It's Moon Day...

While I've been away from blogging, there have been a bunch (that's a technical term) of things I've wanted to blog about. Most of them are not happy topics, but sometimes it is necessary to think and write about them. But before I wade back into all of that, I really feel the need to point out that today is the 44th anniversary of possibly the best thing humans have ever done.

Forty-four years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on and then later in the day walked on the Moon to become the first humans to set foot on a celestial body other than the Earth. Maybe you had to be there to witness the landing to really understand how big a deal it was. And billions of us did witness it, via a television broadcast of the event, which in itself was a very big deal at a time when we weren't used to instant broadcasts from remote locations as a daily occurrence. The pictures from the Moon that day were a bit murky - resolution was kind of low and contrast was high - but, still, we got to see the "giant leap for mankind" in the time it took to relay the pictures from the Moon to a satellite dish in Australia and then around the world.

It was pretty damn cool.

I've written here before about watching the landing and the Moon walk with my father, who was thrilled beyond words about the whole thing, so I won't go over that ground here again right now.

What I want to address is the amount of imagination that it took to put together the program that sent Armstrong, Aldrin and ten other men (and only men) to walk on the Moon - and, lest we forget, a number of others who orbited but did not set foot on the Moon. Yes, it took a lot of money to go to the moon. But it took even more imagination. The first moon landing took place a little short of twelve years before the Russians put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in orbit around the earth on October 4, 1957 and a little over 8 years after Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space (and to orbit the earth) on April 12, 1961. A few weeks later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. An American didn't orbit the earth until John Glenn did so on February 20, 1962.

From those first manned flights to the first moon landing was an incredibly quick progression. That landing humans on the Moon was accomplished at all, let alone in such a short period of time from the inception of the efforts to put humans in space, took great imagination and great determination. Granted, at least some of that impetus came as a result of the Cold War and American determination that the Soviets wouldn't "get" the Moon. I don't believe, however, that was the whole of the program to go to the Moon. It also had to do with the essential human urge to explore.

I wonder, sometimes, what has happened to that urge, because there doesn't seem to be much of a desire on the part of most people to move on and push the frontier of exploration farther, or even to hold the frontier at the Moon. Whenever it is proposed that we return to the Moon, all sorts of objections are raised. It's too expensive. It's too dangerous. We don't need to go. Plans to go to Mars are met with similar objections. When George H. W. Bush was president, he proposed sending a manned mission to Mars. It was shelved because it was seen as being too expensive. Barack Obama has also called for a mission to Mars by the 2030s, but there is as yet no budget for the effort.

When I was a child and the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were progressing, there was a huge excitement about the space program. Now, it seems, very few people care. Very few people seem willing to even look up and see the planets and stars in the universe, much less take any more tentative steps to visit even the closest of those celestial bodies. They seem to want to cling to the planet we were all born and are so far confined to. True, there is a more or less permanent human presence in space, on the International Space Station. But that is a tenuous presence and limited to a few people at a time, with a maximum permanent occupancy of six. It has been continuously occupied for almost thirteen years, but the ISS will not last forever. The United States, since the end of the Space Shuttle program, has no means to send crew members to the ISS and depends on Russian launches to get its astronauts and supplies to the station.

So, I want to take advantage of the anniversary of the first human walk on another planetary body to say that we need to rediscover that ambition, that imagination, that determination to reach beyond this rock we live on and reach out, first to our immediate neighborhood and then, perhaps, to the rest of the universe. Just imagine what we might learn...what me might find.

Music Sunday: Moon Song Edition, in memory of Neil Armstrong

Today's Music Sunday is a little different, although not lacking in music.

As you've probably heard by now, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died yesterday. The word hero gets bandied about a lot these days, but as far as I'm concerned Armstrong is one man who really deserves that title. He landed the Lunar Module Eagle on the moon, flying it manually after the computer program that was designed to guide the landing turned out to be trying to put the lander down in a place where too many rocks made a landing dangerous. Of course, being a pilot, I suspect Armstrong was not all that disappointed or upset that he actually had to fly the lander, rather than having the computer do it for him. Just having the guts to go to the moon, much less the cool to take over like that and make a successful landing in such stressful circumstances, qualifies him for the title of "hero".

I think it is notable that after his return from the moon, Armstrong simply went about the rest of his life and didn't make a career out of having been the first human to walk on another planetary body. He could have ridden the adulation that came his way as a result of his accomplishment for as long as he wanted to. Instead, he came back and taught, sat on some corporate boards, participated in the spaceflight accident investigations after Apollo 13 failed to make its scheduled moon landing and after the Challenger disaster, and generally led his life. In the US culture of hero worship and celebrity adulation, I think it took a great deal of character not to fall into the trap of living the rest of his life off the fame he gained from being the first man on the moon.

Because it became a tradition at NASA to play musical wake-up calls for the astronauts on missions, I was going to share the wake-up music from the Apollo 11 mission as a tribute to Armstrong. However, it turns out that the wake-up calls on that mission consisted of news and sports reports rather than music, so instead, I'm going to share a few "moon" songs.

"Fly Me To The Moon", by Frank Sinatra, seemed a natural place to start. Two Apollo missions had flown to and orbited the moon before Apollo 11 made the first landing. But the Apollo 11 crew was the first to fly to the moon, rather than just to the vicinity of the moon.



And then, I thought it seemed appropriate to share Louis Armstrong's version of "Moon River":



The Police's "Walking on the Moon" also seemed like a natural song to share here, even though it isn't really all that much about walking on the actual moon:



The moon, of course, plays a role in a lot of songs. "June, spoon, moon" is sort of the classically stereotypical love-song formula, and has nothing to do with moon landings, of course. But I couldn't resist sharing a few more "moon" songs. Many of these songs are romantic in nature, of course. One of my favorites is "Moondance", by Van Morrison:



Cat Stevens's (Yusuf Islam) "Moonshadow" is a song I've liked ever since it first came out. At first listen, it seems awfully depressing, with lyrics about losing, well, just about everything. But then, when you listen to it more closely, it really is about looking on the positive side of every situation, no matter how dire. That is a difficult thing to do, but something I think more of us should try more often. This live performance is from 1976:



Sting's "Moon Over Bourbon Street" is another favorite of mine. This performance, from 2010, includes a symphony orchestra and is perhaps a little over-produced for my taste, but it's a good live interpretation of a very good song:



Not all songs about the moon are romantic (in whatever way you want to interpret that concept) or hopeful. "Bad Moon Rising", by Creedence Clearwater Revival, takes the opposite tack of exploring the theme of the moon as an ominous omen:



Neil Armstrong's family has requested that those who want to do something in remembrance of him do a very simple thing. On a clear night sometime soon, go outside look up at the Moon, think of Mr. Armstrong, and give him and the moon a wink. I can't think of a more appropriate way to remember a man who lived an ordinary life after doing such an extraordinary thing as being the first human to walk on another world.