Skip to main content

MoonFire

By



I dusted off my copy Of a Fire on the Moon to read this month, as the great mission of Apollo 11 turns 50.  I bought the Taschen version of the book a few years back.  It is loaded with pictures, while still being a convenient size.  I see they have enlarged the format for the golden anniversary, beefing up the price in the process.

Mailler is best when reporting news stories.  His novels tend to be dense, unwieldy things, driven by a false bravado.  The purple prose comes out in his non-fiction books as well, but I like the way he captures the excitement around an event, like he did in The Fight, probably my favorite book of his.

He starts this book with the pre-flight interview by the astronauts.  They were kept in a glass box so as not to pick up any viruses in the movie theater packed with reporters and photographers.  He seems to be attracted to Buzz Aldrin more so than Neil Armstrong, who comes across as wooden.  Michael Collins is pretty much odd man out.

I grew up on the Apollo missions.  It was Tang and space food sticks for me at breakfast.  I was steeped in the lore of the Apollo missions throughout the 70s.  It was thrilling to see the Americans and Soviets join together on the Apollo-Soyuz missions, reducing the tensions of the Cold War that began with Sputnik 18 years before.    My dream of becoming an astronaut faded with time, but the memories remain.  It is great to see NASA once again returning to the fore.

Aldrin has become the face of the American space agency in recent years.  Neil Armstrong died in 2012.  Michael Collins is still alive but lives largely in the shadow of the famous moon mission, despite having written what is regarded as one of the best books on the mission, Carrying the Fire.  It didn't help that Mailler had beat him to the punch with his serialized telling of the mission, which first appeared in Life magazine between 1969 and 1970.  I suppose in many ways Collins set the record straight, if anyone cared to read.

The mission has a particular resonance this year, as NASA announced it would go back to the moon.  It is the first part of a two stage mission to Mars.  NASA hopes to turn the moon into a base of operations for further exploration of the solar system.  It is an ambitious mission that will carry us well into the future, assuming the government is willing to underwrite it.  One of the big problems over the years has been lack of funding, with NASA resorting to unmanned missions to the planets within our solar system, transmitting back valuable new information.

NASA will be competing against the interests of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have both launched rocket companies.  Musk has set his sights on Mars within the next decade. China also has big ambitions after successfully landing a spaceship on the dark side of the moon earlier this year.  At some point it would be nice if all these competing interests would come together in an International Starfleet.

It is great seeing all this interest in space travel again.  After the end of the space shuttle program, the US has had to resort to sending its astronauts to the International Space Station in Russian rockets.  This took a lot of the luster out of the space program.  A trip to the moon would go a long toward restoring public confidence in NASA.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more