Nerdy-looking Houston boys whose brain power put man on the moon
TALKING about the upcoming Apollo 11 moon landing 40th anniversary, I’ve come to realise how prevalent the hoax theory is.
Younger generations only remember the awful footage of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, killing all 14 crew members.
How can it be possible, they ask, for the technologically-challenged, hippies of the sixties to safely land people on the moon?
I can see why they’d rather believe that the whole thing was stunted up on a Hollywood film set.
Most of the calculations were worked out on chalkboards. The average wrist watch nowadays has more advanced computing technology. And the only thing stopping these men from burning to death was an exciting new wonder product called Teflon (now saving your eggs from sticking to the frying pan).
Yes, it’s incredible. And maybe you had to be there at the time to believe the madness and bravery and of the space race.
The whole thing was based on the childish, competitive, brutish stupidity that was the Cold War. America and Russia took all the world’s resources and intelligence and pointed them in the same direction — for a few crazy years the only thing that seemed to matter was getting to the moon first.
If it was a stunt, it was a very long drawn out one, which lasted throughout most of my childhood.
Between 1961 and 1972 we spent weeks and weeks gathered around little black and white TV sets, or with our ears up against the radio, trying to follow the latest development.
My older brother, like every other boy of his generation, was obsessed with facts and figures about the latest Apollo mission and would bore me endlessly with every detail. He had a wall chart showing where the spacecraft was each day.
And the reason we were mesmerised was that those astronauts knew (and we all knew) that their chances of survival were based on a wing and a prayer. There was no health and safety mentality in those days.
I’m not knocking health and safety: factoring out the imminent threat of death can only be a good thing.
But back then the world was a dangerous place. My father used to have a 1960s green Austin Mini van and we would use it for holidays and family days out.
That meant mum and dad in the front, with the baby safely held on mum’s knee (no seat belts) and us older four kids all bumping around in the back.
On one memorable occasion when my grandmother was over from Ireland, she came too — along with my aunt and my five cousins, and their Corgi dog. That was four adults, 10 children, a dog, and all our picnic stuff for a day at the beach. In a Mini van (when Minis were miniscule — our van was about the same length as a Smart car). Never mind seatbelts, we were squeezed in so tightly that getting enough oxygen was more of a worry.
I think that kind of devil-may-care mentality about safety puts the Apollo missions into context.
The astronauts’ families watched knowing that the chances of them getting back alive were slim.
At take-off, the world held its collective breath. We knew that at every docking procedure things could go fatally wrong. And when we saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, everybody was well aware that these might be the last pictures of him alive.
It was that raw bravery and spirit of adventure that made every little boy want to be an astronaut.
And there’s another factor that moon landing doubters don’t take into account.
Our modern-day reliance on computers is actually a reason why space missions became more dangerous, rather than less.
Those nerdy-looking Houston boys had to rely on old-fashioned brain power and an obsessive, compulsive attention to detail, checking and double-checking every calculation, testing and re-testing every piece of equipment, rehearsing every moment of the mission until everybody knew their part, however small, and everything ran like clockwork. That precision is something that’s been lost.
Computers make complicated calculations so quickly that it is difficult to imagine mathematical theorists and scientists taking years with chalk and blackboards, using pen and paper to do the same job.
Everybody knew that lives would be jeopardised by even the tiniest human error. So it wasn’t allowed to happen. And computer error wasn’t even born.
They say if you remember the sixties you weren’t there. But if you were a child in the sixties, the one thing you remember above all else was the day man landed on the moon. If you don’t believe it happened, perhaps you had to be there.
