We did it!

I was an eighteen year-old lad, waiting to take my place at Liverpool University medical school in just a few week’s time, when at around 4 o’clock in the morning of 21st July 1969, I watched the grainy images of Neil Armstrong making his way down the ladder of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module). As he “stepped off the LEM”, I heard his immortal words “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, badly garbled by static but still intelligible, and I knew my life, and the life of humanity, would never be the same again. A few minutes later I went outside into the early dawn, and there was the moon, just past half-full, and thought to myself: My God! There are people walking around on that thing! To me that moment marked a fundamental step forward in the progress of human kind. To develop the technology to visit our neighbouring world, across the terrible, airless void of space, remains the most significant event of the 68 years I have lived on this planet.

I wasn’t alone. Much later I heard Buzz Aldrin being interviewed about the world tour the Moonmen undertook in the months following their landing, and he said that everywhere people would say the same thing to him: “We did it!” OK, it was an American flag that was planted in the Sea of Tranquillity, and let’s face it, if we’d done it there would be a Union Flag there now. But the point Aldrin was making was that everyone felt it to be an achievement of the whole human race, not just the Yanks. They just led the way.

Yet not everyone was a fan of the Apollo project, and I’m not referring to the idiots who continue to insist that the whole thing was a movie made by Stanley Kubrick. A number of people felt the money, and to be fair it was an enormous sum, could have been better used to help end world poverty, or something else more relevant to humanity here at home. Trouble is, you can’t solve poverty simply by throwing money at it. Most poverty and hunger is politically based, famines especially so. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to end poverty, hunger and famine, of course we should, but we should explore space too.

Human beings have been saying “I wonder what’s out there. Let’s go and find out” ever since the time of Cro Magnon. The Phoenicians regularly set sail to parts unknown in search of new trading routes way before the pyramids were built. The Vikings sailed right across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered the New World hundreds of years before Columbus tried the same thing. And what we did in 1969 was in the same spirit, even if it was a fortuitous consequence of the arms race and the Cold War. It’ll be the same when we finally set foot on Mars, then Titan, then Triton, as Arthur C Clarke predicted we one day will. The burning desire to find out what’s out there is as strong now as it ever was.