Icon: Neil Armstrong

So, today is the day—the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and Neil Armstrong's first steps on an alien world. Right around now, the CSM and LM combination were in the first of 12 orbits of the moon prior to landing.
Armstrong was an interesting choice as the man to take that "one giant leap." The crew rotations on the Apollo missions were decided upon by Deke Slayton, a man who faced innumerable pressures in getting the line up of each trio correct. One of Armstrong's big advantages (in fact, I'd say it almost guaranteed he'd be the choice) was that he was a civilian. There was a strong feeling at NASA that they did not want to militarise space, so a civilian test pilot rather than a navy/air force guy was a better bet. There was some symmetry to this in having Harrison 'Jack' Schmidt, a civilian scientist, be the last man on the moon in 1972 on Apollo 17.
Something that has bugged the media for 40 years has been Armstrong's supposed reclusiveness (as addressed in Andrew Smith's documentary Being Neil Armstong on BBC4 recently). He's been interviewed many times and has appeared in some recent documentaries (notably the BBC's NASA: Triumphs and Tragedies), but you can understand why he'd get a bit tired of being ask the same question for 40 years: "What was it like to walk on the moon?"
However he feels about it, Armstrong is a true pioneer, up there in the history of aviation alongside Charles Lindberg. He'll always be the first man on the moon.

Web Site: WeChooseTheMoon.org

This fantastic web site (thanks to Adam Newell for the tip!) has been created by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum offering a graphically rich, minute-by-minute recreation of the Apollo 11 mission.
Today has seen the launch of the Saturn V rocket carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon recreated in all its glory. There's over a hundred hours to go yet (says the handy countdown clock) until the capsule reaches the moon (sometime on Monday 20 July), but if you're in the UK you'll have to be up pretty early to recreate seeing it all live.
There's much more on the site, too, relating to the Apollo program and its well worth exploring in depth as you while away those 100 hours...

Web site: http://wechoosethemoon.org

Lift Off!

Forty years ago, just after 14:30 UK time, Apollo 11 blasted off from Florida on it's trip to the moon...

Convention: Satellite 2

Thanks to Paul Cockburn for pointing out this Glasgow event. It’s an SF convention, with Iain M. Banks as Guest of Honour, but it’s also celebrating the moon landing’s 40th anniversary (over the weekend of 25 and 26 July).
Space related guests include US Apollo historian Frank O'Brien, who will be bringing some unique Apollo mission memorabilia while BBC Scotland’s David Woods will be giving a talk at Satellite 2 based around his book How Apollo Flew to the Moon.

www.satellite2.org.uk

Web Site: BBC Moon Landings Archive

As an antidote to the rather poor new moon documentary fronted by James May, you could do a lot worse than check out the extensive BBC Moon Landings Archive now online.
There’s a host of archive video material that offers unique insight into how the space program was covered on TV between 1969 and 1972, with a few other later moon-oriented documentaries. They range from three minutes (a Today programme radio extract from 1971) to almost two hours (the superb Apollo 11: A Night to Remember from 2006 and rebroadcast on BBC4 last Sunday).
There’s hours of fascinating material here to be explored.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/moonlandings/index.shtml

Review: James May on the Moon

As mentioned previously, it’s annoying that the BBC’s flagship documentary celebrating the 40th anniversary of the 1969 moon landing is a ‘personality’ led piece that even puts presenter James May’s name before the subject ‘the Moon’. The piece becomes then not about it’s putative subject (‘the Moon’, remember?) but actually all about May’s own personal experiences. So we get May on the ‘vomit comet’, flying planes and trying on space suits. Why? In what way does this illuminate what happened 40 years ago? Sure, it must’ve been a great experience for May, but it’s no use to the rest of us. ‘The realisation of a childhood dream’ indeed, at BBC licence fee payers’ expense. And I say that as someone who visited Cape Canaveral over 10 years ago…
Sure enough, Top Gear presenter May is banging on about cars two minutes in, and delivering ‘macho’ stats about the U2 spy plane. Once it settles down, the interviews with the (ex)astronauts are fine, even if May’s prattling is annoying. I’ve always been fascinated by the question: what does an astronaut do once he’s been to the moon? What does May do? Meets Alan Bean and starts admiring his car! Gimme a break. Informative: Not.
It’s like television for idiots. Now he’s playing Simple Simon on the ‘vomit comet’. And this is a serious documentary? No, it’s not. It’s fatuous ‘entertainment’ for people not really interested in the facts of the moon landing. It’s for your semi-detached punter who is happy to half-watch an idiot like May clowning around on a plane while prattling on about monkeys. ‘That was obviously terrific fun,’ May tells us. Maybe for you, James, but not for us. His description of the building of the Saturn V rocket is positively moronic. He compares that marvel of modern engineering to the gear box of a car: does the man have a single-track mind? Later, the centrifuge ‘smells like an old Jag I once owned’. Later still, he's geeking out over the Lunar Rover.
Everything that is wrong with James May on the Moon is symptomatic of modern media culture: it has to feature a celebrity (who may or may not be interested in the subject—to give him his due, May is clearly an aficionado); it has to be light and fun and not too fact-filled; and it has to feature a ‘personal mission’ for the presenter during which they might discover something about themselves.
Documentaries like this don’t celebrate their subjects, they make the celebrity presenter the subject and he eclipses everything else. That’s a great shame and this documentary is a huge missed opportunity. I, naively, expected so much more of the BBC.

If you want to check it out, it's available via iPlayer for a few more days: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lfdbv/James_May_on_the_Moon/

Image Credit: BBC

Video: Faking the Facts

In a time when some basic facts of the world are being questioned by politically or religiously motivated groups, it is troubling when people add to the confusion by producing fake documentaries to bolster a false premise. Yep, read that again…
I may get into the whole ‘were the moon landings faked’ debate at a later point, but for the time being I’d like to direct your attention to Opération lune/Dark Side of the Moon (a 2002 French ‘mockumentary’ available on YouTube under the title ‘Moon Landing A Fake or Fact’).
While pointing out the unreliability of all media and encouraging people to think for themselves are all laudable aims, there is a danger that a fake documentary like this can only give succour to those who believe that the moon landings were indeed faked.
Although it gets sillier as it goes on and ends with a series of ‘blooper’ moments from some of the faked interviews (you’ll be surprised at some of the people who participated), Dark Side of the Moon is chillingly convincing at the beginning.
Alert viewers may spot ‘witnesses’ called David Bowman and Jack Torrance (characters from Kubrick movies 2001 and The Shining, not to mention 'Ambrose Chapel' from Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956) who supposedly helped Stanley Kubrick falsify the moon landings on the sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s amusing, but the YouTube comments alone show that many who have viewed this film simply perceive it as ‘truth’.
UK TV broadcast Alternative 3 (about a political conspiracy to establish a settlement on Mars) in the 1970s and Peter Jackson made Forgotten Silver (about a long-lost New Zealand film director and his work). Both were fake documentaries about things that didn’t exist, and they were clever ideas.
However, there is a danger in producing a too-clever, too-convincing documentary/mockumentary about something where there is a real active cohort who are trying to undermine the truth. That’s only helping ‘the enemy’ to undermine reality.