On the Death of Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong, the first man to step onto another celestial body, died at the age of 82 on the 25^th of August 2012. The obituaries talked about this historic, self-effacing man in their usual pre-written ways. At his burial the fact that the day coincided with the second full (and therefore “blue”) moon on the same month was mentioned. By the time I am writing this paragraph in early September 2012, and endless F5ing of the newspaper websites has consigned his story to the archives and life goes on as before, the moon landings of the late 60s and early 70s a strange historical oddity.

The Apollo program ended in December 1972. I have a memory of watching a moon landing live in the early 70s. Hard to say if it was the last one, which was reputedly not televised as people had got bored already with blurry images in black and white of these strange chubby dolls bouncing around a barren landscape as if on elastic. I am too young to recall the Apollo 11 landing of Amstrong and Aldrin, even if I was there.

I often wonder how the present young generation see the moon landings. As the youngest man to have walked on the moon was born in 1935 (Charles Duke?), the moon shots were stuff of their grandparents’ generation, just as for me the Second World War was of my grandparents’ time.

Since the last Apollo flight, man has been restricted to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and somehow this is less thrilling than it should be. Perhaps it is because apart from repairing orbital telescopes, the LEO missions are of limited value. Perhaps it is because the altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) is between 330km and 410km, something like the distance between Brussels and London.

The dream of spaceflight has failed and I wonder why? At the death of Neil Armstrong I looked up a quote from the late author J.G. Ballard:

[I]n 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon and became, I thought, the only human being from our millennium who would be remembered in 50,000 years' time. But after those first triumphs something began to go wrong. [The] great vision of galactic exploration had begun to fade. The suspicion dawned that outer space might be - dare one say it - boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn't very much to do there. [It was] the most hostile environment ever encountered. Besides, absolute zero was not a temperature at which anything very interesting ever happened. We began to realise that the most fascinating planet in the universe, and by far the strangest, was the one that the astronauts had left behind them. (J. G. Ballard, Observer 22 Dec 1996)

In a relatively short period of time, man has gone from cave dwelling hunter-gatherer to agricultural settler, to technological city dweller sending men to the stars. It’s an incredible feat in objective terms. But somehow our imaginations don’t play ball. Maybe Ballard is right that space in reality is boring – perhaps our ideas and dreams of science fiction and space travel are so far beyond our capability that we are deeply disappointed by the reality.

Ballard suggests that space travel offends our sense of evolutionary superiority, as it infantilises us in terms of our biological prowess in walking, running – all the things that gravity gives us.

But what if there had been a disaster in space? This question was floated by the Chilean surrealist artist Matta in 1966:

DIS-ASTRONAUTE

Disaster in space: an astronaut is dead. But is he dead? Closed in a perfect capsule, his body is intact. Is he alive? His voice is not heard by man, his thought is still. All that one knows is that his body – dead? alive? – turns in space around the earth at enormous speed. On a clear night, a luminous point crosses the sky from one horizon to the other. Sailors check their course against that point; on silent islands mothers show the miracle to their children: the miracle of something – a man – that moves amongst the stars and is distinguished from them by movement. He has a name. Russian? American? A common name, a sound like the sound of a star’s name, but a man’s name. Dead? Alive?

Perhaps we will never hear of such a thing, perhaps a disaster in space will never occur. But what would occur if it should occur? Perhaps nothing more than what is written in this brief hypothetical account. Or perhaps everything in the world would change because man could not support the idea of a perfect cadaver or a live man without voice and without thought turning in space, beyond contact and beyond understanding. But how many perfect cadavers and live men without voice and without thought surround us every day on earth? Why must we await – and fear – a disaster in space, in order to become aware of our world?

MATTA, Paris 1966

A Ballard character in The Atrocity Exhibition misquotes the last line as, "a disaster in space in order to understand our own time?"

There have been several disasters with the space program. From NASA there was the Apollo 1 fire during testing that killed Grissom, White, and Chaffee. This was a disaster on the ground. There were two fatal disasters with the Space Shuttle program, Challenger at launch in 1986 and Colombia during re-entry in 2003. In these cases the bodies of the brave astronauts fell to earth.

But what if Armstrong had crashed the Eagle module as he landed it manually on the moon’s surface in 1969? What if the explosion on Apollo 13 on its way to the moon had been fatal and the crew of Lovell, Swigert and Haise had crashed into the moon or ended up as an orbiting tomb around the moon? If these disasters had taken place, each time we looked at the moon we would think of the cadavers of these men in their cold airless coffins. Every clear night as the moon shone down we would feel the bodies of these pioneering men and wonder at their death. We would dream about going to the moon to see their final resting places, maybe talk with their ghosts.

If men had died on the moon, our concepts of time and space would have changed, I really believe that. The moon would have become an emotionally charged place and I am convinced we would have had a moon base by now.

The preserved and desiccated remains of these men would have spurred humanity on to deeper understandings.

In a November 16, 2009 editorial, The New York Times opined:

[T]here’s something terribly wistful about these photographs of the Apollo landing sites. The detail is such that if Neil Armstrong were walking there now, we could make him out, make out his footsteps even, like the astronaut footpath clearly visible in the photos of the Apollo 14 site. Perhaps the wistfulness is caused by the sense of simple grandeur in those Apollo missions. Perhaps, too, it’s a reminder of the risk we all felt after the Eagle had landed – the possibility that it might be unable to lift off again and the astronauts would be stranded on the Moon. But it may also be that a photograph like this one is as close as we’re able to come to looking directly back into the human past.

"We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth." –Eugene Cernan

The original video tapes of the Apollo 11 mission are believed to have been wiped. What a comment…