An American Geek in Paris — Chapter 7 — July 20th 1969
July 20th, 1969 was a pretty significant day in my life. Firstly it was my parents’ 12th wedding anniversary. Secondly we were going to get to stay up way late and hopefully get to see man walk on the moon for the first time. Today is the 50th anniversary of that even, arguably man’s greatest technical achievement.
As I live in Paris now, I have to find a way to celebrate from here. It’s late July and the city has more or less been ceded by its inhabitants to the tourists crazy enough to brave the summer heat. While there’s always the occasional one sporting a NASA t-shirt I’m pretty sure I’m missing the celebrations taking place in all the places in the US that participated in the Apollo program.
So for lack of a party I’ll write a few words.
If you were alive in 1969 you probably remember exactly where you when Neil Armstrong stepped down from the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) onto the surface of the moon. I won’t say I remember it like it was yesterday, more like the day before yesterday, but I was in Casablanca, Morocco. While those of you in the US got to watch the moonwalk in the late evening I got to watch it around 4am. We didn’t have a TV at home so my parents found a friend who had a black and white set with rabbit ears and we watched Armstrong take his big step.
Darn, I realize I may have to explain such antique concepts as “black and white TV” and “rabbit ears” to some of you. Never mind, you have google. It looked something like:
In the US the Apollo program was a symbol of American ingenuity, power, and a cause for unabashed national pride. It served as the era’s counterweight to Vietnam. On the news there were body bags and horrible images coming back from the far east, demonstrations and riots in the streets, and then there was an amazing white rocket blasting into the blue Florida sky; science fiction coming to life before our eyes.
On the faraway shores of North Africa there was slightly less American pride but there was nevertheless human pride. Sure the US was doing this to prove they could and to beat the Russians but there was no doubt that this was a gigantic moment in world history. The human race had “slipped the surly bonds of earth” and stepped on another celestial body.
Fifty years have gone by and it’s hard to think of a bigger step taken by all mankind. Yes, we’ve done some great things: we’ve encoded the human genome, we’ve built the Internet and made every piece of information ever created, both real and fake, available from the palm of your hand anywhere on the planet at any time (offer not valid in China and certain other jurisdictions). We even invented Pokemon Go, something that even Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov couldn’t have ever conceive.
Encoding the human genome doesn’t make for great TV though, especially a snowy 15" CRT. The space program has always had better visuals even though some of them have been tragic. The Hubble telescope has shown us the immensity, mystery, and beauty of our universe.
My interest in all things space had started a few years before Apollo 11. In 1965 two Gemini astronauts made a goodwill visit to Madagascar where NASA had a tracking station. My father was stationed in Madagascar at the time where he was working for USAID (the Agency for International Development). We lived right next door to the US embassy and when my dad heard about the visit from one of the people at the embassy who worked at the tracking station he decided to take me to the airport to meet the astronauts.
My parents dressed me up in a little red blazer and a tie (I was 7) and my dad got a couple of Malagasy drums for me to give the Astronauts. Those two astronauts were Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad, fresh back from their Gemini 5 mission. They landed in one of the official blue and white US Boeing 707s with the national seal — the same kind of plane used by the president at the time.
I got a thank-you letter back a few months later from one of Pete Conrads kids who had taken the drums to school for show and tell. I guess we were about the same age. What neither of us knew then was that Pete Conrad was to be the 3rd person to set foot on the moon as commander of Apollo 12.
Two years after Apollo 11 my parents took my brother and I to Florida to see the Apollo 15 launch first hand. We spent the night in our rental car on one of the causeways near Cape Kennedy getting bitten by mosquitoes but the morning launch was spectacular. I can remember the air shaking with the roar of the Saturn V’s 5 F1 engines at liftoff. Few realized that at instant the rocket was generating more watts than the entire electrical capacity of the United Sates!
A few years later I enrolled at MIT to study astronautics. One of my professors, Richard Battin, is listed in the readme for the Apollo 11 guidance system code. He would tell us crazy things in class about that program. That the midcourse code that took the astronauts between earth and the moon (solving the 3 body problem) only took 8k of memory. Heck, an emoji is bigger than that! He also told us that for lack of memory they would find code patterns that approximated key constants such as the mass of the earth, sun, and the moon, and then refer directly to those (code as constants!). Any change in code forced them to have to find new addresses for those constants.
Prof. Battin was my favorite professor at MIT. Here’s a video of him recounting “A funny thing happened on the way to the moon” — a lecture he did at MIT 10 years ago, shortly before the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.
July 20th 1969 remains for me the most significant event that has occurred in my lifetime. Yes of course there are other days that are more important personally but I mean for the entire world and the human race. We did something truly remarkable that captured the imagination of an entire generation.
My hope today is that my daughters will live through such an important day in their lifetimes. Humanity has some really big problems to solve. Global warming, the slow-motion collapse of western democracy, plastic waste filling our oceans, drug-resistant bacteria, cancer. Maybe we’ll land on Mars or finally make contact with an alien intelligence. I don’t know. But I hope it’s just as great for them.
