Man In The Moon

Unless you’re in a coma you’ve probably heard that tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. If your old enough I’m sure you can remember the excitement. I was allowed to stay up and watch the landing at about 3 am but I fell asleep. I had all the models, all the posters and any magazines I could get hold of; in short I was a boring little Herbert. It’s easy to forget what a staggering achievement it was. When JFK announced a goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, all they’d so far managed was 16 minute sub orbital flight with Alan Shepard aboard. This is the equivalent of promising to circumnavigate the world when all you’ve actually done is rowed across Port Melon in a bath tub, but they did it. When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat in Mercury 3, waiting for lift-off, he replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder”.

90% of Apollo 11 was fuel to get the tiny command and lunar modules out of Earth Orbit, at launch it was 365 ft high, I still remember that and all that came back was the Command Module was a truncated cone measuring 10 feet 7 inches tall with a diameter of 12 feet 10 inches across the base. It took 3 days to get the moon, 3 days of excitable waffle by Patrick Moore and James Burke; Steve Watt would have been in his element. And then on the 20th they landed, though they should have aborted but Aldrin ignored procedure and landed with about 15 seconds of fuel left. The Neil Armstrong got this wrong, but he might have been nervous. Then they came back to a well disturbed heroes welcome, Buzz Aldrin went slightly mad for a bit, Neil Armstrong became a recluse and Mike Collins is now managing a fish and chip shop in Enfield, maybe.

They went back 5 more times but the public lost interest, which is why all NASA does now is probes and low earth orbit missions, they have the technology, but not the funds, to build a moon base, ands go to mars they even have plans for an interstellar mission. And after all the best way to sort out global warming is to find a new planet to ruin, but at least we got Sky TV and Sat Navs out of it, god bless America.

And there’s another anniversary this week. On July 16th 1994, the first piece of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, speaking of which, Jupiter rises around 10 p.m in Capricorn and shines highest in the south before dawn, dominating the South Eastern sky for most of the night.

Like all the best cowboys Saturn has just about disappeared into the sunset.

Venus and Mars are still faffing about due east during dawn. Venus is very bright, Mars, to Venus's upper right, isn’t.

I’ve put some Apollo pictures up on the blog, and a guide to Mars and Venus if you’re daft enough to be up at 3:30 am