Fifty years on

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Fifty years on

Saturday, 20 July 2019 | Pioneer

Fifty years on

It can be argued that sending men to the moon was humanity’s greatest achievement

When the giant Saturn 5 rocket lifted off Cape Canaveral on a balmy July evening on America’s east coast, it carried three men in a small capsule, at least when compared to another celestial object, our moon. There is a reason that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are among the most famous men, not just of their generation but among mankind. In a recent BBC podcast series, 13 Minutes to the Moon, Collins, the third crew member, who orbited the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on it, says that when they travelled the world after that momentous occasion, it was not about “You Americans have done it”, it was “We did it.” Even today, one marvels at the fact that this audacious mission went off, largely without a hitch, and when one of the seven missions almost failed, groups of young men and women managed to bring the three astronauts back to earth.

And, do not for a second think this was all about young men. It was a woman, Margaret Hamilton, who led the software team that programmed the Apollo Guidance Computer, a truly remarkable piece of hardware and software with some of the instructions being hand-woven bundles of wires. The truly remarkable leaps of engineering achieved by the United States in the 1960s, after the then President John F. Kennedy exhorted his nation to go to the moon in 1962, possibly laid the groundwork for the tremendous technological achievements of the modern US and today’s information technology revolution. The missions to the moon cost unimaginable sums of money, governments today would balk at spending such amounts, but they have had a lasting impact on the way we live today as well as proving that we can achieve the impossible. The world is potentially looking at another space race. While the Americans remain one of the protagonists, this time they are competing with China which wants to send a man to the moon within the next five years. This while the US aims for Mars and private industry, led by visionaries like Elon Musk, are helping achieve this goal. The missions to the moon might have cost billions but it established the US as the world’s predominant power, a position that despite recent incidents it maintains. And as India prepares to send its next satellite to the moon on Sunday night, we should hope that our space programme not only pays homage to the Apollo mission but also announces that we are ready to be counted.

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