Nothing underlines this more than the fact that 50 years ago, the first man landed on the moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969 — Monday, July 21 in India. Not only do we have no lunar colony by now (except in novels like Andy Weir’s 2017 hyper-real lunar industrial espionage romp, Artemis), but the last time humans landed on the moon was in December 1972.
Sure, India’s second (unmanned) moon mission, Chandrayaan 2 — that hopes to soft-land a lander and a rover, making it the fourth country after the US, Soviet Union/Russia and China to do so — is scheduled for launch on Monday. That would be a great show of rising global power. But hardly the stuff of romance.
When US President John F Kennedy asked Wernher von Braun, chief architect of the Apollo Moon Missions’ Saturn V rocket, what it would take to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely, he had replied, ‘The will to do it.’ Much of the will that would result in Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins landing on the moon, of course, was the result of the Cold War. By sending the first satellite (Sputnik in October, 1957), the first living being (the dog Laika in November) and first human (Yuri Gagarin in April 1961) in space, the Soviet Union was already way ahead of the US in the space race. By January 1966, the Soviets had already succeeded in landing the first spacecraft on the Moon.
But humans landing on lunar shores, so visible from Earth and yet so far away, was much more than izzat ka mamla between two superpowers. It was about a beautiful romance of science and exploration. And there was a long pedigree of imagination feeding it.
More than outer space with its neither-here-nor-there quality, or planets like Mars that were too fantastical, too unbelievable, the moon presented itself as a destination that would start a new era in human civilisation — not terra incognita, and yet at the ‘world’s end’.
French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne’s 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, and its sequel, Around the Moon (1870) set the part-maritime, part-scientific tone of ‘lunar imagination’. Despite the ‘fact’ that the novel’s voyagers are shot out of a giant ‘space gun’ on a giant bullet-shaped projectile, Verne is keen to be realistic — something that HG Wells wasn’t in his 1901 novel, The First Men in the Moon, where the protagonists fuel their craft using cavorite, an anti-gravity material.
But especially for things yet to be, seeing is believing. It was French cinema pioneer — and the father of all FX — Georges Méliès, who provided an ‘alternate reality’ in his 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon. Yes, with its travellers crashlanding their rocket in the eye of the ‘Man in the Moon’, and hostile Selenites (insectoid inhabitants of the Moon), it was fantastical and a fantastic feast to the eyes. But it underlined the new New World of choice for humans.
But it was in the post-World War era, with advances in (missile) rocketry and Cold War coquettery, that the science and fiction of lunar explorations started feeding off each other. Many of us delight in the art and story of Hergé’s two-part Tintin lunar adventure, Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers of the Moon (1954). But Hergé was most serious about ‘getting it scientifically correct’. He pored over old V2 rocket photos (on which the Tintin lunar rocket was based), and was influenced by the 1950 American film, Destination Moon.
For its time, this Irving Pichel-directed film was spectacular and remarkably keen on details. What is especially interesting for us in this age of Elon Musk’s SpaceX is that Destination Moon prophesies private enterprise taking over space travel — after successive failures of the US government to send men to the moon.
A year before Neil Armstrong set the first human foot on any firm natural ground outside our planet, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was not just visually stunning, setting what the future ‘would look like’, but also brought an emotive, spiritual element in the whole business of travelling to ‘other worlds’.
We all have Neil Armstrong’s line, ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’ hardwired to our collective memory. But it was the second man to set foot on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, who encapsulated the awe, the quiet wonder, of landing in a New World, “Magnificent desolation.”
One would have thought that 50 years later, the future would have been far more exciting than having a space programme that just sends up and services satellites in earth’s orbit.