Aşağıdaki fotoğraflar Edwin Aldrin’in 20 Temmuz 1969 tarihide Ay üzerindeki yürüyüşü sırasında Neil Armstrong tarafından çekilmiştir.

Arkada iki UFO belirgin olarak görülmektedir. KAYNAK Fotoğrafları büyültmek için üzerlerine tıklarsanız Ufoların tencere kapağı (saucer) gibi yapay bir şekle sahip olduğunu ve aya bakan cephelerinde özel bir bölüm olduğunu hayretle göreceksiniz.

I’ve read other memoirs by the Apollo astronauts who went to the Moon, most of whom wrote about their tremendous efforts to become space jocks and their stories always peaked with their lunar adventures.  Buzz Aldrin second autobiographical book starts with the Apollo 11 landing and quickly wraps that adventure up, because his book is about the second half of his life, the forty years of life after being a famous man who landed on the Moon.  Aldrin had an exciting first half of life before becoming the “second” man to walk on another world.  He went to West Point, flew jet fighters in the Korean War, got a PhD at MIT, became a NASA astronaut and blasted into orbit on the Gemini 12 space mission, getting to do one of the early space walks.

So after coming home from the Moon and spending a year touring the world and being famous, Buzz Aldrin had a tough second act to follow his first.  His book chronicles his decline into depression and alcoholism, and it’s not a pretty story.  The real magic of his life appears to be recovering from his early success and starting over, especially his amazing luck of finding Lois Driggs Cannon, his third wife who helped him rediscover a purpose in life that has carried him forward these last twenty plus years.  It’s the Buzz Aldrin 2.0 that I find the most fascinating.

Of all the Apollo astronauts, Buzz Aldrin is the only one that has stayed in the limelight making a career campaigning for space exploration.  This is the tragic part of Magnificent Desolation, and maybe not one Buzz intended to portray.  Aldrin is completely gung-ho on space travel – the trouble is the rest of the world isn’t ready to follow his lead.  Why have we never left low-Earth orbit since 1972?  It took less than 10 years to get to the Moon starting from scratch, but with all the fantastic technology we have today, we can’t seem to get back to the Moon, much less go further.  Why?  Well, it’s not for Buzz’s heroic effort in trying.

I believe the portion of the population who are space travel true believers is so small that they don’t have the political critical mass to make Aldrin’s dream come true.  I’m not even sure 1/10th of 1 percent of the world’s population, or 7 million people are space advocates.  The Planetary Society doesn’t state how many members it has, but I’m guessing it’s in the low hundred thousands range.  The National Space Society, is even smaller.  In other words, the core group of humanity that seriously wants for humans to live in space is probably another magnitude smaller, 1/100th of 1 percent, or 700,000, and probably much less.

Buzz Aldrin has a tremendous uphill battle to convince the world to spend the money on manned missions to the Moon and Mars when only .01 percent of the population really cares.  Even if you add in all the the heavy duty science fiction fans, I doubt the number grows beyond .1 percent of the population.

Aldrin has hitched his star to the space tourism philosophy, which I have never bought.  Magnificent Desolation is current through late 2008 or early 2009, so Buzz reports on all his friends in the private space exploration business, the people who keep the dream alive, but it’s like what Aldrin states in the book, it only takes a rocket going 2,000 mph to achieve sub-orbital success, but it would take a spacecraft going 17,000 mph to make orbit. 

Can private space programs launch that kind of leap in technology?  We know the minimum required, an Atlas rocket like John Glenn road to fame.  The minimum to get to the Moon is a Saturn 5 – can anyone really imagine a private company funding that kind of expense?  If there’s a better way to space don’t you think someone would have found it in the last forty years?  Rocket technology seems to be the sole technology for heaving people off Earth.  Many space advocates campaign for the space elevator, but that technology is far more fantastic than real.

I grew up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts – they were my childhood heroes.  I thought NASA was blazing a trail to a future where science fiction would become real, but that hasn’t happened.  We have the technology to colonize the Moon and Mars now, and we have pioneers who are ready to go, we just don’t have the patrons to pay their way to the stars.  Buzz Aldrin still dreams the dream, and so do I, and a lot of other space enthusiasts, but I don’t think there’s enough of us to make a political or financial difference.

The only force that inspires the tax payers of America to send missions beyond low-Earth orbit is international politics.  We went to the Moon because of the Russians.  I believe President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration and the plans for Project Constellation in 2005 because China, Japan and India were making their own plans to send their citizens to the Moon.  However, President Bush’s vision didn’t impassion America like John F. Kennedy did in 1961. 

I think most Americans feel “been there, done that” and don’t see the point of returning to the Moon.  Even the majority of science fiction fans don’t pine for new missions to the final frontier.  For forty years we’ve been great at planning new manned space exploration, but no country or company is willing to spend the big bucks.  Space travel still excites and inspires legions of kids, but most somehow lose the dream as they get older because the political climate never seems to change.

Buzz Aldrin could have called his book Magnificent Ambitions, because space travel true believers feel that spawning a branch of humanity that lives off Earth and eventually colonizes other worlds in this system before moving on to other stellar systems is the ultimate purpose of our species.  I think many of us space travel true believers have been depressed, like Buzz, since the success of the Apollo Moon landings because the United States didn’t go on to greater missions. 

The phrase “to infinity and beyond” was the funny rallying cry of Buzz Lightyear, a cartoon character, but that’s how space travel believers feel.  The fascinating question about the 21st century is whether or not the rest of humanity will take up the challenge.  I don’t think the political leaders of China, India and Japan are space travel true believers.  Since 1945 there have been two spectacular ways for a nation to prove they are great – exploding an atomic bomb or developing a space program.  Nationalism isn’t a good force for long term space patronage because citizens eventually feel such wealth should be spent on programs closer to home.

JWH – 11/20/9  

Jesus, companies will make anything.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s lunar landing this past summer, Louis Vuitton designed a Malle Mars trunk. If we ever develop a community on Mars, I’ll have to go out and get myself one of these.

Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Sally Ride was not only at the opening but they recently starred in LV’s summer campaign.

The custom trunk is still on display at the American Museum of Natural History alongside other NASA memorabilia.
Jesus, fashion houses will make anything. There’s something for everyone…

Chanel cupcakes for those who are too fat to fit into a Chanel suit.

For the jocks! Wouldn’t this make a great Superbowl party favour?

And the most blatant agenda pushing I’ve ever seen by LV…

Combining two things all chinks love: badminton and badminton cases.

Nobody likes to talk about the fourth Apollo 11 astronaut

(Moon Landing)

Picture by: dunno source Caption by: JMonschke via Advanced Lol Builder

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OVERACHIEVEMENT
Everything else you do will be compared to it.

(Apollo 11 liftoff)

You have to admire them

Picture by: dunno source. Caption by: Muze via Poster Builder

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A picture of Apollo 11’s landing site taken by the LRO from an altitude of 50 km.

[via]

Over the years you’ve no doubt heard claims that the Apollo Moon landings were an elaborate government hoax. Of course, this is one of the silliest conspiracy theory claims I’ve ever heard, but then once people start to venture down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy mongering I’m of the opinion that logic & reason go right out the window.  In any case, ever since these CT-lunatics (pardon the pun ) have started making their hoax claims a decade ago, one of their most oft-repeated mantras is: “If we really did send humans to the Moon, then why doesn’t NASA show us pictures of the landing sites?”

Well, here you go, an image of the Apollo 11 landing site as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)…

A detailed description of this photo is given over at the Bad Astronomy blog:

We’ve seen it before, but this time LRO is in its 50 km mapping orbit, so the resolution on this image is far higher — about 50 or so centimeters (20 inches). In this image, the tracks made by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they scampered on the Moon for 2 hours and 31 minutes are obvious. You can even see the lander footpads, each just less than a meter (a bit over a yard) across.

The bright spots south of (below) the lander are various scientific packages they installed, including the Lunar Ranging Retro Reflector and the Passive Seismic Experiment. If I’ve got the scale right, the faint dark trail going to the upper left is where they put the TV camera. Somewhere between that and the lander is the flag. The Sun was shining straight down in this image, so the flag isn’t visible.

The image above is a piece of a much larger photo taken by the LRO…

Hat tip to the Rogues at the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog for giving me the heads up on these new photos from the LRO.  Incidentally, Phil has a really detailed blog post on this new development – I recommend you check it out.

It’ll be interesting to see what sort of reaction the Moon hoax CTers will have to this news, seeing as how it addresses a critical claim they’ve been making all along (that no direct photos of the Apollo landing sites exist).  Of course, I predict that the CTers will engage in all manner of special pleading and goalpost moving to explain away this damning evidence – even going so far as to appeal to the conspiracy theory (i.e. NASA faked the photos) to rationalize their delusions.  Such thinking displays the unfalsifiable nature of conspiracy theories and shows how misguided & separated from reality these folks can be.

Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water

By ALICIA CHANG (AP) – 1 hour ago

LOS ANGELES — Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that’s only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

“Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go,” said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

Even so, members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA’s future plans said it doesn’t change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

“This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but … the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain,” Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA’s lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

As for unmanned exploration, previous missions had detected the presence of hydrogen in lunar craters near the moon’s poles, possible evidence of ice. In September, scientists reported finding tiny amounts of water in the lunar soil all over the moon’s surface.

But it was NASA’s Oct. 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, that provided the stunning confirmation announced Friday — water, in the forms of ice and vapor.

“Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one,” said Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the mission, led by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The LCROSS spacecraft only hit one spot on the moon and it’s unclear how much water there is across the entire moon.

The October mission involved two strikes into a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole. First, an empty rocket hull slammed into the Cabeus crater. Then, a trailing spacecraft recorded the drama live before it also crashed into the same spot four minutes later.

Though scientists were overjoyed with the plethora of data beamed back to Earth, the mission was a public relations dud. Space enthusiasts who stayed up all night to watch the spectacle did not see the promised giant plume of debris.

NASA scientists had predicted the twin impacts would spew six miles of dust into the sunlight. Instead, images revealed only a mile-high plume, and it was not visible to many amateur astronomers peering through telescopes.

Scientists spent a month analyzing data from the spacecraft’s spectrometers, instruments that can detect strong signals of water molecules in the plume.

“We’ve had hints that there is water. This was almost like tasting it,” said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who in 1969 made his historic Apollo 11 moonwalk with Neil Armstrong, was pleased to hear the latest discovery, but still believes the U.S. should focus on colonizing Mars.

“People will overreact to this news and say, `Let’s have a water rush to the moon,’” Aldrin said. “It doesn’t justify that.”

Mission scientists said it would take more time to tease out what else was kicked up in the moon dust.

Finally they’ve confirmed it: the Moon has water. NASA has crashed 2 spacecraft into one of the lunar craters on the Moon and found a pretty sizeable amount of water – approximately 25 gallons. For those on the metric system, that’s 95 litres. Now that we have water on the Moon, chances of having extended stays on the Moon have increased. There is even the possibility of a astronaut outpost.

With this new discovery, there’s a chance that there’s even more water elsewhere on the Moon just waiting to be discovered. Even so, it’s still going to be some time before our dreams of living on another planet come true…

NASA reports -

This is LROC’s first picture of Apollo 11 after LRO dropped into its 50 km mapping orbit. At this altitude, very small details of Tranquility Base can be discerned. The footpads of the LM are clearly discernible. Components of the Early Apollo Science Experiments Package (EASEP) are easily seen, as well.

Continue reading HERE.

See the full image HERE.

We’re still having fun FUN-raising!  Get used to it.  We’re doing it until the 15th.  Tonight, though we don’t have anyone in the studio with us,

Amalia Goros and I will be featuring the music of Tereza.  The big song from this disk is “Fly me to the Moon”.  Written by Bart Howard in 1954 the song was first recorded by Kaye Ballard then covered by many other great artists including Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Julie London, Patti Page, Doris Day.  In 1969 (forgive me–a pun this good just can’t be ignored) it reached dizzying heights when astronaut Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 played the Frank Sinatra version as he walked on the moon.  On July 20th of this year the 40th anniversary of the moon walk was celebrated at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and to commemorate this historic event Diana Krall serenaded the three Apollo 11 astronauts with her version of the song.

In May 2003 Tereza released her version of this classic on the aptly titled Double cd: Fly Me To The Moon.  It was catapulted into the public arena when Cutty Sark picked it for their TV ad campaign that year.

The disk we’re offering at the $100.00 pledge level has this and many other great songs by Tereza in both Greek and English.  Though she grew up in New York her roots are Greek.

Click here to check out her video for “Akouse Me”.

So, while they last, call (718.204.8900) and pledge $100.00.  Not only will you get this great disk you will also be supporting HPR (Hellenic Public Radio).

In September of 2009, I received an invitation to do some research with primary resources at the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, DC. Knowing that this invitation was a tremendous opportunity, I agreed and made the arrangements to do research for one week. Part of my time at the LOC was spent with librarians who demonstrated the use of primary resources in the classroom. The rest of my time was alone doing research with primary resources.

The focus of my study is the enigma of Thomas Jefferson. He set forth some of our nation’s greatest ideals but he didn’t always follow his own advice. I found this discrepancy interesting and knew that the LOC has many of his original writings and much of his personal library. So off I went to spend days in a library studying first hand artifacts from history.

It was everything I could have hoped for and more. Some of the more famous documents I was able to see were James Madison’s copy of the Treaty of Paris (1763), pages from Meriwether Lewis’s diary from the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Spanish explorer journals (1500s), James Polk’s journals (all unpublished materials), and many many more items & manuscripts. It was truly inspiring to work with these materials and I hope to go back soon -seeing that they issued me a researcher’s library card that is good for two years.

Since the topic of this blog is camping, I thought I’d look up some camping topics while at the LOC.  They had tons of materials but nothing of great note.  Apparently, the best place to go for teardrop trailer material is the RV/MH Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana.  I did some networking while at the LOC that may come in useful for a future project with the Hall of Fame in Indiana.

While in Washington DC, I went to The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport.  This is the newest addition to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.  It is a remarkable display of one of a kind aircraft.  I was surprised to see so many of my favorite historic & current aircraft.  I recommend a visit to anyone in the area with a spare day to spend in one spot.

There were three displays that were particularly exciting to me.  The first was the SR-71 Blackbird.  As a kid, I always dreamed of riding in one of those high altitude spy planes and at the museum I finally saw my first one.  The second display that fascinated me was NASA’s Space shuttle Enterprise.  It sits in the space flight section of the museum & dominates the floor.  I have also always dreamed of seeing a space shuttle up close and finally got my chance.  The last display was an unexpected surprise.  I was walking through the space  craft displays when I came upon the most famous Airstream trailer in history.  It is the Airstream that was converted to a quarantine facility for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.  It has so many reasons to be in that display.  It is related to the moon missions, of course, but many of the first Airstream trailers were made with aircraft specs & surplus materials during and following WWII.

This is the information I found in front of the Apollo 11 Airstream trailer:

“This Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) was one of four built by NASA for astronauts returning from the moon.  Its purpose was to prevent the unlikely spread of lunar contagions by isolating the astronauts from contact with other people.  A converted Airstream trailer, the MQF contained living and sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and a bathroom.  Quarantine was assured by keeping the air pressure inside lower than the pressure outside and by filtering the air vented from the facility.

This MQF was used by Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins immediately after their return to Earth.  They remained in it for 65 hours, while the MQF was flown from the aircraft carrier hornet to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.  They were allowed to emerge from isolation once scientists were sure they were not infected with “moon germs”.”

I may not have been able to shoot many photos at the LOC, but I did get about 36GB of photos on the week.  Here are just a few of them.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 – the first landing on the Moon – Joseph Bellows Gallery presents FULL MOON: The Apollo Missions. The exhibition will feature photographs from Michael Light’s book FULL MOON and will be on view from October 17th – December 5th, 2009, 7661 Girard Avenue,La Jolla, California.

www.josephbellows.com

Aus Nixons Rede für den Fall, dass Apollo 11 nicht zur Erde zurückkehrt.

A few months ago, I was asked to interview Theo Kamecke, the director of Moonwalk One, the original documentary charting the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Believe it or not, this year marked the fortieth anniversary of that intrepid voyage, so it seemed appropriate to celebrate it with a full-length feature. That, and the fact that the doc has just been re-released on DVD with an abundance of extra features.

The film, it has to be said, is slightly weird. It very much feels that it was made in 1969, just as that decade’s naive spirit of peace and love was dying out – in fact, it was pretty much obliterated by the Vietnam War and the assassination of various prominent politicians. It has a strange, surreal tone to it, which is not helped by the bizarro soundtrack which must have done wonders for the pipe organ industry that year.

That said, Moonwalk One is also an incredibly powerful piece of work. It has a hypnotic, oddly disconcerting quality which I can’t quite put my finger on. I guess what stands out most about it is that it captures a society (or perhaps a world) ready to lurch, willingly or otherwise, into a brand new technological age – and all the fear that comes with that.

SHOOT THE MOON: FILMING THE FIRST LUNAR LANDING

History is dominated by tragic events. Wars, famines, assassinations, earthquakes, sieges, plane crashes, scandals, murders… Start talking about those moments that changed the course of human history, and pretty soon someone will mention the day that Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll, or the moment that two atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We fail to remember that the passage of time has just as frequently been rerouted by the forces of good. In 1969, the Apollo 11 shuttle shot off into space, with the Moon as its destination. Its passengers, three astronauts would soon stroll across the planet’s surface, whilst around 600 million people watched enrapt in the comfort of their own living rooms. Contracted by NASA to make a “time capsule” to document the event, Theo Kamecke responded with his film Moonwalk One, in which he wrangled with the philosophical ramifications of living in a universe that had just multiplied in size. Here, he speaks about witnessing the dawn of a new era…

It’s amazing how easily accustomed we have become to magic. And not the fake kind either. How casual we are about the sun, Moon and stars which give light to our world. Stop. Think about it for a second: somewhere above our puny globe, huge, rolling spheres are suspended in space, gently librating. These celestial bodies move silently on their orbits on set paths, without colliding with each other or boring a hole through our earth. Day by day these processes take place, allowing our lives to continue, allowing sailors to charter paths at sea, allowing poets to write romantic odes to their lovers, yet still we take such magic for granted. We go about our day to day lives, and somehow forget the mind-blowing laws of physics which hold the cosmos in place above us.

We also seem to forget that forty years ago man first walked on the Moon. The Space Race was officially over – or had only just begin, depending on how you look at it – when Neil Armstrong uttered those immortal words about taking one small step. In our era of cleverdickery, we now even regard that as a cliché. This might explain why Moonwalk One, Theo Kamecke’s wonderful account of the build-up to the lunar landing, remained in obscurity for over thirty years. It received favourable reviews upon its release in 1970, but soon after the importance of this landmark event was eclipsed as even something as astounding as space travel became trivial.

“You have to bear in mind that even after the film was finished there were still Apollo missions going to the Moon,” says Kamecke. “There was better video transmission, rovers they could drive around in, different kinds of rocks they could look for, but on balance just more of the same. The public’s interest in space travel had its limits. This was pretty much what I had expected, and I had moved on. More than a year had gone by when I learned that the film had been shown at Cannes and was awarded a special prize. Nobody bothers to tell the filmmaker until a reviewer from a New York paper calls it a ‘sleeper’ among American films at the festival. But because of its subject matter it still was not of public interest, and so it sank into near oblivion for decades.”

Consequently, the prints of Moonwalk One became as forgotten as the lost ark: some of the footage was presumed lost, whilst the rest of it gathered dust in steel boxes squirreled away underneath Kamecke’s desk. What little original material that remained was pilfered for other documentaries.

“I wonder how many of the producers who borrowed scenes ever gave thought as to how they came to be in the film in the first place – the spectacular footage of the launch, for instance. I had noticed in a technical manual obtained from NASA that 240 engineering cameras were triggered automatically at launch, but asked what ever happened to that footage. They had no idea. I discovered that it was shipped down to the rocket research centre in Huntsville, Alabama, where I found it jumbled into two cardboard cartons under a workbench. If nothing blew up, the technicians weren’t interested, and after a while were going to toss it out.”

One of the people familiar with Kamecke’s work was the British filmmaker Christopher Riley. In time to come, he would play a pivotal role in restoring Kamecke’s vision for a new, more appreciative generation of viewers.

“I first came across Moonwalk One about twelve years ago when a colleague at the BBC showed me an old tape of the film,” enthuses Riley. “We were all spellbound by it and would occasionally recut some of the footage in it into our own films. I always suspected that there was a copy on film somewhere still, but whenever I asked at NASA no one knew much about it.”

As the world approached the fortieth anniversary of astronauts casually meandering across the Moon’s crust, a group of producers sought out as much original material as they could find. Riley was one of those involved in the project.

“In 2007 we tracked down Theo through the internet and found that he still had a 35mm film print of the full-length director’s cut of the film. Since then we’ve been working to restore and renovate the film to release for a new twenty-first century audience.”

Watching the new Director’s Cut of Moonwalk One is, to be frank, a slightly surreal and unsettling experience. It’s coloured by an otherworldly, dreamlike style, as if Nicolas Roeg has directed a piece for the Discovery Channel. To make matters more psychedelic, it’s set against a kaleidoscope of late sixties and early seventies sounds: funk and paisley pop are mixed with stretches of eerie silence.

“The film’s composer Charlie Morrow understood how I wanted to handle it,” says Kamecke, “that I wanted it to have a sense of mystery while in other parts to be firmly down to earth. He could write a rock song where it was needed, he could get hold of a cathedral organ where it was needed. For the ‘Earth Poem’ sequence he came up with a heartbeat, breathing and a cello. It brings tears to your eyes if you’re even partially human.”

Moonwalk One opens with a haunting series of shots of Stonehenge, not only because it symbolises human engineering but also because the monument is said to be where man first observed the stars. It initially befuddles you, and along with the dry, rumbling voiceover, you would be forgiven for thinking that Spinal Tap are about to appear in a cloud of dry ice and studded leathers. The whole of Moonwalk One is driven by this evocative, philosophical approach. It’s fitting, given that the mythical character Apollo is often named as a god of poetry and the arts.

“There are countless ways a documentary about Apollo 11 could have been made,” continues Kamecke. “It could have been highly technical with lots of fascinating details; it could have traced the development of the space program or boasted of NASA’s competence; it could have cast a jaundiced eye at the whole program which ignored all the suffering in the world – though probably not on NASA’s coin. I chose to make Moonwalk One like an epic about the time when man left his earth and walked on another world. If mankind’s history is looked at eons from now, this point will have to be marked, along with the discovery of fire. So I tried to make it somewhat poetic and myth-like, to have the feel of a tale told round a campfire.”

Like all good Sci-Fi, one of the most engrossing aspects of the film are found in the contrast between the mechanical and the emotional. The viewer is reminded that the trio of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (famous for being the second man on the Moon. To quote his appearance in The Simpsons: “Second comes right after first!”) were just normal guys who experienced something insanely abnormal. This human element is vital to the success of Moonwalk One. Yes, your spine may be tingled by the site of a huge rocket firing its engines and launching upwards into the heavens, but your heart will burst at the countless numbers of regular Joes and Janes who allowed such alchemy to happen.

“It was very, very hard to land men on the Moon and return them safely,” adds Riley, paraphrasing President Kennedy. “It took 400,000 – yes, 400,000! – engineers the best part of eight years to make it happen. And throughout that time it must have seemed impossible as things would often go wrong. But against all the odds in July 1969 NASA landed their Eagle Lander on the Sea Of Tranquility. Theo, the only civilian, was actually there in Mission Control at this moment.”

The film goes to great pains to remind the viewer just how much human effort went into keeping the Apollo shuttle aloft. And we’re not just talking about the genius of astronautics which makes spaceflight possible. In a key sequence, we see the women who beavered away to fashion the clothes necessary for the mission.

“I think it’s touching to learn that the ladies who so carefully stitched together the spacesuits for the astronauts had white hair and were using foot pedal machines from 1900 for this precision work,” says Kamecke, empathetically. “They dreamed of going into space themselves, and hoped it was their gloves or their boots that steeped on the Moon. Our grandmothers dressed us for a walk on the Moon.”

As Moonwalk One progresses, as you become accustomed to its curious rhythms, you become more deeply convinced of the way in which this event galvanised the world’s populace – even if it was only for a few stolen moments.

“It was mankind that stepped on the Moon,” Kamecke continues. “Some of us run spaceships, some of us run hotdog stands. Some of us paddle a canoe hunting for fish for dinner, some of us grind the corn. We all went the Moon, and that’s what everyone believed at the time. The million who came down to watch the launch and spill food on each other, the crowds who celebrated, and the astronauts who flew down to the surface of the Moon were us.”

If you take the time to pause and consider that such an accomplishment was possible – that human beings really did defy the laws of gravity and probability – it is difficult to believe that it actually happened at all. When we do not respond to the lunar landing with apathy, we do so with incredulity.

“Your point about it being hard to believe today is also behind the commonly held belief that maybe it didn’t happen,” affirms Riley. “But we can assure you that it did. There isn’t one single conspiracy theory that holds any truth.”

Kamecke agrees: “Notwithstanding how difficult it was to do in actuality, it would have been one hundred times more difficult to fake. Can you imagine getting hundreds of thousands of people to keep their mouths shut for the past forty years? I always wanted to ask a conspiracy theorist how stupid they think the scientists of the Soviet Union were that they fell for this – or perhaps they were in on the scam. No, some things really happened in history just the way the books have it.”

It is difficult to fathom that a film as valuable as Moonwalk One could have been forgotten, but its most praiseworthy achievement of is coaxing the viewer into experiencing this feeling of awe afresh, or to sense it for the first time.

“I hadn’t given the film much thought in many years,” Kamecke confides. “I hadn’t seen the film as originally edited for almost thirty-nine years. Even the version shown at Cannes was shortened by several minutes in an attempt by NASA to interest distributors. It was nice to put back the footage the way I intended it. The restoration also gave me the chance to do something with the soundtrack of the launch sequence which I had always wanted to do. Being back in the editing room was not strange at all – it could have been only yesterday, except that the equipment was all leading edge digital, instead of the noisy moviolas we used back then, which looked like small jeeps.”

Now working as a sculptor, and making visually stunning pieces which look like futuristic obelisks modelled on Egyptian architecture, Kamecke has found the process a hugely rewarding one, and reminded him exactly why he made the film in the first place.

“As I watched Moonwalk One again, I think I hit the mark. Yes, it was sometimes an emotional experience, but I don’t think that had anything to do with my making it. It was because the film did exactly what I meant it to do: to create an emotional and memorable experience for the viewer.”

All of these plaques, with the exception of the Apollo 13 plaque, were left on the moon by Apollo mission astronauts. They are awesome. These images are from NASA’s official website.

Apollo 11 - The first men on the moon

Apollo 12

Apollo 13

Apollo 14

Apollo 15

Apollo 16

Apollo 17 - The last men to walk on the moon.