New Zealand Listener - October 13, 2018

26 LISTENER OCTOBER 13 2018

A

s next year’s 50th anni-

versary of the Apollo

11 moon landings

approaches, those whose

job it is to explain history

are braced.

For National Aero-

nautics and Space

Administration (Nasa) chief historian Bill

Barry, the feature film First Man, released

worldwide this month, will provide a new

myth, but he is used to those, including

the one that astronaut Neil Armstrong

never walked on the moon at all.

“I try not to worry too much about

conspiracy theories, although it is, frankly,

a consideration as we plan for Apollo’s

50th anniversary next summer,” Barry says

during interviews at Nasa’s Kennedy Space

Centre ahead of First Man’s release.

“Nasa has a lot of social media accounts.

One is the @nasahistory account on Twit-

ter and I can tell you that every single time

we post a picture of someone walk-

ing on the surface of the moon,

someone will come back and

say it was fake. But if you argue

with conspiracy theorists [they

think] your argument is part

of a cover-up, so it’s an

infinite loop and you

can’t get at that.”

Barry is familiar

with the explana-

tion that film

director Stanley

Kubrick created

the fake land-

ings. He points

Myths and legends

of the moon landing

The brilliant new feature film First Man is a reminder that fact

and fiction have always been fellow travellers in space. by JOANNE BLACK

GETTY IMAGES

FIRST MAN ON THE MOON

out that the moon looks completely differ-

ent in the live broadcasts from 1969 than

in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One aspect of Armstrong that does seem

agreed by all is that he was a man of few

words. So few, in fact, that he famously

missed out a crucial “a” in the most

memorable sentence he ever spoke, as he

took the last step from Apollo 11’s lunar

landing module, Eagle, on to the surface of

the moon. “That’s one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind,” he uttered

as millions of people around the world

watched transfixed by what was, at the

time, the world’s longest live television

broadcast.

“I’m not particularly articulate,” Arm-

strong later told his biographer, Auburn

University, Alabama, emeritus professor of

history James Hansen.

“’For people who have listened to me

for hours on the radio communication

tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables

out,” Armstrong told Hansen, who reports

the conversation in his book First Man:

The Life of Neil A Armstrong. “I think that

reasonable people will realise that I didn’t

intentionally make an inane statement,

and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended

because that’s the only way the statement

makes any sense. So I would hope that his-

tory would grant me leeway for dropping

the syllable.”

H

istory should indeed grant the

leeway. As he spoke on July 20,

1969, Armstrong was in the act of

becoming the first human to set foot on

a celestial body. His place in history was

assured even if the unthinkable happened

and he and lunar module pilot Edwin

“Buzz” Aldrin were unable to get back

to the command module that Michael

Collins was orbiting around the moon,

waiting for them.

All astronauts in the Apollo programme

knew the risks. For this particular occasion

a message, presumably not shared with

Aldrin and Armstrong beforehand, had

been prepared in case the unthinkable

happened.

“Fate has ordained that the men who

went to the moon to explore in peace will

stay on the moon to rest in peace,” the

sombre message began.

“Once I started digging,

I grew astounded by

the sheer madness and

danger of the enterprise.”

Personal toll: Ryan

Gosling as Neil Armstrong

and Claire Foy as Janet

Armstrong in First Man.