Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of man’s first walk on the moon. I celebrated by seeing a marathon of free documentaries about the Apollo missions at the Egyptian Theatre.
First was “For All Mankind,” a documentary comprised of all original footage and some narration. The most impressive parts were the up-close views of liftoff (it looks so slow at first) and of Buzz and Neil bouncing around in their lunar rover “golf cart.”
The second movie was “In the Shadow of the Moon,” another [Ron Howard!] documentary that was mostly based on interviews with the actual astronauts. I think Mike Collins is hilarious (he was the guy who had to stay in the command module while Neil and Buzz got to walk on the moon). “I was described as the loneliest man in the universe. Which really isn’t true. I had the command center yakking in my ear half the time. So, it was actually nice to go around the far side of the moon.” [where they couldn't send him radio transmissions]
Did you know Apollo 15's David Scott performed Galileo's gravity experiment on the moon? Sure enough, the hammer and the feather hit the ground [lunar firmament] at the same time.
It was interesting to hear from the Apollo astronauts how they felt about being involved in this mission while the rest of the world was dealing with the free love, civil rights, and women’s rights movements and the Vietnam War. They said that they sometimes felt they were living in a bubble and that some of them have extreme guilt complexes about not fighting in the Vietnam War. After all, most of them were fighter pilots before they were recruited as astronauts.
It was also crazy to think how much they accomplished with the technology of the 1960s (those computer images looked ancient!). And we haven’t been back to the moon since…
NASA has a great website they are building to commemorate the Apollo missions. Check it out here.
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