No giant steps taken walking on the moon this time around - Vladimir McTavish
As a 13-year-old kid on his summer holidays back in 1969, I remember being awestruck and utterly riveted as the first pictures of the first moon landing were beamed back to Earth.
The whole family looked on in amazement at the grainy, almost ghost-like image appearing on the black- and-white TV in the living room of my uncle’s farm on the banks of Loch Awe.
They’d only had that telly a year or so, as up until the opening of the Cruachan hydro-electric station, they’d had no mains power, having to rely on a generator up until then.
The events of the past week have by contrast left me completely cold and uninterested.
Compared to Apollo, the Artemis mission strikes me as somewhat pointless and in the current global crisis, a complete waste of money.
While the rest of us are worried about the cost or availability of our next gallon of petrol as the west’s fuel stocks are stuck of the Strait of Hormuz, it’s apparently OK for a handful of astronauts to blast off for a wee trip around the other side of the moon.
But this is one thing I learned this week. I never knew we could only see one side of the moon. I had always assumed we saw each side on alternate months.
It turns out nobody had seen it until Tuesday. Then we had the first footage beamed to Mission Control and on to our TV screens. And guess what? It looks pretty much identical to the side of the moon we usually see. I could have worked that one out 50 years ago.
What a total waste of time and resources. I reckon that the only people who have made any material gain from this jaunt are the surviving members of Pink Floyd.
I cannot even hazard to estimate how many millions in royalties they earned from the endless replays of “Dark Side Of The Moon” which inevitably played under the TV footage. Not just BBC and ITN but channels worldwide used this apt, although predictable soundtrack.
Of course, in 1969 older kids like my brother’s friends were less impressed. They were the hippy generation This was the summer of Woodstock, anti-Vietnam protest was at its height and 18-year-olds were out getting stoned on weed or sitting at home reading the Thoughts Of Chairman Mao.
They were also into crackpot conspiracy theories, such as the whole thing was staged, actually filmed in the California desert. Or it was all done to take the public’s mind off Vietnam.
If that was the plan, it was a disastrous failure as opposition to the war really mushroomed throughout that summer and the next autumn.
So what about today? The current US government seem intent on continually bringing our attention back to the war in the Gulf.
They seem positively proud of the genocide they are carrying out, Pete Hesgeth constantly claiming their last atrocity to be “victory with a capital V”.
As for crackpot conspiracy theories, the people indul-ging in them now are not 18-year-old dope smokers. They are far-right religious zealots living in the White House.
Now I know it really exists, I might move to the other side of the moon.