A lot of bloggers are reminding us that yesterday was the 63rd anniversary of the first successful nuclear test at the site now known as “Trinity” in the deserts of New Mexico. Usually, more attention is paid to the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred just a couple of weeks later in early August, 1945, but for some reason this has caught the attention of the bloggers. Maybe it’s because of the opening sequence of “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls”, which has Indy hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator and survivng a nuclear test (which, I hope, you do realize is totally impossible). If you’ve ever read much about the Manhattan Project, you’ll recall that at least one physicist was legitimately concerned that the test might cause the entire atmosphere of the planet to catch fire and destroy everyone. I’d like to see Indy escape from THAT. The test was successful, clearing the way for the assembly of the two bombs and for Harry Truman’s controversial decision to use them.
Meanwhile, Phil Plait reminded me that July 16 was also the 39th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the first space mission to land men on the surface of the moon. I should have remembered, since I sat through the entire Discovery Channel miniseries “When We Left Earth” not too long ago, and just watched the documentary “In The Shadow Of The Moon” which also ran on Discovery. The miniseries was about the entire breadth of the manned space program from Mercury through the Space Shuttle, while the feature-length documentary was specifically about the Apollo Program. The miniseries got off to an interesting start, but, not unlike the manned space program itself, became monotonous and uninteresting after the segment about Apollo 13. The single documentary, on the other hand, had lots of interesting commentary from some of the less-famous members of the astronaut corps like Alan Bean and Gene Cernan, to make up for what was otherwise a standard rehash of the usual NASA film footage. They both looked mighty awesome on my big-screen TV, but that’s about that. I did get Charlotte to sit through “In The Shadow Of The Moon” with me, and she liked it.
I was not quite six years old in the summer of 1969, a couple of years younger than she is now, but I remember being glued to the TV day and night for Apollo 11, especially for the launch. While Walter Cronkite is the iconic figure of the television coverage of the space program, we were an NBC family, and so when I think of the moon missions, I think of Frank McGee at the anchor desk. Phil Plait had a really neat link in his post about the launch: this is a short video of the live television coverage in Australia. One of the things all of the astronauts mentioned in “In The Shadow Of The Moon” was how the entire world seemed to adopt the Apollo astronauts and how people thought of the moon landing not as an American accomplishment, but as a HUMAN accomplishment. “We Came In Peace, For All Mankind”, the plaque said, and for that one time in history maybe it was true.
