This year is the 18th such entry, the 12th for the 'Moon Clock'. The 'clock' symbol is based conceptually on the 'Doomsday Clock' of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In theory their clock striking midnight would mean charred copies of that publication would be drifting across ruined cities.

This 'clock' represents the likelihood of a human being standing on the Moon once again. If and when a person stands on Lunar soil again, the time will read midnight if I am around to update it.

I have moved the time ahead a little from last year reflecting some stirring of official interest in returning to the Moon, at least in a Lunar orbiting space station. I consider the prospects for future human landings on the Moon flights little changed from last year, as no crewed lander designs are yet being funded.

The image at top right is a composite of frames from the Apollo 11 video showing the LM and Buzz Aldrin, using overlapping frames to cancel out video noise and overexposure.

Below: Apollo's footprints will last longer than any on Earth exposed to the elements, but over time even on the Moon time changes things. Micro meteorites and subtle soil movements will gradually erase our first footprints on the Moon over perhaps a million years. This unique moment in our history, indeed the coming and going of Man, is but a moment in Moon Time.

  The Twentieth Century will be remembered as among other things a time of unprecedented ingenuity and brutality. Once in a great while Great Projects come about where our skills are applied towards things that benefit and inspire the world. Apollo was such a marshaling of the best of our minds and our industry. It was something most of those who worked on believed in deeply. Apollo was not just another tallest building, longest canal or intimidating weapons system. Indeed it was a nationalistic demonstration of the prowess of the United States over the USSR, but it was also a glorious crusade to bring the heavens within our grasp. Apollo 11 gave a magical edge to that eventful summer of 1969, as titanic cultural forces clashed and flowed past each other in America and across the World. The Vietnam war was at it's height, demonstrations against it were becoming 'mainstream' and chemical visions colorfully enveloped many young minds. NASA was winning the technological battle but losing the mass appeal it needed to sustain human space exploration. In retrospect one mistake NASA made in the Public Relations aspects of Apollo was to never make an effort to let the world see the faces of people on the Moon out of fear of the brief Solar ultraviolet exposure. TV from the Moon was thus largely views of faceless armored forms. The last Lunar expedition gave the world one of the few brief looks at a person without the reflective gold visor, as Harrison Schmitt spoke to us for a delightful minute on live color TV from the Moon.

Now people being on the Moon is little more than an inner vision, and increasing numbers even view it as a fantasy. Apollo 11 was 49 years ago this summer, and forevermore it will stand as a sign of the golden age when such things were possible. Apollo will always be a beacon across the gulf of time, a benchmark, a peak, and a point of transformation in what was possible. So long as history is taught the time which brought about our first steps on another world will attract attention. If the bulk of our future advanced civilization ever lives outside the Earth Apollo will stand as the First Step step to those circumstances. If Humanity never makes it to the Moon again then the fact we could once do it will mark our era as a time when the accomplishments of civilization briefly out paced its pitfalls.
  However, now the Moon is 'old history'. The mighty Saturn V rockets lay on their sides displayed like the funeral barges of vanished Pharaohs. The Moon rocks are shown in museums alongside other artifacts of vanished times. The Moon is receding from us and becoming another Pompeii whose artifacts we marvel at under glass cases.
Future photographs taken of the Apollo footsteps made by people or their evolutionary/technological descendants may well show noticeable meteorite pitting across the once fresh footprints accumulated over the ages. How different the Earth's civilizations, language, and operating philosophies or even life may be by then! If not, these prints will ever so slowly be sandblasted away unseen, with new craterlets forming atop them until a million years hence when the prints are lost in the new variations of the eternal pitting of the Lunar landscape.

July 2018:

Many remember the Moon landings. About 90 percent of those who were born in 1960 are now alive, with those born before that having better chance of recollection. We who remember the Moon landings currently make up perhaps 35 percent of the present population, extrapolating from a study applied to those who remembered the Kennedy Assassination on November 22, 1963.

Since last years entry another of those who remembered being on the Moon has left us, Alan Bean of Apollo 12. I had the pleasure of meeting him at Spacefest, both of us displaying art. His paintings inspired by Apollo are an enduring legacy of a man who carried his decades old accomplishments forward in his subsequent career. Other people associated with Project Apollo are also, sadly, dying off. Those who made it happen, largely born in the1920s-30s and coming of age from the tail end of World War II to the Korean War, are down to about 30 percent of their former numbers.

When will half of all who remember Apollo, themselves a declining minority of the population, be gone? The 'half life' mortality landmark should happen about 2046, assuming the minimum age for remembering a news event arbitrarily placed at the age of five, the age I remember being told about Sputnik in Kindergarten. The mortality of that age group will steeply decline around 2046 until about 2065ish when Apollo is as lost to memory as by then will be the World Wars. The linear time remaining for living memory of Apollo is at about the length of time in the future that Apollo 11 is now in our past. We are about half way in time between the first Moon landing and when it will have passed from living memory, which is granted just short of a century. But the glorious echoes of fondly remembered things take on a life of their own, they silently thread through our collective lives and emerge as we occasionally yearn for other times, other lives. And the Moon waxes and wanes across the skies as events on Earth whiz by under the face of the ancient Moon, whose surface tells us much and reveals possible resources for future Lunar settlers. But that may be in the future. This month the eternal Moon will have grown just past half in the evening sky by the 20th, A Moon with a brightening future including an Eclipse July 27 people in Asia and Europe will see.

Reaching the Moon is the 'center post' in the bridge crossing the gulf of time between today, 49 years ago in the year of Apollo 11 and 49 years before. This year places the distant time landmark in 1920, now just beyond living memory. But those times have their echoes still with us, the passions and aspirations, hatreds and follies people acted upon then wearing different labels and uniforms in later times.

Two men we would hear much of later were advancing their careers, both briefly hired by their governments to spy on organizations whose causes they would come to embrace. Adolf Hitler was discharged from the Army that year, and he gave a pivotal speech in Munich outlining the grim agenda of his adopted 'Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei' party, to be henceforth known as the Nazis. He exploited widespread resentment at the punitive Treaty of Versailles, which was ratified that year. In the wake of the civil war between Russian factions following the October 1917 revolution, Poland and the USSR fought a war over the fate of the Ukraine in 1920. A rising red star, Joseph Stalin, was sent to help oversee military operations. The peace treaty ending the war, which the Red Army got the worst of, infuriated Stalin and began his bitter dispute with Red Army founder and initial commander Leon Trotsky.
Other places affected by the aftermath of the World War included Turkey, that year involved in fighting with occupying Western armies even as the last Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire was signing a Treaty of Partition. Before the fighting was over Constantinople would be occupied by the British. In the first major battle of the Turkish War Of Independence the French and Armenian armies were driven from Marash, to the misfortune of the remaining Armenians repatriated there. Mustafa Kemal, known as 'Attaturk', would become the first President of Turkey later that year and the secular government would formally dissolve the Ottoman Empire, comparable to the fall of Rome in historic significance.

In the middle East, the French were fighting their way through Syria. Arab wrath over the 1917 Balfour Declaration was brought out in fiery speeches including one by the later infamous Amin Al-Husayni. He would later become the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Terrible riots took place in that city with precedents established that sadly continue in their influence to this day. Ireland was partitioned and forcibly brought under British military supervision, reaction against which were to escalate into tragic blows and counter blows that year and long after.
A hoped for means to better the human Condition world wide was the formation of the League Of Nations that year, although it lacked the membership of the US and did little in its quarter century of life.

In the Unites States the transition from war to peacetime life was punctuated by events of lasting significance.
The 18th Amendment was put into law early that year, the Prohibition of manufacture and sale of Alcoholic beverages. This failed imposition on personal freedom served to spawn enculturated defiance of such laws with underground 'speak easys' where hopefully authentic drinks could be had. The 1920s marked a rise in the urban 'counter culture' and in the spreading of popular entertainment. Records and films were mass media of growing influence. The first commercial radio stations, WWJ in Detroit and KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting. Three years later there would be 500 radio stations in the US. The election of Warren Harding was the first to be broadcast on Radio that year.

A then unknown but significent landmark in human health matters came about 1920 with the first cross overs occuring of the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus to become the Human adapted version, HIV. This happened in Kinshasha in the present Democratic Republic of Congo.

In the wake of the World War and the deadly 'Spanish Flu' epidemic which killed a comparable number of people as the War, Youth culture took off as if there was no tomorrow. The very decade was to become known as the 'Roaring Twenties'. Mass aparticipation in popular culture was becoming a factor in the lives of those coming of age then. An 'underground' culture as would emerge again 40 years later became part of young life. Women assumed clothing and grooming styles less covering than before, with hair and hemlines getting shorter. The origin of the word 'Flapper', as a slang term for young women who liked to go out and drink and dance and publicly smoke, seems lost to history. Some have it as a coarse term for women who are dancers or of 'loose' moral character and prostitutes. One story has it springing from a British fad of girls playfully walking with unfastened galoshes. A casually unbuttoned overcoat fluttering in a moving car has also been mentioned as a romantic image of urban fun loving young women. Cars were becoming more available, and the American urban population that year first began to outnumber that of the rural farming communities.

American women assumed unprecedented political power in 1920 as the 19th Amendment finally gave them the right to vote. In September that year terrorism would first strike New York, in the form of a 'wagon bomb' in Times Square, killing 38 and wounding 400. In the aftermath of this act, later attributed to Italian anarchists, an ambitious lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of organizing numerous raids of suspects. Many Communists, Anarchists and such were arrested during America's first 'Red Scare'. The New York State Assembly refused to seat 5 elected Socialist Assemblymen. The American Civil liberties Union was founded that eventful year. A creative moneymaker named Charles Ponzi funded aspects of his growing business with new investments, a practice unstable in due course. His name now labels such a scheme, which once a generation seems to resurface.

Science had its appreciation and ridicule in print that year. Arthur Eddington published the report on the detection of light being bent by the Sun during the previous year's Total Eclipse, confirming a prediction in Einstein's General Relativity theory.
The star Betelgeuse became the first to have its diameter measured using clever analysis of it's light at Mount Wilson Observatory.

The New York Times published that year a scathing ridicule of the work of American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, ignorantly claiming a rocket needed a medium to act against. In 1969 a correction was run in the paper as Goddard's dream of a flight to the Moon was coming true.

A musical milestone of that year was the first performance of the finished 'Planets' by Gustav Holst, in London. Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his haunting 'The lark Ascending' that year. Popular music ranged from 'Swanee' by Al Jolson, to the emergence of the 'Harlem Renaissance'. The first 'blues' record by Mamie Smith, 'Crazy Blues' was a landmark recording.

Deaths that year included Robert Peary (born 1856) who is credited, with dispute, with first reaching the area of the North Pole on April 6, 1909. Among those who would be known to many who were born that year were actors Ricardo Montalban, James Doohan and Deforest Kelley. Science fiction authors Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert were born in 1920, as was Psychedelics popularizer Timothy Leary. Another who would make a mark on the 60's, musician Ravi Shankar, also arrived that year.

As these babes in arms live the lives that take them to their destinies, let us put on a whimsically happy record of the time...perhaps 'Whispering' by Paul Whiteman, or 'Cuban Moon' by Carl Fenton's Orchestra. Let it whirl under the needle as fresh young music as we sweep again across the years, the decades, the lives and the deaths, onwards to see people and nations come and go under us. The record before us is changing into something old, the music scratchier and the tone feebler. Looking up, we almost miss the beacon of the half way point, the blazingly bright needle of a Saturn V bathed in many spotlights. Their light spills past the giant rocket, spreading into a vast fanning radiance visible in the night for many miles. It is a beacon of a landmark in human history. Then it shrinks and fades, the cycles spin the view into confusion. Less trees grow, ancient hills are less green and more building covered. We suddenly, as if from almost dozing off, are sitting before the dusty and battered wind up record player, with a worn scratched wax record just reaching the end of the barely audible ancient song. The room and the view out the window is familiar, but an appreciation of how things have changed over the years adds to the sight. Here and there are scraps of vanished times, all in the context of the world that has come. How much will things have changed before again we see a rocket that will take people to the Moon beaming its glory across the night?

Don Davis

July 2018

July 2017:

The Moon again calls attention to itself this year, not only for an anniversary of what was but for its role in the coming Total Eclipse. A rare alignment with Earth and the Sun will lead to the Moons shadow crossing the United States in August this year. Millions will gaze at the Moon as a dark circle blotting out the Sun for about two momentous minutes. They will marvel at the silvery luminance surrounding the Sun denied us except when the sky brightness is thus removed. But as the anniversary comes, the Moon is a thinning crescent seen by few in the early morning hours. The light of living memory of those who remember Apollo still shines brightly, but the number of lights steadily decreases. Since last year we lost Eugene Cernan, the Last Man on the Moon. Dear friends who treasured seeing such things on TV are dying, each another of the cloud of dispersed candle balloons winking out as they climb into the depths of the night.
The path of Living memory still stretches both directions in time 48 years from Apollo 11, but just barely. Contemplating what an interval of time can mean brings thoughts of the state of things in the times mentioned. Although many of my readers cannot remember the 60s, enough do so the curious can learn from many first hand accounts, so I will still treat some working knowledge of the times of Apollo as a given. I close my eyes and first hand memories of the music, things personal and places I lived then come to mind. But 48 years before 1969 it was 1921, a time the curtain of life is closing on except for the artifacts, film, paper and a modest number of those who recognise their significance. None of my readers will probably remember those times. A few scattered people may still in their dying memories recall a song from then.
1921 was a time of resurgence from the First World War, but also a time of honoring the dead as France and the United States interred their Unknown Soldiers. Germany was having crushing war debts applied to them, fostering resentment. Runaway inflation was wiping out savings there, rapidly leading to masses of high value notes being frantically rushed about as they dropped in value. One opportunist taking advantage of that unstable climate was the scurrilous fanatic Adolf Hitler. The 'Storm Troopers', or 'SA', of his young National Socialist party were already making a bloody reputation for themselves. In Italy Benito Mussolini strutted himself to the position of 'Duce' or leader, of the Fascist party. In Japan the young Hirohito inherited from his retiring father the position of Prince Regent.

It was a time of rebuilding of cultures with the influence of rising technology and mass media. Young people in the West, particularly the US, adopted styles and dances that alarmed their elders, even to the point of here and there legislating permissible skirt lengths, such as no less than four inches below the knee. Medicinal alcohol was cracked down on. Radio was emerging as a mass medium, that year the first regular programming was broadcast from KDKA Pittsburgh. The British Broadcasting Corporation was also established. Movies included 'The Sheik' with Rudolph Valentino and 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'. A pioneer of recorded sound, Enrico Caruso, died in 1921 after leaving a legacy of over 160 recordings. In medicine perhaps the biggest story was the isolation of Insulin, soon to help many diabetic people. The chromosome theory of heredity was postulated by Thomas Hunt Morgan. A German rocket theorist named Hermann Oberth wrote his dissertation 'The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space'. In another harbinger of the future, Billy Mitchell demonstrated the ability of aircraft to sink a battleship.
A novelty of that year was the first demonstration of a radio controlled driverless automobile. Regular air mail between New York and San Francisco was established.

As we in our imaginations follow such a mail plane crossing the country we shall also cross the gulf of time from then to now. Below us vast stretches of empty country become crisscrossed by roads along which towns sprout. At night they look like gleaming drops of dew on spider web strands.Here and there these grow and merge, glowing far into their surroundings by night. Above all this, the Moon is examined by telescopes, made a destination for probes then people, and midway in our journey set foot on for the first time. Then this and the other landings quickly happen, the high water mark of human exploration comes and goes in a flash. Thereafter the Moon is left alone, later to be revisited by more advanced probes. While looking up we have reappeared in the world of today. The Moon is an early morning waning crescent with the soft glow of Earthlight outlining its shaded bulk against the darker sky. Once again we look at it and treasure the memory of the time people were there.

Don Davis

July 2017

July 2016:

The Moon is glowering down on us just past full phase this year at the actual anniversary of the landing, its cold light making the scenery an abstraction of moonlit shapes and black shadows. Bats whirl about silhouetted in the brighter sky near the Moon. Timeless sounds of insects and other life persist among those of expanding civilization. The Moon will always be there as the scene below it changes, as will the memory of when Humanity reached the Moon The bridge of time between Here and Now and There and Then over time grows wider and thinner and more brittle. But many still travel that bridge of Living Memory. Now many will think of Apollo, see the bright Moon filling the night and ponder those magical times. What happened to light and then extinguish such a wondrous flame?

Apollo 11 is a Beacon in time, a lighthouse of a realm of what was and is possible. But the beam sweeps both ways, and I find it intriguing to look back at the world of the same period of time before Apollo 11 as we are after. The pace of the inventive and ground breaking processes operating in the two equal intervals bears pondering.
When the first Lunar Expedition was launched the Moon was a thin sliver, becoming a wider crescent by the time of the landing. The shadow angle at the landing site was chosen carefully to allow maximum visibility of the surface relief, and the landing site was thus near the inner edge of the crescent Moon that fateful afternoon. 47 years later that Moon is just past its fullness, but still bright with potential. The Moon of July 20,1969 was young and full of promise.

At that date in 1922 the Moon was a waning crescent. The world of 1922 was one of the waning of the pre World War One order and the sowing of the seeds of new forces that would shape the century.The British Empire was fraying at the edges, Their Middle East mandates being forcibly protested in Egypt and Palestine. In India they were particularly irritated by a troublemaker named Mahatma Gandhi, whose civil disobedience campaign led to his being imprisoned for sedition that year. Killings and reprisals in Ireland made trouble closer to home. The French presence in Morocco took a violent turn as a revolt there cost some 700 French lives. The disastrous Greek war against Turkey was in defeat climaxed with the retaking by the Turks of the ancient coastal city of Smyrna. In the process the city suffered one of the worse fires in history with tens of thousands killed. Mustafha Kemal proclaimed Turkey a Republic that year.

In Italy Bonito Mussolini bullied his way into power and formed his Fascist government. In Germany 50,000 people turned up to attend a speech by Adolf Hitler, then making the transition from rabble rouser to politician. Albert Einstein fled Germany that year out of fear for his safety. In Russia Vladimir Lenin appointed Josef Stalin to General Secretary of the Communist Party, a title he would hold for the rest of his life. Soon afterward Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes which would become a path to absolute power Stalin was not slow to exploit. That year the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally named. China was concluding its civil war with competing generals defeating each other until two were left, Wu Pei-fu in the North and Sun Yat-sen in the South. The Chinese Communist Party was organized, among those attending the first Party Conference was a young library assistant and schoolteacher named Mao Tse-Tung.

Across the oceans, in the United States, the stock market boom was in full swing and times were good. Signs of official reaction to an emerging counterculture were warnings about the use of 'hip flasks' that people hid illegal liquor in and the establishment of the federal Narcotics Control Board by President Harding. Harding also banned liquor from all ships entering US harbors. Coal strikes made big news much of 1922. The post office mandated that mailboxes were necessary for mail delivery to houses. The Dirigible Roma crashed into power lines and exploded in the outskirts of Norfolk, Virginia, killing 34 men. Annie Oakley, veteran of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, broke a record by hitting 98 out of 100 clay tosses at a range of 16 yards.Readers Digest magazine was founded and gave compressed versions of many works to American homes. In literature, among the memorable books of the time were 'Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse, 'Tales Of The Jazz Age' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and 'Ulysses' by James Joyce. The latter book had shipments from Paris intercepted by the US Post Office with 500 copies burned at once. Movies of note included 'Nosferatu' and 'Nanook Of The North'. Among those creating great music were Irving Berlin with 'April Showers', and an up and coming Louis Armstrong.

The tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen was discovered, unique in not being robbed of its treasures. Roy Chapman Andrews began the first of his series of expeditions into Mongolia which would yield revelations about prehistoric life. The Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin announced the 'Primeval Soup' model for the conditions where life could have arisen on Earth billions of years ago. The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Niels Bohr of Denmark. The white blood cell was discovered, and Insulin was first made available to diabetic patients. Irregular Galaxies were first defined by Edwin Hubble during his massive Galaxy observing campaign. The British first demonstrated a vertical takeoff helicopter. In the US the first flight across the continent by a woman was accomplished by Lillian Gatlin, taking 27 hours 11 minutes. The furthest climb yet up the slopes of Mt. Everest reached 26,800 feet, some 3200 feet below the summit. In this year when maps were still being filled in on Earth, a major volcano was discovered in Alaska, later named Aniakchak.
Among those who died in 1922 were Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell who in 1876 spoke the first words on such a device to another. Among those born were Actress and singer Judy Garland, columnist Jack Anderson and Israeli statesman Yitzhah Rabin.

Since then so many births and deaths have happened, the range of Living Memory shifting steadily forward. Back then there was still ample Living Memory of the early 1800s. After briefly glancing at the misty echo of that time the elderly of 1922 held within themselves, we turn around and start back along the barely intact bridge of living memory between then and Apollo 11. Clothes, cars, songs, household items appear, mutate and disappear in a dizzying cacophony. The Moon is during that time studied with increasing pace in the last decade once we decide to reach it. Then we slow down and pause in wonder at the reference marker of our journey, the spot lit Saturn V rocket ready to take men to the Moon. The many lights around it spread up and out in dozens of beams fanning out past the brilliant tall spaceship, going far into the humid Florida night. Armies of people nearby tend to its vital signs, sitting at rows of consoles. Now we begin the leap back to our time, through the closing acts of the cultural reformatting of the 60s, past Punk Rock and Disco, past the emergence of digital formats for music and video, and we settle to a standstill back where we started in 2016. More than half of those who have been to the Moon are thankfully still with us. But when it comes to the overall 'living memory' aspect of this it is sobering to note that we are half way between the time of Apollo 11 and when no one will be alive who remembers it. As things are going it is hard to not be concerned about the possibility that by then no one will remember being able to go to the Moon. But we shall see.

Don Davis

July 2016

July 2015:

The Moon is a waxing crescent this year, more or less as it was that magical July as we crossed the threshold into being a multi world species. While Apollo shines as a landmark in history, It is also like a lighthouse steadily dimming in the distance as we sail away. It is 46 years since people of this world first visited another, decades of trends, events and reinventing of popular culture. The Moon as a destination is receding behind the veil of generational disconnect, as has the Second World War to young people. The 'Greatest Generation' who went through WW II and then marshaled the technological might of an affluent Post War America displayed not only what 'we' could do but what Humanity could accomplish. That generation is now sliding down the plunging mortality curve at peaking rates.

We are also collectively sailing within sight of a sober milestone. We are approaching the half way point from the time of Apollo 11 to when there will be practically nobody left who remembers it. Half way to when our being able to travel to the Moon is lost to living memory, as today is the Wright Brothers first flight and the First World War. As of this writing there are still a couple people alive who have lived in three centuries, being born before 1900. These last fragile links with a lost era steadily give way to those of later times, with almost everyone else passing on decades before. The far horizon of living memory carries us all to it like the galaxies following the expansion of space to greater depths apart from each other. The time dimension of the Human Drama involving living memory serves each generation in turn and can have something of it's Great Stories and lessons passed on. Everyone has 'big moments' they will always remember. lesson of my times is that if enough people pool their skills they can make such moments beneficently happen. Hopeful signs of reappraisal of likely paths for human access to space are taking place.

Thus our continuing potential to do such great things comes to times that invite re introduction of the idea that the Moon can be within our grasp with several years of robust commitment. The details of how it could be done now cross contentious lines in the space community but in time some trends could well sort themselves out. For a long time the likelihood of people returning to the Moon has been uncertain at best, and yet one has never felt more confident in our ability to continue to perform engineering miracles to accomplish such a goal. The nearness of the Moon continues to work in its favor as instrument packages are being designed to be sent there.
There continue to be reasonable odds things could turn around in a few years. Like a stock market or climate graph trends can be sought in the short term wiggles, yet where one finds themselves at after a while can be surprising.

To continue my little tradition of looking back to the corresponding point in time as far into Apollo 11's past as Apollo 11 is to us, let us hop beyond that historic beacon to that year opposite it in the same time interval, to a time nearing the frontiers of the horizon of living memory. It is 1923 again.

The world of 1923 was lacking only a few coastlines on its maps, mostly in Antarctica.
The mapping of the local Universe achieved a milestone when Cephid Variables, stars of known behavior and brightness, were detected in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy. This began an era of cosmic distances being narrowed down to.

The Earth trembled in Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan, devastating the cities and killing about 120,000 people. As the young Emperor Hirohito toured the ruins little did he know this would not be the only time he would see Japan's great cities in ruin only to rebuild to further greatness. In Turkey Mustafa Kemal was elected President of Turkey. In Russia a debilitating stroke suffered by Lenin was to ultimately benefit the patiently plotting Josef Stalin. In Germany inflation was placing the value ratio between the German Mark and the Dollar into the millions, then to 4 trillion! People would start pushing piles of Marks to the store in a wheelbarrow and be robbed for the wheelbarrow.
In the US, The 'Teapot Dome' oil scandal hearings were part of what once was a continuing political news. We lost President Warren Harding, with Calvin Coolidge taking the reins of power. The Ku Klux Klan was making a nuisance of itself, thankfully being dealt with through the legal systems wherever they showed themselves.
Social Morals of the young were changing, much as what was to happen four decades hence. Prohibition in the US was beginning to unravel as states started refusing to fund enforcement. This was as the government began flying air patrols to try to catch people smuggling in liquor. The US was in places involved in contrasting social movements and concerns. A fad was 'dancing until you drop'. Popular songs included 'Yes, we have no bananas', and perhaps he most memorable was 'Rhapsody In Blue' by George Gershwin. A fresh voice named Bessie Smith recorded her first records and began a long tradition of hits. Popular movies included 'Robin Hood' with Douglas Fairbanks.
Aimee Semple McPherson opened a temple of sorts in Los Angeles, among the pioneers of American radio preachers. Legend would have it that she was eventually interned with a working phone line within her grasp to use when she was brought back to life!

Triumphs of machine and human endurance included the first non stop airplane flight across the United States, taking 27 hours. The English Channel was traversed by Argentinean swimmer Enrique Tiribosche in 16 hours 37 minutes. The four minute mile was achieved by runner Paavo Nurmi.

Among those born that year were astronaut Wally Schirra, statesman Henry Kissinger and mime Marcel Marceau.

Somehow every year has something to say about it, with remaining fond recollections still to be shared by many. Let us ride the tide of dreams and memories back to where we live, in bounds over times of hope, of destiny, of tragedy and of renewal...time and again here and there. Like the full Moon gleaming through the night rain clouds, a vision of the spot lit Saturn V beams its yearly greeting to us. Then this vision withdraws into the distance and becomes but a dot on the horizon. It is brought to mind in moments of wandering thought as the Moon catches our eye. The world next door beckons as well as it reminds us. Whatever the past, the future is malleable and responsive to directed effort. Let us manifest people on the Moon again. In this year when we have seen Pluto revealed let our thoughts turn again toward human presence in space exploration.

Don Davis

July 2015

July 2014:

 Apollo looms in our memories, as does the waning crescent Moon in the early morning skies on this anniversary of our first being there. The Moon is a face of eternity. Like the Sphinx's eternal gaze past human history, the Moon impassively overlooks the appearance and vanishing of entire species on the blue world half of it always faces. The Moon is aloof to our political and monetary initiatives and paralysis, stonily silent to the rise and fall of our mayfly civilizations. One of these civilizations sent several missions there within a few years, but since then only recently have we shown renewed interest with orbiters sent by the US, Japan, China and India. But plans for new human space flight there continue to find the funding commitments elusive.
Whether or not Humanity ever ventures so far again is for the future to decide. That future will need at least the resources we could bring to bear today, something we can comfort ourselves in assuming will always be available. Just as our ability to make plans in this life are subject to sometimes unexpected mortality, so it is with our civilization we live in. An illusion of secure permanence can lead one to the fatal mistake of putting desirable things off indefinitely.
Like someone acting under hypnotic suggestion that they can no longer reach out and grasp something, we look at something once within Human experience with no thought of touching it again. Generations after Apollo have grown up with the knowledge that our reach in the past was greater than it is now with human presence in space. Some have found it easier to adopt the idea that the Moon landings never even happened.

Space exploration in the mean time proceeds nicely with the largest asteroid and the furthest traditional planet (both redefined since 2006 as 'dwarf planets) and a comet to be visited by spacecraft within a year. But I, who remembers seeing a populated Moon in the skies, miss the days when we could visit another world.We who remember this are starting to die off individually, but for some years to come we can still remember seeing the missions on TV. We can now admire and meet people who have seen the scenery of the Moon with their own eyes. Apollo in general and the Moon in particular is thus still within living memory. The collective experience of the surviving Second World War generation who principally made Apollo happen is steeply declining in numbers. The more decades that pass with no return of human beings to the Moon, the sooner the Moon will join the vanished collective memory of the soldiers of the First World War which started a century ago this year.

Let us go to that wonderful summer of 1969, a time so great to be young that it cannot be communicated to later generations.
The impact of that moment is such that we still hear that eras music in many a public place. The TV ads now play the music of that time to those who remember when it was new, now at the peak of their productive careers. The echoes of that moment of human history not only provoke nostalgia but also reverberates in our future imaginations and in our fantasies of what could yet be. 45 years ago, through the gulf of political intrigues, reshuffling of world concerns, progress and tragedy, the clouds of time part like the clouds from around the Moon itself. The great Saturn V rocket brilliantly shines in many floodlights fanning their beams into the humid night sky beyond. Crews sleep their last night for a while on Earth. Rows of intent people look at the life pulses of the mission displayed on small TV screens mounted before them. Over a million people migrate to nearby viewing sites. Television networks prepare to suspend all TV programming for news coverage of Apollo 11.

Again we take the same leap into the past, another 45 years in the depths of time. What did that year, 1924, have for people to hear about and live through? What kind of world were those who are now 90 yeas old born into? Calvin Coolidge was elected President, and J. Edgar Hoover became head of the newly renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation. After a rebellion whose outcome was judged contrary to US interests, soldiers were sent to Tegucigalpa, capitol of Honduras. A modest resettlement movement to Africa by seminal black activist Marcus Garvey was suddenly rejected by the Liberian President. Immigration into the United States was going through its own dramas, with the Immigration Act of 1924 excluding entry by Asians, Arabs and Indians. This was the year of the debut of execution by gas chamber in the US.
Vladimir Illyich Lenin died in January of 1924, clearing the way for the ascendency of Stalin who was in the mean time maneuvering his enemies into undermining their positions by fighting each other. In Germany, would be coup leader Adolf Hitler faced a judge and was sentenced to five years. He would be released before the year was out.

Those interested in sports would hear of the American football winning streak of Notre Dame under coach Knute Rockne. The first Winter Olympics were conducted that year in France.

An obscure company was founded by Thomas Watson, International Business Machines Corporation.Dutch physiologist William Einthoven won a Nobel prize for his invention the Electrocardiagram. Using the 100 inch Mount Wilson telescope in California, Edwin Hubble first detected stars in the nearby Andromeda galaxy. This established galaxies as common and that we were inside one of many rather than uniquely situated. A momentous look into the past was had as the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamen, the only Pharaoh to escape tomb robbers, was revealed.

Among the movies people were watching then was 'The Thief of Baghdad' starring Douglas Fairbanks. Future movie actor Marlon Brando was born that year, as was future President Jimmy Carter and author Truman Capote. Among the deaths were authors Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad, and politician Henry Cabot Lodge. George Gershwin premiered 'Rhapsody In Blue' in New York. Some other memorable popular songs from then include 'I'll See You In My Dreams', 'California Here I Come', and 'It Had To Be You'. One song, 'See See Rider' would be played for young audiences in the Apollo era.The music of the Roaring Twenties glides past us in happy tinny melodies, time itself winds around us like a spinning 78 RPM record, sounds merging with flickering surroundings forming a tunnel we whisk through.
We leap over everything in between then and now with only one brief pause. We admire the column like behemoth of the Saturn V roaring as it ascends on a pillar of fire a thousand feet long.
Then we resume our swift passing to the days we now find familiar, to the smells and sounds and the attractions and trials of our lives. However far back our memories go, few now reach the 90 years we have just traversed. Again we look up at the eternal Moon, to whom the journey we just took is as nothing. Footprints made 45 years ago still look as fresh there as the moment they were made half a long lifetime ago. As we who remember grow old and die, may there be others who know of and perhaps somehow inherit the sense of wonder and accomplishment we felt, within the context of their abilities and passions. May they one day decide it is worth doing for reasons that even now may lie gathering dust on the shelves of history. May the Moon one day again be seen as the realm of Man by everyone who looks at it.

Don Davis July 2014

July 2013:

On this 44th anniversary of the 'One Giant Leap', the man who took that 'One Small Step' is gone. On August 25, 2012, US flags at NASA sites and elsewhere flew at half staff against the rising gibbous Moon. The passing of Neil Armstrong is symbolic of the Moon proceeding to pass from living memory, with 8 of the twelve who have been there now remaining. Living memory of momentous things is carried along the better part of a century with an events effect on masses of people well beyond the actual participants, as part of the passions and joys and despair attached to things millions will always remember. We are now passing through a brief interval when there are people whose lives have spanned three centuries and two millennia, four women as of this writing. They have seen many wondrous milestones come and go, somber and terrible, amusing and remarkable. But very soon the 1800s will have vanished from all current human life spans. Living memory really starts several years later and improves with the numbers involved, which naturally expands as the birth dates move ahead in time. Now it is the veterans of the Second World War who are on the steep slopes of the mortality curve, quickly joining their vanished counterparts of World War One, 'The War To End All Wars'.

To the Moon we are as May Flies passing by in a quick blur. It is aloof from our history, oblivious to our ability to reach it then or ever. But it also shines as a beacon to remind us of what was, and is, possible. It looms over the changing surroundings as a place we have collectively been to. We can wonder at the accomplishments shining through the increasingly hazy past, but how many wonder what has happened to the sense of momentum of progress we had until the time we went there?

Uncertainty dominates our view of the future. The past, however, is laid out in sequence with its lessons and trends, and especially its achievements we celebrate. What happened in the 44 years preceding Apollo 11 is also sobering to compare and contemplate as a 'mirror into time' anchored on Apollo 11. Has the breadth of leaps in fundamental changes quickened or slackened between those two 44 year intervals? It depends on what you focus on, but no one can doubt enormous alterations in much of life has taken place in both. The number of people who have living memory of both spans of time are rapidly declining. Most people reading this will have living memory of only part of the post Apollo interval. Look back with me now with the aid of our Collective Memory, and marvel a bit at the times and the lives of that simpler, wider and fresher world between the World Wars.

In our reach across the spiraling vortex of time, 1925 becomes our resting point this year, the same interval in the past of Apollo 11 as has transpired since. Some things happening then have cast their shadows across World Affairs for 88 years to this very day.

Among the people born in 1925 who would touch the world in various ways were Malcolm Little (X), Robert F. Kennedy, William F. Buckley, Paul Newman and computer pioneer Seymour Cray. There were nearly two billion people in the world in 1925, almost 116 million of them in the US.

The year started with the announcement of a discovery by 35 year old Edwin Hubble that the Andromeda 'nebula' was actually another vast galaxy, and that the Universe was thus far larger than previously measured. In world politics, the assumption of absolute power in Italy by Benito Mussolini consolidated the first Fascist government. Adolf Hitler was then mending the shreds of his National Socialist party, and published the first part of his rambling rant 'Mein Kampf'. In the mean time Field Marshall Paul Von Hindenburg became President of Germany. In Persia the Pahlavi Dynasty was founded as Reza Khan became the Shah, deposing the previous Dynasty. The Shah would be removed by the Allies during World War Two, then later replaced when it was considered in their interests as Stalin looked greedily at the region. His son would lead Iran for better or for worse until he was ultimately replaced by something far worse.

Turkey, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, took a firm turn toward secularization and moved toward a European model of society with the abolition of polygamy, turnover of old dress customs, and the adoption of Western alphabetical characters. In far away China, Zhongshan, known to us as Sun Yat-sen, died in Beijing. His successor, Jaing Jieshi (Chaing Kai-shek) then led the Nationalist Party. He could not know then that Mao TseTung's Red Army, then spreading across Outer Mongolia, would ultimately prevail with Chaing retreating to Formosa, now known as Taiwan. In the Soviet Union, Trotsky was suffering the consequences of opposing Stalin, losing his post as head of the military council and soon to lose everything else. Two other luminaries in the Soviet government, Zenoveiv and Kamenev, joined Stalin in sacking Trotsky, but by the end of the year they too would know their days were numbered. American women were breaking new political ground with the election of the first woman Governor Nellie Taylor Ross of Wyoming. United States interests were guarded by force across the world, first in Shanghai, to assist Americans caught in the chaos of revolution. Another revolt, this one in Honduras, endangered it's American community and soldiers were sent there, with American interests in Panama later also drawing US troops. At home, the most memorable headlines of the year certainly include the July 10-21 Scopes 'Monkey Trial', which came about after an act of defiance by John T. Scopes against a Tennessee law making it the first state to prohibit the teaching of evolution. His trial became the first to be nationally broadcast live. Scopes was technically convicted but procedurally acquitted.

Nature brought beautiful and terrible spectacles in 1925, a Total Eclipse darkened the skies of a narrow zone of America, including New York City. A huge tornado swarm ravaged Missouri, Indiana and Illinois killing 950 people.

The fads of the time included crossword puzzles, the 'abbreviated columnar' look of the 'Flapper' dress, and wide bottom trousers in college students, the latter which was publicly denounced by President Coolidge! The dance craze of the day was the 'Charleston', and the wilder dances of Josephine Baker were 'knocking them dead' on the Paris stage. The Paris Design Exposition formally introduced 'Art Deco' to the world. 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published then, as was Kafka's 'The Trial'. Among the magazines introduced that year was 'The New Yorker'. In Chicago's West Side the first Sears store appeared, where the items long sold in their catalog could be bought. Gifts could soon be wrapped with the aid of 3M company's Scotch Tape invented that year, designed at first as an auto painting masking tape.

After hounding by the Bureau Of Investigation, the ancestor of the FBI (complete with young zealot J. Edgar Hoover), the persecution of United Negro Improvement Association leader Marcus Garvey reached a climax as he began serving a five year prison sentence over a trumped up mail fraud charge. In a little over two years his sentence would be commuted by President Coolidge. In Washington D.C., 40,000 Ku Klux Klan members had their first national congress. The huge hooded parade marched to the Washington Monument, where their plans for a fire ceremony were drenched by rain.

Among the big films of the year were Chaplin's 'The Gold Rush', and 'The Phantom Of The Opera', with Lon Chaney's role remembered to this day. Film was taking to the skies, as another hit of the year 'The Lost World' became the first movie to be shown on a passenger flight. The 'stop motion' dinosaur puppets animated by Willis O'Brien for 'The Lost World' marked a major step in film illusion. Television was undergoing its first physical incarnations in London from the workshop of John Logie Baird. In that year he demonstrated first moving silhouette images, then on October 2 the first live mechanical television images of a young office worker, Edward Taynton, using his ingenious but ungainly mechanical television system. Still images began to be distributed to multiple locations by wire. Radio was presenting important stories and entertainment to growing audiences, the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge the first to be widely broadcast. The WSM Barn Dance broadcast began, later to be renamed the 'Grand Ole Opry'. The mobility of electronic media was taking new steps with the first demonstration of a wireless car phone in Berlin.

Automobiles were growing in numbers and variety, including new models manufactured by Walter P. Chrysler. Enclosed cars began dominating the market, displacing the open designs derived from the horse drawn buggy. Numbered interstate highways were introduced then, and improved roads made possible the record setting drive that year across the United Stated of 4 days 21 hours. Seeing the wave of the future, the first motorists hotel (motel) opened in San Luis Obispo, California.

The The Air Age was still new, It's over reaching significance still grasped by a few. One such person, Billy Mitchell, was court martialled that year for his out spoken resistance to perceived official Army neglect of air defense. The Space Age was still the stuff of fantastic stories, however some theoretical foundations for traveling in space and shifting orbits were laid by Germany's Walter Hohmann, who published 'The Attainability of Celestial Bodies'.

In our imagination we let these ideas whisk us high above the Earth, pausing a moment to look down and see the land and seas through the cleaner air of those days. We speed ahead faster and faster, following the Earth through space and time. Once again, the whirring blur below bears within it the flurry of changing songs and clothing styles, past the crises and wars big and small, to the days of the Soviet Empire and the West facing each other behind fences of missiles. We see the biggest rockets ever built trying to go to the Moon, the Soviets failing and the Americans succeeding. Onwards, through the times of cultural mutation and the phases of their own distinction thereafter coming and going, the pages of time like images of old flapping by as one turns the crank. Through all this, the stars are virtually unchanging, allowing for a nova and a major comet now and then. The Moon's face remains inscrutably impassive, any new craters too small to see from a distance.
Below, ornate pointed skyscrapers rise in cities, become grimy, and are steadily replaced by simple glassy blocks. We note the years which saw another billion people added to the world population, recalling it took from the beginning of the Human Race until early in the 1800s for our numbers to reach one billion. On 1927 we reach our second billion, with another added by 1960, '74, '87, '99 and finally 7 billion in 2011. Suburbs spread, the stars retreat as urban areas spread their brightness far around them. Invisible world wide information networks grow denser, becoming a major aspect of human interaction with which information becomes more available than ever in some ways, but more restricted and commodified in others.

We slow down as the songs and many trappings of everyday life become familiar again. We ease ourselves into the world of today with a sense that we still have hopes of spreading Human destiny to other places in the skies. At least some of us feel that way. The first obvious destination which we reached in 1969 is always there, and will always be there. It means more to us, with living memory of people being on the Moon, than it did in 1925. Once the last man who has been there is gone, the living memory of the experience of being on the Moon will be as extinct as that of fighting in the First World War. But it will take a much longer time for living memory of people being on the Moon to be extinguished, probably by about 2075, assuming life spans by then are similarly constrained as now.

So we have continuing hope that at least some of the younger space fans who were thrilled by Apollo will have the satisfaction of seeing on live visual media people on the Moon once again. Although the sense of upward momentum of the early space age is now but an aging memory, we have continued the technological development in many fields that would greatly assist any renewed effort to put people on other worlds natural and man made. We still have a chance to do these things, but no one knows how long will be too late.

Don Davis

July 2013

July 2012:

This year, the 43rd Anniversary of Apollo 11, the Moon is a thin crescent setting in the evening twilight. The day we first dared to make the Moon part of Human experience recedes another year into the twilight between the experiences and memories of the living and the chronicles of dead history. Each year the Moon sheds more of the living memory of those who brought us there, the younger members of 'The Greatest Generation' who came of age during the Second World War. The Moon bears a collective mantle of pride from the generation who made Apollo happen, but the beautiful living memory of the accomplishment steadily blows away like a Tibetan sand painting in the wind. History in retrospect has a sense of inevitability to it, Tolstoy ponders the physical and crowd psychology factors as well as chaos that were in play at the pivotal Battle against Napoleon at Borodino in 1812. So it may be with why Apollo became our 'high water mark' rather than a start of expansion of Human presence in the Solar System. If the 1968 election had elected Hubert Humphrey it seems likely the initial surge of exploration would have continued and broadened. If Vietnam hadn't been the focus of resources that dwarfed those that went into Apollo, discretionary funds spent toward space exploration might have seemed more inviting. Or perhaps not.

The Moon landing also serves as a sign post in History, a benchmark that is intriguing to ponder where we were 43 years before 1969, double the reach into the past. It is sobering like seeing a video of your young self. One is tempted to compare the progress between those two intervals. And so we rise above Earth, and will ourselves 86 years into the past to 1926. Earth corkscrews a path through the Universe following the Sun as the cities shrink, the air clears and the clothes, cars and a thousand little things change form and flash in and out of existence. Earth exploration reached another milestone as Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennet first flew a plane over the North Pole in a 16 hour trip. Science was pushing back the age of Earth past the one billion year mark, a figure that would under further inquiry settle on slightly over 4.5 billion years. The world population was reaching two billion people, about a century after our numbers at last made the long hard climb since the last Ice Age to reach one billion.

Here and there in the world people whose influence would carry far were assuming power. The political rise of Mussolini was completed with his assuming the title 'Il Duce', and he proceeded to make the trains run on time and his enemies run and hide. Hirohito became Emperor of Japan, with his reign to see Japan swing wildly in its fortunes. In Iran, Reza Kahn consolidated his rise to power as Shah and assumed the name 'Pahlavi', balancing his dealings with the Moslem fanatics there between accommodation and open warfare. An obsessive egomaniac named Adolf Hitler published volume two of his antisemetic conspiracy book 'Mein Kampf'. One day it would have the contradictory status of the most bought and least read book in Germany. In the USSR, poor Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo, taking the career Zinoviev and others with him. Opposing Stalin was a good way to be stricken from the Book of life, and retouched out of old photographs. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, was born in 1926 and died last year.

Movies that are remembered to this day that came out in 1926 include 'Metropolis' and 'Battleship Potemkin'. Rudolph Valentino died this year, grieved by an adoring public as no movie star had been before. Home movies had a new format, 16 mm film. People who would be stars in film and TV born this year include Marilyn Monroe and Andy Griffith. Others we would hear from later that were born in 1926 include Queen Elizabeth II, Fidel Castro, Allen Ginsberg and Hugh Hefner.

In the US, the Roaring Twenties were in full swing. Prohibition had created an 'underground culture' which was to continue over time as opportunistic authorities decided this or that state of mind foreign to them was deemed immoral and made illegal. Open warfare in the streets of Chicago was one public consequence of the nefarious 18th amendment. Inventions of the year include a practical television system, demonstrated in the UK by John Logie Baird, pop up toasters and aerosol spray cans. One invention especially fateful for Humanity first flew March 16, a liquid fueled rocket hand built by Robert H. Goddard. Radio telephone service across the Atlantic was inaugurated between New York and London, as was commercial air mail. The road system of the US allowed greater range for travel than ever before, Route 66 becoming a major path through the nation that year. Cars traveling such highways were being built by the influential industry of Henry Ford, who that year declared a reformatting of his business from a 48 hour 6 day work week to 40 hours and five days. The gas used in the cars cost as low as eighteen cents a gallon.

A book published then and remembered today is 'Winnie The Pooh' by Alan Alexander Milne. A publication that is still remembered by many, Amazing Stories', first appeared, with editor Hugo Gernsback at the helm of the first Science Fiction magazine. The infant medium of radio had its first major network, NBC, inaugurated late in the year. Popular songs included 'Bye Bye Blackbird' and, ironically enough, 'Reaching For The Moon' by Ben Bernie's orchestra. Listening to the latter song of longing and lonliness the dreamy glee of a lost time, the idyllic interval between the World Wars, recedes into the sepia toned mists of photos in albums and yellowing books on shelves. We travel from the year of the first rocket that was more than a firework, then hop to the time of the Great Saturn V which stood as tall as the fabled Pharos of Alexandria. Both were Wonders of the World, both are history.

Now we see prospects for new rockets and new ways to enter orbit struggling up the development ladders while we pay the Russians to send astronauts to the ISS. We shall see what schemes make it past press conferences, models, and animations. Whatever the uncertainty in our future in space, we at least have advanced a good deal in spacecraft design with the benefit of many lessons gathered along the way. Although there are no efforts being made to land people on the Moon, there is momentum for new generations of roving vehicles remote controlled from Earth, so there are prospects that the Moon will be experienced at least remotely. The day may come when the Moon can be explored with the experience being widely shared in real time in home computers and in domed theaters.

We can hope for the future, but there is nothing like remembering something yourself, remembering looking at the Moon and knowing it to be within the realm of Human experience. Somehow some things seem so impossible, others so inevitable. What can we make of the forces that once in a great while converge so miraculously? That so many of us remain to ponder a day when we dared to stand on another world is comforting, something epochal like living at the time of a great Prophet that will always be remembered. Perhaps it is the realization of Human Potential that can work miracles that is the biggest legacy of Apollo 11. The Moon sets in our deepening twilight only to rise elsewhere.

Don Davis

July 2012

Thanks to Jim McDade for referring me to the record 'I'm reaching for the Moon'.


July 2011:

The waning Gibbous Moon rises like a pale yellow lamp into the warm desert night. The Moon as a place continues to grow further from us, to be an enthusiastically reported event in yellowing pages of summaries of the events of 1969. It will, as all great events of history, live within our culture so long as the generations who appreciated it lives on. The 'baby Boomer' generation, tightly defined as the bulge in birth rates between 1947 and 1952 but 'stretched' by generous definition well into the 60's by some, has never enjoyed more catering to in advertisements than now. The ability to land on the Moon will not only stand as an episode of epoch making achievement, the Moon may yet figure in human adventure to come, if the remaining passenger seat on a waiting Russian Lunar tourist voyage can be sold. Such a trip around the Moon may serve to break a psychological barrier we may have to considering voyages beyond Low Earth Orbit. The more time passes since the days we marshaled such manpower, the more fabulous, the less imaginable in todays world and economy such a thing may seem. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, which I visited last year, required an average of one stone block being set into place every few minutes if the entire structure was to be thus built. 'Liberty Ships', still stored in floating rows in the North San Francisco Bay, were being turned out at a rate of one every 8 hours in 1943. Such things sound fantastic in todays world however when talent, money, and a Great Idea to accomplish a goal come together sometimes wonders can be worked. Such was done in the magic transformative time of the late 1960's.

The '60s are beginning to be a long time ago. Imagining the time between now and then and then doubling that, to gather sense of perspective in time looking both directions from that hallowed date, is an indulgence I offer again this year. But 42 years ago is too long for increasing numbers of my potential readers to personally share. 42 years ago from the perspective of 1969 was 1927. Silent movies were still being made, but the end was in sight with October's debut of 'The Jazz Singer' starring Al Jolson. The silents still had life in them, evidenced by the premier of the French director Abel Gances' epic 'Napoleon', restored this year. 'It' with Clara Bow, made her the 'It girl' of that year. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig made baseball headlines. Hit songs of 1927 included 'Ol' Man River' from 'Showboat', and 'Blue Skies'. Ten year old violinist Yehudi Menuhin first performed publicly, starting off with a flourish his life long career. Thomas Edison celebrated the 50th anniversary of his invention of his phonograph. A book from this year destined to be well read ever since is 'Steppenwolf' by Herman Hesse. Transportation for individuals advanced with the introduction of the Ford Model A that year. The exceptional traveler could make historic milestones, like the daring May 20-1 solo crossing of the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh. The mysterious Mongolian deserts were first being explored by the team of fossil hunter Roy Chapman Andrews, braving dust storms and warlords to among other things find the first dinosaur eggs. Andrews saw the disintegration of the Chinese government from the chaos of his dealings with government representatives then. The Soviet Union had its own government reshuffling going on as Stalin expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party, thereafter vilifying and liquidating them. A general in Nicaragua made the Americans work to hold ground there, Augusto Sandino. A scurrilous and increasingly volatile Adolf Hitler was released by the German Government from restrictions on his public speaking, addressing the first public meeting of the newly formed National Socialist German Workers Party. In America and Western Europe the 20's seem to be remembered in retrospect as a 'play time' where societal restrictions were being noticeably re evaluated. The 'Roaring 20's, in retrospect might thus be considered a 'distant mirror' of the 60's in some ways.

And so we move back from that time of happy tinny music, past the depression and the New Deal, through the gunfire and bombings of the terrible World War to come, to slow in the post war era and briefly pause to glance at that magnificent Saturn V and launch tower gleaming in a night amid a wide 'fan' of spotlights, about to carry the first man to the Moon. Then we whisk past the Apollo program, past the end of the Vietnam conflict, leaving behind the 70s and their decadence and developments, past the 80's with the next generation asserting themselves, through the Reagan/Bush era and the weaving of the World Wide Web. The re alignments in allies and enemies and the flashes of news great and horrific slow down to place us back here with so much to remember between now and then.
The Moon is pale and bright high in the warm desert sky now, helping hide the Milky Way. Bats dart about hunting flying insects. The Moon still lights up the desert rocks, our rooftops and our paths. It still looms as something to reflect upon as past ages never could. A reminder of what was and is possible, and will be for some time to come. Somehow I think there will be people up there again within the lifetimes of many who remember being able to go to the Moon. This is admittedly an article of faith now, but so has it been for so many years! Those of you who were born too late to remember, to me its importance was such that given a choice I would never be born significantly apart from my actual time at the end of the 'baby Boom' surge. Such is the magic the Moon still holds for we who remember. May the choices be made so you can have your own moments of looking up at the Moon and knowing there are people up there.

Don Davis

July 20, 2011

July 2010:

1969 is beginning to be a long time ago. The recent abandonment of the Moon as a factor in Human affairs makes it seem a little longer, bringing the wonderful images of Apollo into the cavalcade of images of the grandeur of past civilizations. Newer political leaders try to make changes from the past course and sometimes delight in erasing the pet projects started by their predecessors, like the new pharaohs defacing the statues and monuments of their forebears. The previous year has not been kind to those who yearn to see the Moon returned to Human reach. Between the economic convulsions and the political reappraisals of the times, it seems hard to justify establishing a settlement on another world. It is clear that only a small minority of enthusiasts even care about such things. The Space Station was conceived as a stepping stone to the Beyond, it has instead contracted its mission to represent the sole permanent Human presence in space. After the retirement of the remnants of the Shuttle fleet the US will lack any means to reach the ISS itself, until commercial launch systems can hopefully be weaned into handling the task. Other countries make occasional statements about going to the Moon, but when it's all said and done there is a lot more said than done. In the mean time the U.S. orbiter continues to map the Moon in unprecedented detail with its final data set promising to be a treasure. If and when future civilizations want to go the the Moon, if the data (and our technology) survive that long it will prove useful to them.

Using 1969 as a 'time mirror' is intriguing to visualize the intervals of time on both sides of that pivotal moment in history. Now the time interval since 1969, applied to before Apollo, takes us to 1928. In aeronautics the Atlantic Ocean was still the subject of firsts, such as Amelia Earhart's first flight across it by a woman. The gargantuan Graf Zeppelin made its first passenger crossing of the Atlantic. Our ability to probe the universe improved with the completion of the 200 inch telescope at Mt. Palomar, for decades to come the largest telescope in the world. The eventual rocket trips to the Moon were first seriously visualized in the German Science Fiction film 'Frau im Mond', by Fritz Lang. who as a dramatic device for the film invented the 'countdown', later adopted in rocket launches and atomic tests! Medical news was highlighted by the discovery of antibiotic properties of the Penicillium mold by Alexander Fleming. Events in the world made news and contributed to the flow of events. Hirohito was crowned Emperor of Japan. Haile Selassie was crowned King of Ethiopia under the name Ras Tafari. Radio and films were the mass media, with the Will Rogers 'cowboy philosopher' broadcasts beginning, and the movies showing a new comedy team named Laurel and Hardy. Television was trying to emerge from the experimental workbenches, as the first receiving sets made in the US were offered for sale. Among the births of the year 1928 were Andy Worhol, Stanley Kubrick, Shirley Temple and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

And so another year passes, and the Moon becomes a steadily dwindling collective memory, the time when we could go there dying along with the people who remember it. Some day the last person who remembers will see the Moon and be reminded of a time unknown to everyone else alive then, presumably in the 2060's, as now the last veterans of the 'War to End All Wars', the First World War, are leaving us. The time before WW I was written of by H.G. Wells in his 'Outline of History' as a golden age never to be regained. Will Apollo 11 look the same as Living Memory of the Moon drains away? There are dreams of commercial space flight, but even sending people to Low Earth Orbit is now a long ways away with such means. Commercial justification for trips to the Moon seem to be a pipe dream. Still, we who remember know it could be done, and until Peak Oil consumption happens and closes it's fist around civilization it can be done again. May there still be some who remember if it happens again. May our being on the Moon never pass from living memory.

July 2009:

This year sees a Moon which has been recently orbited by probes launched by Japan, China and India, and the USA now has a well equipped orbiter scanning our neighbor world. It is good to see attention paid again to our shining neighbor in the heavens, always beckoning, still perhaps to be one day revisited by people. As a new administration takes over, the political continuity once again undergoes a convulsive reappraisal of ongoing priorities. NASA spent months without a new administrator being named, while the biggest economic down turn since the Great Depression was in progress. It is hard to imagine voyages to the Moon will last long among the priorities. Nagging doubts about the new rockets involved plague the process even as hardware is taking shape. The sands of time are running out for the Shuttle program, and the interval to come in which the USA will lack a capability to launch people into space looms ahead as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The time line for an actual landing on the Moon keeps being pushed further into the indefinite future.

In the mean time careful searches of government paper trails have at last revealed the fate of the fabled slow scan telemetry data of the Apollo 11 television transmissions. Many years ago all the data tapes were gathered, erased and recycled due to a shortage of tape stock in times of reduced funding. Thus perished the best quality Apollo 11 television signal before it was compromised by the video converters of the time. Scraps recorded in Australia on super 8 film of the superior signal provided by the Honeysuckle Creek facilities are all that exist. Tantalizing clues linger of another pair of missing Australian tapes possibly bearing a copy of the slow scan data. NASA gave a media briefing in July 16 admitting the loss but also showing samples of efforts to optimize the appearance of the best surviving video copies of the Apollo 11 EVA video. In a process similar to the restoral of a nearly lost silent film from scraps scattered world wide, video from news networks and other sources was gathered and duplicated with modern methods. Samples of the ongoing work were shown which were clean of 'snow' and other noise but suffered reduced detail compared to the originals.

As the Moon we saw revealed that wonderful July day shines down upon us, the percentage of those who remember it as I do steadily declines. It has been 40 long years since TV gave us the first shadowy images of fellow human beings on another world, 40 years since the Heavens welcomed us when we ventured beyond Earth. It is getting harder to anticipate a New Frontier beyond the Earth as we could back then. A journey starts with the first step, and 40 years ago that first step marked what is beginning to look like a 'high water mark' rather than the start of a trend. The Moon was a waxing crescent when we first visited it, today the Moon is a waning crescent, fading with more of the lives of those who made it's first human visits possible. Walter Cronkite, a man whose journalistic professionalism helped generations appreciate the importance of the Space Program and so much else died July 17. Another giant of those times thus passes into history, part of the silent migration from the living to the dead of those who remember the days when we dared to dream big. The passing of time invites looking across the panorama of memory, leaping onward to the recorded knowledge left by those who have come before. 40 years is a long time, the events in that snippit of the Time Line inviting sober reflection. Using Apollo 11 as the 'reference point' centered between 40 years of it's past and future is an interesting exercise. In this moment of history we are ending a brief interval where a small number of people have lived to see three centuries in their life times.

What was our world like 40 years before Apollo 11? Twice the distance into the past takes us a lifetime away, where many WW I vets and indeed those of the Civil War were still telling their stories. A spectacular silent film set in WW I, 'Wings' won the first Academy Award for best picture that year. The silent movies were fading fast, with directors using sound as soon as it was practical such as Hitchcock's 'Blackmail', Britian's first 'talking picture'. For home movie makers Kodak introduced 16mm color movie film. An enduring song released that year was 'Singin' In The Rain'. 80 years ago a connection with America's 'Old West' faded with the passing at age 80 of lawman and gunfighter Wyatt Earp. Contemporary crime took on an intensity possible with machine guns with the Chicago 'St. Valentines Day Massacre', where seven men were slain in a beer warehouse sparking public outrage destined to end the flamboyant career of 'Scarface' Al Capone. The October 28 Wall Street 'Black Friday' brought catastrophic losses to the stock market, beginning a convulsive transition to a poorer America where millions of people learned to make do with next to nothing. In the Soviet Union Leon Trotsky paid the price for opposing the absolute rule of Joseph Stalin, banishment and months of being a hunted 'man without a country'. Human access to distant locations improved. The Graf Zeppelin, leaving from Lakehurst, NJ, flew around the world in the record time of 21 days 7 hours 26 minutes. Coast to coast passenger air service in the US commenced that year, making several stops and sleeping in trains at night during the 36 hour trip. The world was rapidly becoming accessible to growing numbers of people even if few could afford to go anywhere. In 1929 we were reaching our furthest at the time, as the first flight over the South pole by Admiral Richard Byrd took place, and building the highest with the beginning of construction of the Empire State Building, tallest building in the world for many years to come.

Looking both 'directions' 40 years from Apollo 11 brings us a widening view of the evolution and faltering of our progress in expanding the places people can experience. The dream that Apollo 11 was the first step in Human presence being established elsewhere dies hard among those of us who treasure our recall of that magic time. It is a dream for a time when Ability meets Will, a realization of a potential we will always know can be done because it has been done.

July 2008:

Once again the gulfs of time are seen to have spread a little more widely, a few more people connected with the journeys to the Moon are gone, and museums show replicas and rarer real artifacts of the era when our reach extended to other places a person could stand on. Now the world is a harder place to work such miracles. The will do do great things is being sapped by the cost of energy and other economic tremblings causing people to look at the stability of their banks rather than up at the frontiers above. Now oil money is funding the tallest structure ever conceived, a mile high skyscraper in Saudi Arabia. The old 'Spirit of America' which once exulted in doing the formally impossible is in 'traction' with only time telling how well any renewal will proceed. The greatest thing coming from the Moon this year has been the amazing HDTV transmissions from the Japanese KAGUYA (SELENE) spacecraft. For the first time since the Apollo era stunning video can be seen passing over familiar Lunar landmarks, and showing Earth rising and setting behind the Moon. These images are better than any moving images from the Moon that Apollo has left us. In the mean time the digital archiving of Apollo photography is proceeding, the results of which will be priceless.

The past extends to Apollo 11 from now through a gulf of 39 years, and again the leap of the same step further back brings us to 1930. The question nags along the way, was progress faster and more vigorous in that time interval before Apollo 11 or the years afterwards? The answer is obviously yes to faster recent progress in some realms, but in others, such as our powers to spend the vast sums preparing for wars on noble things to enrich mankind, we are as helpless as lemmings massing for the next march off the cliff. One has to look at the progress of air and space flight since 1930 to 1969 to wonder if we have since reached the point of 'diminishing' returns regarding breakthroughs in those fields. Around 1930 the world population was 2 billion people, less than a third of todays. Banks were failing in 1930, the Bank of the United States in New York taking with it the savings of half a million people. Flash bulbs were introduced, at last allowing instantaneous photos to be captured in dim light. The first 'supermarkets' appeared in the US that year. A Yellow Fever vaccine eased the death rate due to that cause. Investigations of the outer Solar System rewarded Clyde Tombaugh with the discovery of the last of the 'classic planets', distant Pluto. Today a spacecraft speeds toward that small icy world, no longer officially a planet but now known to have numerous moons. It may be that true exploration of space is fated to be a vicarious experience through the extensions of our senses provided in faraway places by far flung robot probes. But there was a time when human beings did the exploring, and the furthest we have thus collectively reached is still remembered by a large but ageing percentage of the populace. The Moon looms bright over the uncertain world on this anniversary, bearing the remnants of our journeys there. Some day those may be the longest surviving artifacts of human existence on this world.

July 2007:

  This year the anniversary of Apollo gives us a Moon looking something as it did that glorious July day, when it was a waxing crescent in the warm evening skies. To be alive then and able to recall the moment when Humanity existed on more than one world is a treasure beyond words. 'White Bird' by 'It's A Beautiful Day' hangs in my mind, one of the memories of that wondrous era when the fabric of reality itself was being explored on a number of fronts. The collective journeys took some of us along in the adventure of Apollo, for many others the 'Space Program', as it was called when there indeed was such a thing, seemed irrelevant.The 'Vision for Space Exploration' is proceeding in methodic but languid fashion, with things looking scary on the hardware front. The new launch vehicles being developed for the VSE are fighting weight and performance problems even as the designs begin to be acted upon. The new Lunar Lander is gaining weight at a terrifying rate, as did the Apollo LM in its development days. The engineering problems are one thing, assuring political support over the required time after changes in administrations is another. It is still the most hopeful period of time since the end of Apollo for those who long to see live TV from the Moon again. The post World War II national mind set to 'be the greatest' and to 'build the biggest' and otherwise proudly show what we can do may be faltering, but perhaps it is just the basic improbability of any given idea being given life by a group of resourceful people and money. A troubling sign that our 'spirit' may have been broken by '911' is that we seem to be afraid to build the tallest building in the world because of the evacuation time required. If China or some other nation managed to return to the Moon only a minority of Americans may feel 'left behind' by then. In the mean time there has been no luck in finding any of the three copies of the original telemetry tapes of the Apollo 11 television broadcast. It is another year to look at the images we have, and admire the accomplishment. The 'inner flame' in my heart has the Moon over it. I don't care what percentage of people don't believe Apollo happened, either it will happen again in their time or it won't.

The look back in time is instructive, because by now a large percentage of my readers will remember the events of 38 years ago but not those of 76 years ago, double the interval of time between now and Apollo 11. In 1931 Thomas Alva Edison, American inventor (with help) of electric lights, sound and motion picture recording and many other things, died. A plan to shut off all the electrical devices in the United States for a minute in tribute was compromised because by then electricity had become essential in too many ways. Unemployment was a global pandemic, with starvation being averted by narrow margins in some places across the industrialized world. Prominent gangster Al Capone was finally imprisoned in 1931 from tax evasion charges. As a haranguing rabble rouser named Hitler cajoled his way to power, German films like 'M' by Fritz Lang marked the last breath of creative freedom to come from there for some time. American horror films entered a golden era of sorts with the release of 'Dracula' starring Bela Lugosi and 'Frankenstein' with Boris Karloff. In art a well remembered painting was created by quintessential surrealist Salvador Dali, 'The Persistence of Memory', with it's sagging watches in a dreamy setting. Looking back promotes looking forward. When 38 years have passed, will we have bases on other worlds or will even being in orbit appear as distant as Apollo does to us today?

July 2006:

  The heritage of Apollo is crumbling into dust and flying away in the wind. The pristine data recorded from the Moon at the Australia Honeysuckle Creek Observatory have only recently been recognized as bearing the best quality recording of the Apollo 11 moon walk video, yet searches for the boxes of tapes have turned up nothing. The last tape machine able to play those data tapes rests in a facility scheduled for closing later this year. While the best video was apparently allowed to become lost, the carefully archived Lunar samples have over the years due to failed seals become contaminated by air and humidity, to the point that much of the information hoped to be gathered from yet untested Lunar material has perished. The Moon fades from our grasp like an aging mountaineer putting off for too long revisiting a challenging climb. The current plans to return to the Moon are faltering under the burden of bad planning which sows the seeds of its own failure. there is still hope that the writer as well as the reader of these words will live to see people on the Moon again, however it is increasingly becoming a matter of faith. Gazing again at the widening gulf of time on either side of the great year of 1969 brings us to regard not only the 37 years since then, but at what that same interval ending at Apollo 11 carries us to. In 1932 the West was still mired in the Great Depression. Newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt introduced the phrase 'The New Deal' in his acceptance speech, while that year U.S.Veterans once again got a 'raw deal' as their Washington DC tent city was demolished in a bloody army raid led by General Douglas MacArthur. What for decades was considered the 'Crime of the Century' tragically unfolded as the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped then found dead after the ransom was paid. The same daring flight Lindbergh had accomplished five years previously was done by Amelia Earhart that year. Short wave radio was first tested by Marconi, an invention which brought radio programming to world wide audiences. Werner Heisenberg was earning the Nobel prize of that year for formulating Quantum Mechanics while James Chadwick shed more light on the building blocks of matter by discovering the Neutron. And what of our end of the 'double time line'? To one yearning for a return to the Moon, the ray of hope offered recently is getting harder to see. In a few decades the last of those who remember watching TV from the Moon will be regarded with the patient indulgence of the young for the ravings of the aged. But as long as we live we will carry within us the sacred memories of the most privileged generation in history, that which combined the daring and abilities of an affluent post war America to accomplish great things. And the Moon continues to loom over us all, slipping from a place open to Humanity to a shape changing light in the sky as the ancients knew it.

July 2005:

  Using Apollo 11 as a 'time mirror' to survey the widening gulf between then and now is sobering.Traveling 36 years before Apollo 11 brings us to the year 1933, the year the Austrian demagogue Adolf Hitler celebrated his rise to power in Germany with fires fueled by piles of books as well as by the Reichstag. It was the year FDR declared "The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself!". 1933 was the year FM radio was first demonstrated, as was broadcasting of the first educational Television programming, from the Iowa State University station W9XK. The faltering film company RKO was saved by the 'monster' hit film 'King Kong' featuring the animated models of Willis O'Brien and the screams of Fay Wray. The year ended with widespread celebration as the disastrous imposition of Prohibition came to an end. Now the Moon has moved a little farther away. More people born after this time never knew what it was like to live in a civilization capable of sending men to other worlds, and fewer of those who know remain. Few people even see returning to the Moon as worthwhile, however the trend is toward smaller percentages of the population feeling strongly about almost anything. This year there is more hope that it could happen again, however this writer who has seen hopes raised and dashed before patiently awaits signs of dreams becoming reality. When designs are frozen and hardware is being built that will be the time to look at the Moon not as a sign of the past but of the future.

July 2004:

  35 Years have now passed since Apollo 11, and when again using the 'historical mirror image' approach we see that 35 years before the year 1969 Prohibition had just ended in America, and famous criminals Bonnie and Clyde as well as John Dillinger died in hails of police bullets. Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, and astronomer Carl Sagan were born in 1934, the same duration before Apollo 11 as we now are from that great event. Adolf Hitler proclaimed that year that his Third Reich would last 1000 years, and with the death of German President Paul Von Hindenburg he consolidated his power with the aid of his army of thugs. Time is leaving behind the world of voyages to the Moon as surely as the events between the first two World Wars, all receding into the fog of the dead past. There has been a flurry of hope this year that a return to the Moon may be in the works, but considering the source does not necessarily engender confidence. Besides the uncertainty of a highly polarized election, money does not seem to be eagerly offered to make hardware out of paper dreams. At least as preliminary support for renewed flights to the Moon, renewed robot exploration may well happen even if the manned flights do not follow. In the mean time Apollo 11 still stirs proud memories in those old enough to remember. The Moon eternally beckons to us as a place we have been, and of a time when we dared to accomplish something great during a brief interval when we could afford to. Perhaps we will again soon. Hope is something to cling to when it is offered and this year we have at least a little of that thrown our way.

July 2003:

  It is sad to contemplate the wasted opportunities of the decades since we threw away our ability to visit other worlds. Looking at the 'mirror timeline' centered on 1969 assists in grasping what an interval of time has been wasted. 34 years have passed since Apollo 11, and 34 years before then brings us into the world of the American 'Dust Bowl' climatic catastrophe, the enactment of the U.S. Social Security Act, the introduction of the Douglas DC-3 airplane passenger service, and the marketing of the first modern plastic based color film, Kodachrome. Little by little the world of 1969 becomes as extinct and abstract as the era opposite Apollo 11 on the time line. One day the very thought of being able to go to the moon will seem as fantastic as the legends woven into religion, with tales of miracles which no longer happen.

July 2002:

 Another year passes since we could go to the Moon, soon it will be a third of a century since Apollo 11. The belief that Apollo was a hoax has gained ground since last year. As long as the Moon is beyond our reach, legends and lies will continue to be poured into the mix of the circulating ideas. Once the last of us who remember people landing on the Moon are dead, the disbelievers will gain ground significently. When real events are in short supply, legend will move in to take their place. The night of the anniversary I gazed at the Moon with the satisfaction of knowing it was once possible to travel there, and that I will die knowing of an age when miracles like that were possible.

July, 2001:

  The Moon still lives in our minds, but it has also passed into the realm of dreams as much as if it had never happened. There is increasing exposure since last year to the idea that Apollo was a hoax! A science television program on as I write this is spending time to refute this 'conspiracy theory', followed by a segment on the problems museums are having with preserving deteriorating Apollo spacesuits. It seems increasingly unlikely that human footprints will ever be made on the Moon again. This is subject to things changing, of course, but such changes seem beyond the horizon on a continuing basis.

July, 2000:

  Yet again we pass a yearly landmark many of us remember, the mission of Apollo 11. Every year the wonder returns, the Moon in the sky reminds us of what once was, and the fact that we were once capable of great things brings inner comfort for a moment. I continue to await any sign of some change in the current restriction of humanity to Low Earth Orbit.

July, 1999: 

 When I was a child there were still veterans of the Civil War alive. Hopefully some of us who remember will still be lucid enough to appreciate the second generation HDTV views some future visitors to other worlds will beam back to Earth. While waiting for that day I will always carry with me the transcendent feeling of looking up at the Moon and knowing there were people up there at that moment, and then walking indoors and seeing them live on TV!   In time such things we remember may seem miraculous, but such are the hazards of events passing from living memory. May the Moon never pass from living memory.