EPISODE 429: THE LUNAR AGE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Over the weekend I spent some time watching the CBS news footage of the Apollo 11 landing. I sort of assumed I had seen it all many times before, but of course I hadn’t really, not the actual footage. All I’ve ever seen or heard is just the various sound grabs and photographs we all know, Armstrong on the moon, standing by the flag.

And there were elements of the footage that were so interesting. For instance, it goes mostly unnarrated. We’re just sitting there listening to the beeps and updates along with Walter Cronkite and Walter Schirra, while the screen shifts back and forth between animations of what the lander should be doing and footage of the approaching moon’s floor. It’s incredibly meditative in that way, and maybe moreso for us who live in a world where TV news screens are ongoing bombardments of loud voices, information and animation. The CBS approach allows you to just be in that moment having your own experience, to consider what is actually happening and allow it to actually impact you. Human beings landed on the mood.

And it’s crazy, just as they’re about to land the CBS coverage cut away to a weirdly clean image of the lander on the moon. It’s just a simulation, we’re soon informed, but even after the camera stays there. I don’t know why they did that; perhaps an arrangement had been made with NASA, out of concern that if something terrible had happened at touch down they didn’t want it broadcast. And yet it seems like the broadcasters themselves were seeing a live feed. You can hear in their voices – and also in the sounds from the broadcast room upon the landing, the sort of half gasps, half sighs.

There’s a lovely moment where just for a second we cut for the first time to Cronkite and Schirra. Schirra wipes his eyes while Cronkite takes his glasses off, shakes his head and clearly has no idea what to say. “Wally, say something,” he says. “I’m speechless.”

“I’m just trying to hold onto my breath,” Schirra responds. Knowing as we do that the landing went fine, you forget that they didn’t know that was going to happen. What feels meditative for us was taut for them.

Armstrong’s first steps are even more unexpected. First of all, there doesn’t seem to be any good footage. There’s this weird moment where Schirra says, “Look at those pictures. Wow!” And the quality is absolutely terrible. Armstrong is almost transparent, like a spirit caught in a lunar Ghost Hunters video. And then when he delivers his extraordinary line, while the audio is quite clear, the anchors don’t understand what he said. “I think that was Neil’s quote but I didn’t understand it,” says Schirra. “Nope. ‘One small step for man,’ but I didn’t get the second phrase,” says Cronkite. Can you imagine?

And there’s no dramatic moment, really. He’s coming down a ladder and from the angle of the shot you can’t really tell when he’s actually touched down. His feet are below the shot. Instead we get “ARMSTRONG ON MOON” in this really awful 16bit-ish font and then it’s over.

Cronkite would go on to say this when the astronauts returned home on July 24th:

Man's dream and a nation's pledge have now been fulfilled. The lunar age has begun. And with it, mankind's march outward into that endless sky from this small planet circling an insignificant star in a minor solar system on the fringe of a seemingly infinite universe. The path ahead will be long; it's going to be arduous; it's going to be pretty doggone costly. We may hope, but we should not believe, in the excitement of today, that the next trip or the ones to follow are going to be particularly easy. But we have begun with 'a small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind,' in Armstrong's unforgettable words.

"In these eight days of the Apollo 11 mission the world was witness to not only the triumph of technology, but to the strength of man's resolve and the persistence of his imagination. Through all times the moon has endured out there, pale and distant, determining the tides and tugging at the heart, a symbol, a beacon, a goal. Now man has prevailed. He's landed on the moon, he's stabbed into its crust; he's stolen some of its soil to bring back in a tiny treasure ship to perhaps unlock some of its secrets.

"The date's now indelible. It's going to be remembered as long as man survives — July 20, 1969 — the day a man reached and walked on the moon. The least of us is improved by the things done by the best of us. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins are the best of us, and they've led us further and higher than we ever imagined we were likely to go."

To some extent his words seem naïve; if the lunar age did begin in 1969, at some point it went on a long sabbatical. Perhaps it’s doing a residency with Cher in Vegas?

And humanity’s “march outward” fifty years later seems pretty tenuous.

But while I was at Comic-Con over the weekend, I kept running into other things that began fifty years ago. Like Sesame Street, which debuted on November 10, 1969. Or Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which first aired October 5th and made things like walking into comedic genius.

Less than a month before the moon landing the Stonewall riots occurred in New York City, which brought about change in the treatment of the LGBTQ community by the police and civil society and would become the annual Pride parades in cities across the world each year. Just a few weeks after the landing would come the Woodstock music festival, a pivotal moment both in American music and in American history in general.

Comic-Con itself, which started in the basement of a San Diego hotel and has now become the most massive and important pop culture gathering in the world, also celebrates 50 years this year. And if we’re willing to be a little flexible we might also include Planet of the Apes, which celebrated fifty years in 1968; so did 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Some of these moments are more easily tied to the lunar landing than others, but I think what they have in common is the sense of imagination that Cronkite connects to our trip to the moon. We may not live in a lunar society as of yet, but I wonder if the moon landing didn’t crack us open in a way, did release a capacity to dream outside the boxes we’d been given, to imagine and chase a world that was more in a variety of totally unexpected ways.

I was born about a month after Armstrong walked on the moon. And while I can’t remember that ever being a topic of conversation in my family, it’s always been special to me. I was lucky enough to be born into a world that no longer just had stories about science fiction, but had begun the journey into that future itself. And as much as a lot of the last fifty years probably seem primitive to kids today, how amazing it is really to have been present for not just the birth of the smartphone but the birth of the computer and the Hubble Telescope, to have known Space Invaders, Watchmenand Star Warswhen they came out as well as Facebook and Fortnite, to have been there for cassette tapes, VCR tapes, CDs, DVDs, wifi, streaming and Marvel movies.

In the past when people spoke of Generation X they tended to describe it as a generation of rootless slackers. Today you don’t hear much about us at all, which honestly is just fine. But we’re the ones that have watched this world of wonders unfold and change our lives over and over up close. We may not be living on the moon quite yet, but in another way I kind of feel like we are.

Yesterday I attended a Comic-Con panel on Apollo 11. The special guest was Lovell Stoddard, who was an engineer on Apollo 11 specializing in the heat shielding. And at the end of the panel, the MC invited us to join him in singing “Fly Me to the Moon”. Which is not at all the kind of song we normally sing about life in outer space. It’s all “Space Oddity” or “Rocketman”, these powerful songs of longing and sacrifice.

I actually wondered if it wasn’t a little too silly for the moment, but you know in its own way it captures the innocence and hopefulness of the Apollo era. Outer space is this wonderland we get to wander through together, hand in hand, marveling at each new big and little discovery.

And I don’t know about you but I want more of that hopefulness and wonder in my life.

++ No links today. But if you’re looking for more about the moon landing, here’s a video of it that has lots more information than the CBS footage. And here’s a teenager’s interviews with four astronauts, which is kind of cool.

(Also, that rendition of “Space Oddity” is astronaut Chris Hadfield, performing from the International Space Station itself. I’m not really a guitar person, but there’s really nothing cooler than playing guitar while floating in outer space.)

Just back from Comic-Con. Body aching, wallet empty, sleep needed. So off I go.

Dream big. Wonder much. Wander far.

See you next week.