Picture Shows: The Artemis II crew, pathfinders for what is to be hoped more Lunar exploration by humans.
I’m watching in awe at the journey of the Artemis II spacecraft that is going to be going closer to the Moon than any manned mission since the early 1970’s. It is a wondrous achievement for NASA and although NASA have far more computing power involved in this mission than ever was present in the Apollo programme, the fact that they’ve managed to get this crew into lunar orbit is still gobsmacking.
There are a whole load of firsts with the Artemis programme. There’s the largest number of crew on a lunar mission, the furthest humans have travelled, the first time female astronauts have travelled so far, and the first time in decades that NASA have sent humans to a lunar environment that NASA once put humans on. It is also, as the humorists have pointed out, the furthest away that a human crewed vessel has had a toilet related problem and the longest distance that a problem with Microsoft products has been reported from (should have used Linux although NASA’s servers probably do).
I remember the first visit by man to the Moon, it’s one of those indelible memories where I can even smell the memory so vivid is it. I can recall that we were all ushered into the hall at my Primary school and up the front was the school’s television in its wooden lockable case and its wheeled stand. On it were shadowy human figures on a high contrast scene. It was either a live Moon broadcast or a retransmission although I can’t quite be sure at this distance in time. I recall one of the teachers or the head talking to us about what a truly historic occasion it was and really properly conveyed the gravity of the situation*.
That moment, in a school hall that smelt of polish, chalk dust, rubber, coal, old vomit and grubby children (hardly anyone in my childhood area had an inside plumbed in bath and the lavatories were mostly in the back gardens of our homes), being shown something genuinely momentous has stuck with me till this day. The human figures moving about on a screen and who I understood, even at that young age, were moving where no human had ever moved before and that the images and the sound had come from so far away, just astounded me, never have I forgotten that moment.
It was only when I grew much older that I started to understand sheer scale and wondrousness of the technical, mathematical, physical, engineering and electronic, astronomy and other achievements that went to creating the Apollo programme. NASA got man to the Moon at a time when most the radio receivers in the vast majority of houses that I had been in at the time relied on valves to run them and when computers occupied large rooms and were mysterious things never seen or touched by the ordinary man. At any point in this mission something could have gone seriously or fatally wrong but didn’t and not even the fragile radio waves that occupied the 2200MHz band (just below what is now used for 2.4 wifi) and which were only about 20 watts of RF power, failed and carried the pictures and voices of the Astronauts who had walked on the Moon to astonish us in our homes. We were lucky the Astronauts got there and back and we were lucky that all the systems on the Apollo craft worked and we got the pictures, sound and telemetry.
Since then there’s been so much human and robot spaceflight into parts of the Solar System such as to the planetoid Pluto and with other craft onto the edge of the Solar System, that many people have become blasé about it. Men going further than ever and to a place which once was NASA’s triumph and one of humanity’s greatest technical achievements does not now move people as much as it once did. Maybe because there is, this time, no landing it’s easier for people to downplay its importance but it also may be because we now have around technical marvels that we take for granted. In 1969 I would not have been able to type this on anything other than a typewriter, I would not be able to listen to a great event such as what the Artemis project is on radio on anything other than a valve radio or if I was lucky a transistor radio or watch it on a TV that, if designed to move from place to place without being on a trolley, stretched the meaning of the word ‘portable’ quite a lot and talking to someone on the phone needed either a landline in the home or a trip to the phone box. We live with technical marvels that were, for most people outside of science fiction enthusiasts or scientists, almost unimaginable. Things such as the internet, digital radio and TV, sensors on cars that help you park, more computing power than some of the Apollo programme’s systems in a watch and thinking computers that can not only churn out full colour images of the UK Prime Minister portrayed as a turd on command but can do all manner of things when instructed the correct way, although not as yet advanced enough to be instilled with Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics**.
When Man gets to the Moon again I will again have another vivid memory planted in my brain that will never leave me and I dare say that many others will feel the same way too and feel just as awed as I did when Neil Armstrong took his first and most spectacular, great leap for mankind.
Footnotes:
- The only other time in my Primary school that I had a similar memory engraved into my brain was when the head mistress came around every class and told us that there had been a peace treaty signed that would lead to the end of the war in Vietnam. Because most of us lived in families that didn’t hide the news from kids we probably saw the horrors of Vietnam more live than any generation had seen any other war before. We grew up with Vietnam dominating the news in our early years and therefore I can understand why the headmistress did the tour of the classrooms with the news of the peace treaty.
** Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotic are:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.