We were space-crazy.
Sure, JFK promised we’d go to the moon, but no one really took this seriously until Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth.
This was the era of the cold war. There was supposedly nothing worse than living in the U.S.S.R. They oppressed people, their economy was challenged…so how in the hell did they beat us, not only going into space first, but completing an orbit and landing on…LAND?
This was positively scary. Kinda like today, but totally different. Today we’re worried about nationalism, the division of countries, the disdain for immigrants and science, yesterday we were worried about the Russkis taking over the world.
Now by time the U.S. put a man in space, it was Alan Shepard, and he didn’t even fly around the Earth. Shortly thereafter, the U.S.S.R. put a man in space for an entire day! It wasn’t until almost a year after Gagarin that we had our own astronaut flying around the earth, three times, and that man was John Glenn. The first is always a hero.
And then we were off to the races. We followed space like you follow the internet. Only there was much less information. There was much less information on everything in the sixties, which is why everybody knew about the war, and the protests could get notice.
But then came Gemini! Two men in space at the same time! At this point we knew the routine, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo.
Now I’m not saying every Gemini flight garnered the attention of the first, but it was on TV. The last Apollo flight was not, by then it was de rigueur, after you’ve been to the moon…
But we were still building the blocks.
So we had space food. Not only Tang, but Space Sticks, which were kind of like circular energy bars, which tasted even worse! They came in packets, you had to keep them fresh. And we had space blankets. All innovation seemed to be coming from the space program.
And then, we had the fire.
I remember exactly where I was when the news came over the radio, driving on Route 30, in Vermont, just after Maple Valley, with the river on the right. How could this happen? We were accustomed to winning, it was up, up and up, but now…
And I remember the story being pure oxygen. And I remember the delay in future space flights. But then, we were going to the moon, in July ’69. Kennedy might have been dead, but his promise was going to be fulfilled.
1969. The Miracle Mets. Woodstock. The moon landing. Despite the turmoil, that was the era of can-do. America was indomitable. If we put our minds to something, it happened. And the protests were about equality for African-Americans, and the ending of an unjust, unwinnable war. We wanted a better America, and we got one. Even though the old white men won a lot too. And they were white, and they were men and they were old.
So we knew the date of the moon landing long before. Well, the mission, not the exact dates of the landing and the walk. We were prepared.
At this point, we only watched when it was a breakthrough. The first Gemini. But walking on the moon? That seemed positively unfathomable.
Now I was living in Chicago, in a frat house on the University of Chicago campus. It was a deal I made with my parents, I would go to Mitzvah Corps if I could go to summer ski camp in Squaw Valley first. They agreed, they had to get rid of me, they were going to Europe, it was an annual event since I was in the first grade, when they left us with a woman we didn’t like and my mother came back with my first watch, but even then I knew they’d bought it at the airport. But I did love that Timex.
Mitzvah Corps. Even sounds bad, right?
Summer ski camp was phenomenal. To a great degree unsupervised, which was new to me, at least when it related to camp, but a good chunk of our lives was unsupervised back then. Playdate? We’d never even heard of the term!
But then I had to go to Mitzvah Corps. To hang with nerds, I believed. But it was five girls and five boys and we hung together and it was run by a young rabbi who was in his twenties, as was his wife, and the guy who lived downstairs smoked dope and introduced me to Steve Miller and I don’t remember watching television at all until it came to the moonwalk.
We had a black and white TV. Even back then, it was akin to a CRT versus a flat screen today. Most people had color.
And it was about twenty inches big. With a curved screen, remember that?
And it was in the living room. There was a giant couch, which could sit about eight, and the rest of the group sat on the floor.
And it was interminable waiting. Nothing was happening. The commentator kept telling us they were getting ready, making sure all systems were go. All I knew was I was wearing my penny loafers, and my feet were so hot that I took them off and my feet smelled and I was worried about alienating the girl sitting next to me, who I had a crush on, but that’s another story.
And I didn’t know these people that well at this point. You see we all had different jobs, and were separated all day. Mine was to be a counselor on a schoolyard in south Chicago. I wouldn’t do that today! I’d walk with this woman… She was a nerd, and sensitive to seemingly everything, they paired her up with me when no one else wanted to go with her, and we walked to the train station, got on, long before the days of A/C, and then walked to the schoolyard. I remember walking to lunch at Burger King. There wasn’t another white person for miles, other than this girl. What was I thinking? Yes, today kids go on do-gooder trips for their college resumes, but they’re never at risk.
Another two guys were building inspectors. They took us to meet community organizers, not that they had that title, they knew Jesse Jackson and they wanted change and I felt like I was at the center of something. Could have been the first time I heard the word “rap,” or heard it used so much. This guy was talking about rapping to this person and that person.
But that was only one day. Normally I worked at the playground, on the asphalt, next to the school building. We played softball with a soft ball that required no gloves. And one day there was a rape on the fourth floor of the school, but once again, I was too young and inexperienced to recognize the consequences of that. And the big hit was James Brown’s “Popcorn,” which I’d never heard before, they even had a “Popcorn” dancing contest.
But now I was sitting on the couch waiting and waiting for Neil and Buzz to get out of that damn module.
And let’s be clear, we expected it all to go down smoothly, then again… They were leaving the module, they were on the moon, I’d seen enough “Twilight Zone” to know that things could go wrong.
And then Neil descends the ladder and steps on the moon and utters those fateful words. At the time, we didn’t know they were scripted. But thinking about it now, who would come up with “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” Of course I remember it, it was indelibly burned into my brain.
And then I remember Neil bouncing. We’d read for years about the lack of air, the difference in gravity, it was like a school experiment come alive. That was cool. But after watching them walk around a bit, it got boring. But you had to watch, because you knew this was an historical moment. We had a lot of those in the sixties, and not all bad.
And then it was over.
I remember being anxious about the module blasting off from the moon, worried they might get marooned there, but it went up no problem. But I’m not sure I watched that on TV. Back then there were no 24/7 news channels, nowhere to catch something if you missed it, you just read the newspaper, and the headlines were glorious, like this was the beginning of a new world.
And then days passed, the story fell off the front page, and we rarely talked about it, but we knew about it, even if I did see it in black and white. I was stunned, you mean you could really broadcast from the moon in color? Hell, just a few years earlier the big story was Telstar, and we watched a live TV show from Europe. Now we can Facetime with anybody around the world and don’t think much about it.
But after you go to the moon, then what?
1970 was a year of wound-licking, at least after Kent State. The seventies were about going back to the land. Spaceshots continued, but they were no longer the focus.
And then we had the O-ring disaster. Suddenly, Americans, our scientists, were fallible. The expert said not to go, but they did anyway. That’s men for you, expressing no caution, wanting the glory.
And then Christa McAuliffe burned up in that space shuttle fire. Just a school teacher, we thought space travel was as safe as car travel, probably more, the odds of a problem were nonexistent in our minds.
And then we stopped paying attention.
Hell, the space station was built by Russia. We were suddenly weak, and there was no money for NASA. It had achieved its mission and the mantra of the Republican Party was that taxes were bad and the government inefficient and wasteful and…
The computer revolution was quite something. Mostly made by kids inspired by the space program. But they were uncontrollable renegades. To both our benefit and our loss.
And now government can’t even understand science, at least not those in Congress.
And politics is tribal.
The greater good? We can’t even agree on that.
But despite all the dissension, we all marveled at the moonwalk back in ’69.
What did Don Henley sing?
