Expect a rising tide of Man on the Moon stories over the next week as the calendar advances inexorably toward July 20. Next Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of mission commander Neil Armstrong descending from the ladder of Apollo 11’s Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and stepping onto the lunar surface, thus becoming the first person ever to set foot on the moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969.
I recently had the opportunity to through some old copies of the Toronto Globe and Mail for July 1969, and was struck by some of the inside section stories on the Apollo 11 mission. Well beyond the front page news stories, were all kinds of spin-off stories in the family and religion pages and other sections, on different aspects of the moon mission. There was some fascinating theological discussions in the media on what this might mean for our notions of God and the universe.
Only 12 astronauts, all male, all American – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, and Gene Cernan – have walked on the moon to date, and the last moonwalk by Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission, took place Dec. 14, 1972.
What is remarkable in retrospect, I’ve written before, is to think we only travelled to the moon and back for a little less than 3½ years between July 1969 and December 1972. After burning up billions in expenses, peaking at almost $8 billion in 1966, NASA’s Apollo space program ended abruptly with the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. When it began in 1961, using Saturn A spacecraft, renamed as the Apollo program in 1963, the U.S. space schedule included 20 missions. The scope was reduced immediately after Apollo 11 in 1969. By 1972, a combination of escalating costs and NASA’s shifting interest to Skylab, meant no more trips to the moon. Skylab was the United States’ first and only space station, orbiting the Earth from 1973 to 1979, when it fell back to Earth amid huge worldwide media attention.
If you remember, the Sixties, then on most of the planet you remember those famous words, the alleged esprit de l’escalier uttered by Armstrong and stepped onto the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
This was not, of course, quite what Armstrong meant to say, and not what he actually said, Armstrong claimed later. “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind” was what he intended or did say. While the majority historical consensus is that Armstrong flubbed his historic line in the excitement of the moment, a minority of scholarly opinion holds otherwise, saying he may have actually got it right.
A team of researchers from Michigan State University and Ohio State University in 2103 attempted to deciphering Armstrong’s quote by studying how speakers from his native central Ohio pronounce “for” and “for a.”
Their results suggest that it is entirely possible that Armstrong actually did say it correctly tough evidence indicates that people are statistically more likely to hear “for man” instead of “for a man” on the recording.
Armstrong was raised in central Ohio, where there is typically a lot of blending between words such as “for” and “a”, according to a Michigan State University statement.
“Prior acoustic analyses of Neil Armstrong’s recording have established well that if the word ‘a’ was spoken, it was very short and was fully blended acoustically with the preceding word,” said Laura Dilley, an Michigan State University assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders and part of the research team.
If Armstrong actually did say “a,” she said, it sounded something like “frrr(uh).” His blending of the two words, compounded with the poor sound quality of the transmission, has made it difficult for people to corroborate his claim that the “a” is there.
Dilley and her colleagues thought they might be able to figure out what Armstrong said with a statistical analysis of the duration of the “r” sound as spoken by native central Ohioans saying “for” and “for a” in natural conversation.
They used a collection of recordings of conversational speech from 40 people raised in Columbus, Ohio, near Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta. Within this body of recordings, they found 191 cases of “for a.”
The funny thing is this. While it is true to skip the a illogically – and most ungrammatically – reduces the pronouncement to a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind as being the same thing, it still sounds OK somehow.
My July 21, 1969 copy of the Globe and Mail has a 72-point “going to war” main headline that day – in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed’”
I was 12. My dad was on his summer vacation that week in July 1969, so with my parents, I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon from a small portable black-and-white television set at Pioneer Park, a campground just south of Buckhorn, Ontario. In 1969, televisions were not yet ubiquitous at campgrounds and cottages. I suspect the television set we saw the moon landing on may well have been the only one in the campground that night 50 years ago. We probably picked up the somewhat fuzzy TV station signal from a rabbit ears antenna or some jerry-rigged coat hanger antenna. Certainly there was no cable or satellite TV at Pioneer Park in 1969. Campers from everywhere in the campground came out to watch the historic event, as the television was moved outside the trailer housing it, and a couple of the men hooked up an extension cord and hoisted the TV atop a makeshift scaffold, to allow everyone a chance to circle in and watch. At 12, surreal was not quite yet part of my regular vocabulary, but this was a surreal moment to be sure. I remember we all kept switching between glancing at the TV in anticipation of this historic moment, and glancing up at the starry black sky in a time before much anthropogenic light photopollution out Buckhorn way.
For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.
The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”
In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”
While Armstrong’s quote or misquote is famous, who remembers the last words to date spoken on the moon? Very few, I suspect.
Just before 5:54 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, Dec. 14, 1972, Gene Cernan said for posterity: “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. ‘Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.’”
NASA had announced the cancellation of Apollo 20 in January 1970, and eight months later also scrapped the Apollo 19 mission, and a mission originally planned for Apollo 15. The mission in July 1971 was renumbered 15, continuing to Apollo 16 in April 1972, then to 17.
The Nixon administration had tightened space budgets from a peak in the mid-1960s, when NASA absorbed just under 4.5 per cent of the total US federal budget, and employed 400,000 staff and contractors. The workforce was down to 190,000, with plans to cut another 50,000 jobs, by January 1970.
In 1971, the White House had planned to cancel the Apollo program after Apollo 15, but ultimately left the last two Apollo missions in place.
NASA had also reallocated funds and expertise to the Saturn 5 launch of the Skylab orbital station in 1973, while the prospective development of a space shuttle, endorsed under a presidential task force in 1969, further diverted expertise. The final three Apollo expeditions, which may have included landings in Copernicus or Tycho craters, were scrapped.
“With the program winding down, NASA was under pressure from the National Academy of Sciences to include a scientist on one of the final missions,” reported Marea Donnelly, history writer for Sydney Australia’s The Daily Telegraph on Dec. 3, 2017 (https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/last-apollo-flight-finally-put-scientist-on-the-moon/news-story/76075ad07684b18667e60cd04f20536d. ”
Schmitt was one of the first six scientist-astronauts selected in 1965, and was in training for Apollo 18.
Under pressure from scientists, Schmitt was given a place on Apollo 17, which blasted off in the early hours of December 7, 1972. It was the first and only mission to carry a scientist.
Four days after blast-off, Schmitt became the 12th and final person, and only geologist, to set foot on the moon when he and Cernan stepped out of their lunar module, Challenger.
Gene Cernan’s, “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come,” statement has come to be something of an understatement. The year 2024 – some 52 years after Cernan’s pronouncement – is the current best bet for another moon mission. Pursuant to Space Policy Directive 1 of Dec. 10, 2017, NASA is ordered to “lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually Mars.” Space Policy Directive 1 was based on recommendations from the National Space Council. The council, which had been disbanded in 1992, was reconstituted in 2017.
Ken Bowersox, a 62-year-old veteran of five space shuttle flights, was named July 10 as associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate of NASA, which is responsible for man’s return to the moon in 2024 through the Artemis spaceflight program, a moon mission which is to include the first woman and the next man on the moon. When they land five years from now, the astronauts will step foot where no human has ever been before: the Moon’s South Pole. Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology.
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