It’s a grand coincidence that the 2007 documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon, which has been in our Netflix queue for months, should have shown up last Thursday—the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. The film features interviews with 10 of the 24 astronauts who orbited or walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, along with historic film and TV footage, some of it rare or unseen. I recommend it to you highly if you remember the Apollo missions, but especially if you don’t.
Before I was obsessed by music or baseball (an obsession I have since lost), I was wild about space, and Apollo 11 marked the climax of three years’ geekery. The mission launched at 8:32 on a Wednesday morning, July 16, 1969, but I would have been watching Walter Cronkite long before that. But when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the surface of the moon at 3:17 on the afternoon of Sunday July 20, I wasn’t watching. We’d gone to a family picnic, and I spent the afternoon playing in the yard with my cousins. The TV was on inside the house, however, and some of the adults were watching, and at some point late in the afternoon, I learned that Eagle had landed.
It was just before 10:00—well past my bedtime 40 years ago tonight—when Neil Armstrong emerged from Eagle to take his first step. The TV pictures were hard to make out, but CBS helpfully added the graphic, “Live from the surface of the moon.”
(NASA, which actually destroyed its own original footage of the landings at some point in the 1970s or 1980s, has restored the landing video from other sources, and it’s a vast improvement over what we watched back then. Also, the CBS news clips at YouTube prove that the Apollo 11 mission was the apex of the late Walter Cronkite’s career. He was as big a space fan as any nine-year-old boy, and didn’t hesitate to appropriately express excitement and wonder as he guided his viewers through what they were seeing.)
The astronauts walked on the moon until well after midnight, and I can see myself there in the living room with the family, rarely taking my eyes off of the hazy pictures on the console TV. The next afternoon we were there again to watch Eagle lift off from the surface of the moon. I was excited and relieved when the liftoff was successful, because while we were waiting Mom had said, “Wouldn’t it be awful if their rocket didn’t work?”
I can remember going outside and looking up at the moon that summer—perhaps during the voyage of Apollo 11—and trying to understand that people could go there. It was more than my nine-year-old brain could process. And 40 years later, it seems even more extraordinary then it did then. In 1969, we could never have imagined that the Apollo missions would be the high point of our space explorations. Everyone assumed we’d shoot for Mars next; the week of the moon mission, Vice President Spiro Agnew stated that the country’s goal should be to reach Mars by the end of the century, and he repeated his assertion in an TV interview just after Eagle landed.
But we abandoned the moon and deeper explorations of space, and now, it’s hard even to imagine how we might return to the moon or go to Mars. Our problems on Earth are too great, our finances too fubar’d—and perhaps our imaginations are too cramped and limited now. We also lack the great national motivation that the Cold War provided, which was even greater than the inborn human desire to see what’s over the next hill. As a result, 60 years from today, I’d be willing to bet that when we celebrate the centennial of Apollo 11, Americans won’t have been back to the moon. Another country, maybe. Not us, sadly.
Moon and space references were already widespread in popular culture by the summer of 1969 (remember, for example, Space Food Sticks?), and it didn’t take Dickie Goodman very long to get involved. He’d pioneered the break-in record during the 1950s with the space-themed “The Flying Saucer,” so “Luna Trip” was a natural. As a snapshot of the biggest radio hits of that summer, you can’t do better. But “Luna Trip” was not one of them. It charted briefly on WLS and made the top 10 at KFXM in San Bernardino at the end of August, but it reached only Number 95 in two weeks on the Hot 100, directly between the flights of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12.
“Luna Trip”/Dickie Goodman & Friends (buy Dickie Goodman stuff and/or find a link to iTunes here)
Filed under: TV, Today in History, Tracks | Tagged: Dickie Goodman, Walter Cronkite
I regret as well that we did not continue to explore. I would have wagered a lot on that evening forty years ago that we would have been to Mars by now. I doubt we’ll ever get there, though. Blogwise, it’s odd enough that we both posted Dickie Goodman today; had we posted the same song (as we did Saturday), that would be a sign that we should go spend hundreds on lottery tickets . . . or something. On a related matter: The fact that Goodman’s “reporter” in “Luna Trip” and “On Campus” (and perhaps others) was “Walter Funkite” is just one more indication, silly as it is, of the reach of the late Mr. Cronkite.
July 20th, 1969…a day in which the entire world could rejoice. Rich, poor, black, white, American, non-American, young, old…Everyone could share in one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments. I’m so glad it took place in our lifetime
Another vivid memory of Apollo 11 and the mission to the moon was the CBS coverage of this historic event. It opened with “The Epic Journey of Apollo 11, brought to you by Kellog’s..the best to you each morning.” Just of the sound of that opening with Walter Cronkite in the anchor chair made you feel somethinig historic was about to take place.
in the same vein as “Luna Trip” was “Moonflight”by Vik Venus a break-in record from the summer of ‘69 on the Buddah label featuring Buddah-related artists:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfgznifiFV4&feature=related
Vik was Jack Spector, a NYC DJ.