gullybogan

Dear Reader,

For the last fortnight or so i’ve heard people here saying things like,

Monday is the fortieth anniversary of the first time in the world that anyone landed on the moon (courtesy 89.9 Light FM)

Not true.

According to a little book i have right here in my studio, published a few months after the actual events, the landing took place at 9:18pm “BST” (which the preface explains means “British Standard Time”, or, presumably, GMT/UTC) on the 20th. That means that here, in Melbourne, it was 6:18am on the 21st.

The EVA (“moon walk”) commenced at 3:51am BST on the 21st, which would make it lunchtime on the 21st here.

Am i being too much of a stickler on this? Does that mean that we also celebrate other events on the wrong day? Like Anzac Day (troops went ashore 4:43am Turkish Standard Time on the 25th, which would still be the 25th here, so no), or 9/11 (the planes hit the towers just before midnight on the 11th here, so, again, no)?

Maybe i am.

Or maybe… I’M NOT!

Here are some other stickler tit-bits (i know it’s “tidbits”, but “tit-bits” sounds racier) about the moon landings that you may or may not know. Some are incontrovertible facts, and some may be partly mythologised. Who can say which is which? (I can – they’re all 100% true)

Thirty Seconds

As Armstrong was landing the LM (Lunar Module), Aldrin was counting down. Those watching on TV mostly assumed he was counting down the seconds to the landing. He was actually counting down the seconds to when they would run out of fuel. The Eagle landed with under thirty seconds of flight time remaining.

63

The LM’s computer landing programme – 63 – continually lit up the instrument panel alarm light during the descent. The computer was quite simply being overloaded by what it was being asked to do.

Last time people talked about this, ten years ago, the comparison was that the latest top-of-the-range Mercedes had more computer power on board than the entire Apollo mission. Now, the SIM card in your mobile phone has more computing power than the entire Apollo mission.

Armstrong shut the landing computer down – much the way Luke shuts down the autotargeting computer in his final run on the Death Star – and landed the ship manually. During training, Armstrong had lost control of a landing simulator he was piloting, being forced to jettison to safety. The simulator – this was a real, flying platform, being as it was in the days before computerised simulators – dropped out of control to the desert floor and exploded.

Houston, Tranquility Base Here, But We Have No Idea Where Here Is

The landing computer, before Armstrong shut it off, was taking them to a landing spot that turned out to be inside a crater strewn with boulders the size of econovans. Armstrong eventually landed the ship four nautical miles or more down “Highway 1″ from that deadly crater. This put them at the outer limit of the preferred landing zone. It wasn’t until the boffins examined photographs after the crew’s return to Earth that they knew exactly where Tranquility Base was.

Buzz Was No Shutterbug

There are two photos of Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface. One is THAT photo, a self-portrait where he appears reflected in Aldrin’s faceplate, and the other he’s in the background, bending over to put something down. Aldrin just wasn’t that into taking photos.

So Where’s That Footage Of Him Stepping Onto The Moon, Guys?

NASA lost the footage of that $24Bn footstep. They had so many pictures of rocks and bits of spaceship at the time that they all tended to look the same. In the early Seventies, when someone went to get the film of that One Small Step, they realised that it was missing. NASA had to borrow some footage off a TV station to replenish their archives.

Shielding? What Shielding?

If we knew then what we know now, the Apollo hardware would have been significantly different in terms of shielding. As it was, had there been a solar storm during any of the missions, the astronauts in their capsules would have been almost completely unprotected from the deadly radiation. They would have been exposed to levels of toxicity that would have killed them within days. Their hair and teeth would have fallen out, they would have bled from every orifice, and they would have died. You know, radiation poisoning.

The SNAFU Tape

Had the surface mission gone wrong, NASA had a plan for what to do. If, for example, something went wrong with the air supply, or the ascent engines failed to fire (which was highly possible, as they were the one critical part of the Apollo hardware that had – obviously – never been field tested), the astronauts were to play a recorded message to them from President Nixon, and then the TV broadcast would be terminated, and the LM crew would be left to die in private, all alone on the moon, a quarter billion miles from home.

Apollo 21

In the book quoted way up above, The Invasion of the Moon, published in 1969, the authors are looking forward to the next nine missions and what they will reveal about our daughter planet. In another book i have here in my library, The Once and Future Moon, published decades after the moon missions ceased, they reflect on why we’ve never gone back there. Back in the Sixties, the authors say, the future was full of promise and hope, something to look forward to. Now, the future is something to fear, and the politicians spend all their time trying to avoid talking about it.

Bush the Lesser, before he left public office to continue his career in cattle management, did dedicate his country to returning to the moon by 2020, or was it 2050? Either way, this is unlikely to happen. They had their chance, and they let it wither on the vine.

If there ever is a Moonbase, it will most likely be Chinese.

They Really Did Go To The Moon

Yes, they did.

Those guys, and the boffins and rocket scientists who put them there, were heroes, in every sense of the word. I have absolutely no time for people who say that it was all faked.

The Vietnam war, yes; that was faked. But the moon missions, they were real.

Yours,
Gullybogan