LEGENDS IN THEIR OWN LAUNCH-TIMES
It s precisely 09:18 pm, 20th July 1969 and Neil Armstrong is up there, right now, stomping an indelible human bootprint into moon-dust. As first steps and giant leaps go, it s a pretty spectacular stunt. Global audiences goggle at blurry black-and-white TV imagery, indistinct shadows beamed direct through 250,000 miles of dead space, via NASA. I certainly am . . . I certainly was.
Monday, July 21st 1969. The weather is warm and dry. And the Daily Sketch (a now long-extinct tabloid) costs just five pence. Old money. It boasts a First Men On The Moon souvenir pull-out headlined MOON WALK : THE FIRST PICTURE . I ve still got my copy. The same day s Daily Mirror announces: Man has landed on the moon. A new era in history began when the lunar module Eagle settled gently onto the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquility . It continues with appropriate gravity, America, the land of frontiers, has opened up a new frontier , its astronauts destined now for a permanent place in history .
For those who don t read history, Apollo 11 took an eight-day round-trip lunar excursion. Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldrin EVA d for two hours, moonwalking far enough to collect 21.75kgs of moon-rock while the less fortunate Michael Collins remained 80-miles-high above them in lunar parking orbit.
Meanwhile, closer to the real world, novelist J.G. Ballard s reaction to the moon-plaque wording We Came In Peace For All Mankind was predictably downbeat: If I were a Martian I d start running now .
That all occurred 30 years ago. Of course, there were further moon landings in the years that followed. Apollo 12, carrying astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, touched down in Oceanus Procellarum just months later, on 19th November. Conrad even took time out to rendezvous with the remains of Surveyor an earlier robotic probe to discover that Earth-based life-forms had actually preceded Armstrong to the Moon. Microbes, spicules in the styrofoam from a careless technician s sneeze during assembly, had got there first, and survived, dormant but alive, in the total lunar vacuum.
Then came Apollo 14, launched from Cape Kennedy in January 1971. It made lunar touch-down on 5th February splashing home into the Pacific just four days later. It was followed by Apollo 15 (26th July) from which Dave Scott and Jim Irwin took a 30km drive in a Lunar Roving Vehicle around the Hadley Rill, and Apollo 16 (16th April 1972).
Then came Apollo 17, with the last man on the moon, captain Gene Cernan who lifted off from an area known as Taurus-Littrow in the 14th December 1972 with the words let s get this Mother out of here . The crew Cernan, Eugene Evans and Dr. Harrison Schmitt splashed down in the South Pacific just five days later. And that s it. Since then, in terms of human travel to other worlds, there s been only silence. Nothing. Nada.
Now it s 1999. In TV s recently re-screened Sci-Fi romp Space 1999, there is an extensive complex of permanently inhabited lunar bases used as waste dumps for Earth s hazardous spent nuclear fuel. Sure, they got other stuff wrong too the Zapata moustaches and the flares, for a start but in the long-lost 1970 s when the series was first made, it seemed not only reasonable but entirely inevitable, that by the turn of the century there would be humans living on the moon. Further back, in the 1950s, grubby schoolboys were enthralled by the exploits of comic-strip hero Dan Dare : Pilot Of The Future . His Red Moon adventure (serialised through 1951/2) opens precisely at 22:00 hrs, 29th September 1999, when Earth has colonies not only on the Moon, but on Mars and Venus too. And here we are now, living in their future. The new era in history that Neil Armstrong was supposedly opening. And none of that has happened. Yet . . .
Instead I find myself talking in the foyer of a late-night multiplex cinema awash with luminous Phantom Menace hype. We wind up discussing the Tom Hanks movie Apollo 13, the dramatisation of the aborted moon-mission, the lunar-landing that so spectacularly failed, and Tony, this friend-of-a-friend says I never watched it. I m not into Sci-Fi .
Sci-Fi? Sci-BLOODY-Fi?!?!? explodes wild-eyed Trekkie Neil, the events portrayed in that movie are not Sci-Fi. They happened. They are real. They are actual events from actual history. Just because the action is all about rockets, spacesuits and other worlds, just because it all takes place in outer space, that don t make it Sci-Fi. Scruffing his fingers through his untidy spray of hair, he adds Apollo 13 must be considered historical costume-drama. More so even than, say, Saving Private Ryan or Oliver Stone s JFK.
Think about that brief exchange, and what s happening now 30 years after Neil Armstrong took that first step and that giant leap for all mankind. What s happening is that not only is the manned space programme to other worlds long-dead, but it s already in the process of being shunted off sideways into the never-never fabrications of Science Fiction. As though it never happened. Unless you re one of those Conspiracy Theorists who still persist in believing that the whole thing actually never did happen. That the angles of light and shadow on the supposed lunar surface are wrong freeze-frame the footage, LOOK-AT-IT, LOOK-AT-IT!!! . That the entire thing was a monumental fake staged in some secret American TV studio buried deep beneath Area 51, like in the lunar mock-up James Bond stumbles onto in Diamonds Are Forever.
But it happened alright. The real mystery is why it isn t happening now.

DESTINATION MOON
Of course, it was President John F Kennedy, just prior to the events portrayed in Oliver Stone s biopic, who started it all, sort-of. He promised his eager electorate if not the stars, then at least a slice of lunar real-estate. In a speech he gave on the 25th May 1961 he pledged that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space . He set the target. He set the schedule. Both were achieved.
But he was working within a couple of unique preconditions. The first was the Cold War. The Soviet Union had just soundly trashed the USA in the Space Race to launch the first unmanned satellite. Then they d shot Yuri Gagarin into orbit, and into history as the first human to blast free of Earth. So what happens if the Soviets get to the Moon first? The nation that controls the Moon rules the Earth, doesn t it? Them Evil Commie Bastards can zap nuclear death down on the Free World Democracies from lunar-based rocket-launch sites, can t they? Actually, no. It s a highly unlikely and technically unfeasible scenario. But back then, at the peak of Dr Strangelove Atomic paranoia it seemed reason enough to make sure that America got there first. And the might of the military-industrial complex was more than ready to benefit from the near-limitless financial largesse such a political strategy offered ...
The relentless talk-up propaganda of the Science Fiction industry must also accept its share of blame. The editorial of Astounding Stories No.1 (January 1930) tantalises its eager readers with the lure that tomorrow, more astounding things are going to happen. Your children, or their children, are going to take a trip to the Moon a prediction, according to Arthur C Clarke, triumphantly fulfilled. The children of 1930 did indeed walk on the Moon . And it was a process that Clarke could justifiably claim a hands-on part in. He was still in his early twenties in Winter 1944, at the close of World War 2 when only a few aircraft had flown at the staggering speed of 300mph . But already he was addicted to crude rocketry and to what was, with ludicrously naive optimism, called the British Interplanetary Society. He relates with undiminished joy how the Nazi V2 rockets, Hitler s last and most lethal secret weapons, rained death on England from their European bases. Because hey, look the V2 is a rocket. An unmanned rocket-powered projectile launched in Northern Europe, crossing an expanse of sea and hostile terrain, before falling to Earth many miles from its point of origin. Blowing it all to hell in the process. But shit it even looks like a spaceship from the garish covers of Amazing Stories or Astounding SF. Young Arthur C promptly declared the then-unknown inventor of the V2 an honorary member of the BIS. It s all there in his autobiographical Astounding Days.
But the most bizarre aspect of the entire anecdote is what happened next. The guy who invented the V2 was Dr Wernher Von Braun, allegedly used as a model for Peter Sellers movie portrayal of the Dr Strangelove character. But beyond that, as Nazi Germany fell apart, the good Doctor got himself snatched by encroaching Americans in fact he was made a priority target. And he subsequently used his rocketry expertise to became the architect of the American Space Programme. Just as the Russians, who arrived at the V2 launch-sites a little later, took Von Braun s co-workers and schematics back to the USSR to initiate their Space project. And when it all culminated in 1969 with Neil Armstrong stepping onto the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquility, a little-older Arthur C Clarke was there at NASA headquarters in Houston to watch the history he d so fervently anticipated and propagandised unfolding.
The proto-astronauts of HG Wells The First Men In The Moon preceded Neil Armstrong by a good sixty years. But across that span of time, a succession of hugely inventive and maniacally inspired writers, including Clarke, had constructed a consensual future-scenario, learning and copying from each other, inspired by and adding to each other s visions. What began as freaky-wild speculation gradually assumed a conformity of more-or-less accepted contours. Human beings would achieve space flight. This would logically lead to a first landing on the moon, and then to semi-permanent colonies there. Pressurised domes. Perhaps roofed-over craters. They would become a jump-off point for longer-range expeditions to Mars and Venus, where self-sustaining colonies would be established, ultimately terraforming the inhospitable bleakness of those worlds, through vast planetary engineering, into near-Earth facsimiles. There would be mining-ships prospecting into the asteroid belt. Then to the frigid methane-moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Eventually, just as the American colonies had broken free of British domination, so would the new Martian nations declare their independence from Mother Earth, while just around this point in time, through the benevolent intervention of a convenient alien species, or the invention of some kind of hyper-warp-drive jump-gate, ships would break free of the Solar System and reach out for the distant points of the stars. This became the accepted trajectory of future history. Timescales vary from writer to writer. Details are obviously different with each story. But by the time JFK came along these expectations were already subliminally programmed in.
Arthur C Clarke/Stanley Kubrick s 2001: A Space Odyssey slapped that vision onto the big-screen, intellectually legitimising it. Then Gene Roddenberry dragged it out of the SF closet and universalised it through Star Trek and its spin-off series. Space 1999 buys into the same scam. So does Dan Dare. But Martian colonies? Patrick Moore yes, that Patrick Moore wrote a book in 1957 called Science And Fiction in which he explains that the only justifiable excuse for the SF genre is as an educational tool to teach people, and to teach children in particular, about the basics of astronomy, and to school them in the potential for human exploration of space, and to do it in a fictional but fact-based form. His own attempts, including a novel called The Domes Of Mars, describe Martian colonies within the strictures of what was then assumed to be realistically science-based speculation yet it includes oxygenating plant-life and small native mammals.
Martian Life? Current conjectures hope to just possibly find smudgy discolourations inside rocks that might, just might, have been some kind of crude microbes that might, just might, have briefly survived there before lethal extinctions several billion years ago. In fact, it would be logistically easier and infinitely cheaper to create new cities in Antarctica, or in the middle of the bleakest expanse of the Sahara Desert more hospitable zones by far than anything that we now know for a fact that Mars has to offer. Patrick Moore s SF turns out, with time, to be just as impractical and factually inaccurate as the wildest horror SF comic-strips he condemns.
In a century that will otherwise be remembered for its conflicts and slaughter, according to Observer writer Robin McKie, the US-manned lunar landing stands out as a rare human achievement, a worthy use of technology that demonstrates our species greatest attribute intellect and a startlingly co-operative nature. [Apollo 11] was a triumph of ingenuity, and the handiwork of thousands of dedicated technicians, scientists and administrators.
But was it any more than just that? Is manned space flight to other worlds still the future . . . or just the outmoded dream of fanatical but deluded obsessives and vacuum-headed Trekkies?

BEYOND THE HIGH FRONTIER
They came in Peace for all mankind. That means me and you.
And during those brief Apollo years, a dozen Americans stomped around the Moon. All those crop-headed Right Stuff NASA heroes doing ludicrous leaps and ungainly gravity-less lurches across black-and-white emptiness. Posing for photos that would be temporarily immortalised as T-shirts and student wall-posters for a month or so. Playing golf between craters. Trying to express inexpressible sensations of awe and wonder between farts of static and bleeping radio interference. And what a fantastic adventure it all was. But what was it all about? What did it mean?
The Eagle s journey transfixed the world. But within a year, the public lost interest in Apollo missions. Mankind s greatest adventure became tedious. Television ratings plummeted and missions were curtailed. Even now the lunar astronauts are receding further into history, and into irrelevance. They turn up as curios on TV chat shows, awkward and out-of-place wedged in between Pop Divas and Soap Posers; they do the Betty Ford rehab clinics, co-author crap SF novels, become born-again Christians, do the lecture circuit, or guest on Blue Peter. Solid, humourless and slightly dull men. Men who once crossed space and trod an alien world.
Now I find myself talking in the late-night foyer of a multiplex cinema awash with luminous Phantom Menace hype. And we wind up discussing the future destiny of humans in space. But I believe, protests Trekkie Neil, adjusting his glasses further up the bridge of his nose, that relentless human ingenuity, resourcefulness and invention can resolve whatever obstacles it encounters .
Yeah sure, snorts Tony derisively, you mean like when Geordi and Data look quizzically at each other, and tentatively suggest what if we reconfigure the Dilithium matrix . . .?
With a cool air of scientific superiority he then adds, physics could impose insurmountable restrictions that are absolute and incapable of resolution. Perhaps you can change the laws of physics?
What futurology should be demonstrating is that there s no inevitability about tomorrow. One hundred years ago, the idea that human destiny lay in an inexorable expansion into, and beyond, the solar system would have been considered patently absurd. One hundred years from now it could again seem equally absurd. The entire manned Space Programme could be seen as an eccentric and rather quaintly excessive by-product of 20th Century technophilia. A massive, indecipherable cultural folly on a par with building the pyramids or constructing the geometrical Nazca Lines scratched into the plains of Peru. Magnificently mind-boggling, but pointless.
Me? I d guess I m somewhere between the two extremes. Long after the twentieth century bad guys Slobbery-Dan Milosevic, Say-Dam Hussein and Pol Pot are forgotten, the concurrent advances in sub-atomic particle physics, genetic research, and astrophysics will continue to shape human self-awareness of our place in creation. And the Moon landing was part of it. The Greatest Story Ever Sold. But it was not, in the final analysis, the most significant part of it. The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope with its view back to the very dawn of creation, the Viking soft-lander on Mars, Voyagers 1 and 2 sweeping past Jupiter and Saturn s strange moons and out beyond the heliopause rim, all add more to the human database than the Apollo missions ever did. This is science. Not fiction.
And of course, the technology exists now to mount an expedition to Mars. It has existed since the last Apollo mission when they were using slide-rules and computers not nearly as sophisticated as the home-PC s everyone now buys from their local store. It could be done, providing the political will gives it the necessary shove. It could happen tomorrow. Some poor bastards could be sealed up in a telephone-kiosk drinking their own piss for months on end to reach a lifeless, airless chunk of rock millions of miles into a nothingness bleaker and more empty than anything we can envisage. It could be done today. If they asked for volunteers they d be inundated with more offers than they could deal with. I might even be one of them. And hey people sailed around the world in the 16th century under roughly similar levels of deprivation with even less of an idea as to where-the-hell they d wind up.
In part, the Space Shuttles that followed the last of the Apollo missions were NASA s face-saving operation, but they were also attempts to make a human presence in space demonstratively and sustainably cost-effective. Along such lines, advances in computer micro-circuitry and lighter cheaper designer-alloys could yet make the moon re-accessible without the old techno-giganticism of the late 60s.
Kim Stanley Robinson s epic Red Mars even suggests that a new set of political urgencies could grow out of the conditions now replacing the old Cold War. His protagonists went to Mars because Russia and our USA were desperate, that s why. Decrepit, outmoded industrial dinosaurs, that s what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in Asia. And we had all this Space expertise going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here (to Mars) on the chance that we d find something worthwhile, and it paid off !
Then again, instead of political powerblocks, it could fall to competing multinationals to make lunar exploitation economically viable. Perhaps through one of Kim Stanley s Euro-Japanese or Asian tigers, maybe a Nissan, Toyota or Hyundai lunar module? And while in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the stunning visual waltz of docking with the International Space Station remains part of a great movie, we have an International Space Station now in construction to replace the decommissioning of Mir. It will have little to match the splendour of Kubrick s original, and it won t come on-line until 2004. But at least it s happening. So while JG Ballard s alleged Martians are still there, still largely untroubled by terrestrial tourism, they should still be more that a little concerned about their rowdy upstart near-neighbour. Against all the odds, I d like to see human beings land on Mars. And I hope I m alive long enough to see it happen.

One Lasting Step
It s precisely 09:18 pm, 20th July 1969. And Neil Armstrong is up there stomping an indelible human bootprint into moon-dust, opening up a new era in history . Thirty years later, as I write this, here and now, that bootprint is still there at lunar 0.7N, 23.AE. Still pristine. Still undisturbed in that spectacularly windless erosion-free lunar vacuum. As first steps and giant leaps go, it remains a pretty spectacular stunt. First Step . . . Last Step? Don t be too sure. n