It depends upon when you were born as to what you think of when you hear the term “Moon Walk.” If you were a teenager, or older, in the 1960’s, you may very well recall the dance steps executed in place by Michael Jackson. However, for those who were a youngster or an adult living in the summer of 1969, the words “moon walk” might induce a reflection on Neil Armstrong walking on the real moon, itself. That event occurred a few minutes before 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 20, 1969.
We wanted our daughter, Deb, who had been born ten years earlier in 1959, to remember the date. It might even be possible for Ken, born in 1963, to remember that something special happened in the world when he was six years old. It would be unlikely for our four-year-old Chris to remember anything about his being forced to stay up very late on that adventurous night in the summer of 1969.
At the time, we were living in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., and could not avoid being inundated by reports of rocket blasts and space efforts. It was a very sleepy family that had gathered in our family room around a small black and white television. Games and jigsaw puzzles kept us involved and on the verge of doziness, until it was announced that Neil Armstrong was about to exit through the Eagle’s hatch, climb slowly down the ladder and place a foot on the dust of the moon. We were more or less awake to hear the words: “One small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.”
The words were more exciting than the mere “beep … beep … beep” I had heard some dozen years previously coming from a radio in the DU fraternity house in Ithaca, New York where I was eating dinner on October 4, 1957. Back then I was a graduate student at Cornell University, when the evening-news-broadcast included the sounds being emitted from the Russian Sputnik, an artificial satellite circumnavigating the earth for the first time. A month later, on November 3, we learned that the Soviet Union had launched Laika, a Moscow mongrel, as the first living creature to orbit the planet.
It was a time to be amazed; science-fiction was becoming science-reality. Four years later, as I was completing my doctoral degree, I heard about Yuri Gagarin orbiting in Vostok 1 following his lift off on April 12, 1961. Seventeen months later, the US-USSR space race was announced by JFK in his speech, at Rice University in Houston, with the words: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
President Kennedy was no longer around to see the completion of the race he had announced. Over the intervening years, I followed each step taken by the Mercury Project of 1958 – 1963, my years at Cornell, and by the Gemini Project of 1964 – 67, when we lived in New Hampshire and Oregon. The Apollo years occurred during our days when I was with the National Institutes of Health. The politics of the moon race ended with my years in Amherst.
Over these periods, the nation’s discussions, about funds for science-in-general and for reaching and exploring the moon, have been instrumental in their effects on my own professional life. Discussions relating to the merits of basic and of applied research and development were important with respect to federal funds available for biochemistry and all the other competing “Big Science” endeavors demanding governmental support.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin may have touched down at Tranquility Base, but planet earth was far from tranquil. Perhaps more realistic words were to be found in that other moon-related quotation: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” These words were heard around the world, as I discovered several years ago during a visit to Croatia! Grand Circle Travel, the agency we used for many of our foreign journeys, arranged for brief visits in local homes, often for a native dinner. The GCT also encouraged visitors to give a small gift to the host. We presented our Croatian farm family with a tea-towel from “Houston, Texas.” When their young son read the message, his spontaneous response was, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Although that particular problem was resolved and the Apollo flights were brought to successful conclusions, we have diminished our efforts to try to accomplish deeds that are “hard” and have avoided those in which the solutions are “not easy.”
It has been more than fifty years since a human walked on the moon, itself. There is a possibility that the next feet to touch its surface will be those from China, a nation which landed its own exploration vehicle on the lunar “dark side” on January 3, 2019, a year before we heard about that other “Chinese landing”; this time, one in the United States from a base in Wuhan, China, one which has led to worldwide chaos.
Meanwhile, we have looked into space, itself, and through eons of time, with both the Hubble and the James Webb telescopes. There are renewed discussions about another lunar voyage as well as one to Mars, a planet we’ve seen up-close through our own space satellites and electronic explorers.
We continue to engage in a “moon walk” in which only time will tell if we have been remaining in place, like a Michael Jackson dance-step, or entering a new adventure, one like Neil Armstrong’s step for man, leap for mankind.