It is 40 years this month since the first man walked on the moon. An incredible act of vision, exploration and science was completed, and the phrase with which Neil Armstrong announced his arrival has become part of our daily discourse – one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Indeed.

It sums up the hope and ambition of the times. It was the end of the ‘60s, Boom time, hippie time, and everyone was still on an expectant high. Where else but outwards and upwards? As in space, there was no horizon. Almost like Ireland in 2005.
But there was another, darker view, let’s say more Altamont than Woodstock. Hunter S Thompson maintained that the drugs of choice changed from hash and acid to barbiturates and angel dust with Richard Nixon’s ascent to the US presidency, in which case an era was closing, not opening.
As Danny, the drug dealer in Withnail and I, put it, ‘The greatest decade in the history of mankind is coming to an end and, as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black’.
Viewed from this perspective the moon landing was an end, not a beginning. And so it proved. The 1960s really ended with the Yom Kippur War and subsequent oil crisis in 1973. After that, we came to know of limits and sustainability, Arabs began to fight back, trouble welled out of the Middle East along with oil, the world’s population exploded (in numbers, that is) and conquest, war, famine and death stalked the earth.
But that was after. At the time, a million people gathered to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts blast off. The blast was so powerful it lifted the roof off TV newsman Walter Cronkite’s temporary office…
They landed in the Sea of Tranquillity. There is no such place on Earth.
Or did they? Apparently, 6% of Americans believe it was faked. They’re wrong. Even if you didn’t believe it, a number of experiments set up by the astronauts have delivered results that could only have been gained with moon-based equipment.
From these, we know various things. For example, the moon was formed billions of years ago when the Earth was struck by an asteroid.
Intriguingly, we also know that the moon moves 6.5cm further away from Earth every year. Like many things, one just doesn’t notice. It’s difficult to notice six centimetres from a remove of 384,403 kilometres.
Well, the universe itself is drifting apart, so why wouldn’t the Earth and the moon? And by the time it is far enough to, say, affect the tides, you and I and most of our seed breed and generation will be just so much more moondust.
But it was, in terms of accessibility, supposed to be closer by now. The landing was to herald a new era of space exploration and travel, but it didn’t. Basically, having got there the Americans abandoned the notion.
Ah yes, but so much else has changed. A person in Hanoi can watch a rugby match in Dublin on satellite TV and text an Irish relative who is actually at the match. An Englishman living in Colorado can watch UK soccer from the comfort of a Breckenridge condo. We can travel farther, faster, safer and cheaper than ever before. We have decoded the human genome. We can Skype and Twitter. We can live in virtual worlds. In truth, almost everything is changed.
It’s not that we haven’t moved on up and out, we’ve just done it in a different way.
And it would be churlish not to note that the Apollo moon landing was the dream and brainstorm (rather than brainchild) of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He held out another promise to America, of equality and human rights, and it’s good and proper to acknowledge that – as we contemplate the moon landings of 40 years ago – an African-American president sits in the White House.
Now there’s a giant leap for mankind. Perhaps it’s a better representation of moving on up than we might have expected.
The Apollo journey gave us another legacy that is also remembered today, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, an extraordinary dance motion invented by an extraordinary performer. There were many things to dislike about Jackson, but he was a supreme musician and dancer, and as such he is rightly mourned.
But perhaps the biggest thing the moon landing did for humanity was to convince us that if you could imagine it, then maybe you could also do it.
And if that’s what we got out of it, the adventure was worth the cost.