Blast Off

Only realised this evening, with the help of the World Service on the way back from work, that today marks the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The fact that I'm reading Mailer's book about the mission, and had picked it up back in KL with no awareness whatsoever of the impending anniversary, seems a touch spooky. The irony is that it's taking me a lot longer to complete the book that it did for Armstrong & co to go there, have a bit of a trot on the lunar surface, and get back again.

There was a chap on the radio talking about how exciting and inspiring the whole mission was to a young adolescent - the guy having gone on to work for NASA - and he's right, it was. I can remember walking around Crown Point, Denton on the Sunday evening of the actual landing thinking that this really was the future and things just couldn't get more modern. Of course they could, they always can, but now I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Sadly, once we got passed the drama of Apollo 13 it all got rather dull. One of the penalties of modernity, I suppose, the ridiculously short attention span we've developed.