon, but by the end of 1972 the program had petered out: there seemed to be little point in gathering more moondust. The last Apollo flight, almost exactly six years after Armstrong and Aldrin’s lunar adventure, docked with a Soyuz spaceship: more a one-night stand than a marriage made in the heavens. There are vague plans to resume manned missions to the moon before heading to Mars, amid indications that the next person to step on the lunar surface may well be neither an American nor a Russian.
That’s all very well, but arguably the most precious moment in the US space program was when, on Christmas Eve in 1968, the Apollo 8 crew captured the magnificent spectacle of Earthrise. More than four decades on, it remains a symbolic reminder that preserving and healing our exquisite and fragile planet is the human race’s primary responsibility and should be our chief priority.
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