A Bad Moon Rising

A Bad Moon Rising Maarten Dings Joachim Naudts A BAD MOON RISING On 21 July 1969, at 2.56 a.m. UTC, Neil Alden Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon after a four-day flight. That same day, Eddy Merckx won his first Tour de France. The single ‘Space Oddity’ had been released ten days earlier and people were listening to David Bowie sing: ‘And the papers want to know whose shirt you wear. Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare.’ Millions of people held their breath as Armstrong and Aldrin took a giant leap some 400,000 kilometres away. Buzz Eugene Aldrin, the second man to exit the capsule, recounted that the moon walk wasn’t as hard as he’d previously imagined. The Lunar Lander did not sink into a metres-deep layer of moon dust that had been accumulating for billions of years due to the lack of an atmosphere, as a NASA employee had speculated in 1955. ‘For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one. One in their pride at what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.’ Cartoon on the front page of the De Standaard newspaper – 22 July 1969 President Nixon addressed the astronauts that same day and delivered a rousing and pathos-filled speech. A new era had begun. The moon landing resembled the unreal apotheosis of a last wave of optimism, one that the world was still optimistic enough to surf in the late 1960s. But change was already afoot. Just over a month later, thousands of flower children gathered in Woodstock and listened to Jimi Hendrix demolish the American national anthem on his Fender Stratocaster with a sonic bombardment. ‘I see a bad moon arising,’ sang Creedence Clearwater Revival at the same festival. On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered and, with him, the entire peace- ful protest against racial inequality. On 6 May, 20,000 students marched towards the Sorbonne in Paris and triggered a wave of similar protests around the world, many of which were brutally suppressed. On 5 June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. On 6 December 1969, a concert by the Rolling Stones in Altamont descended into chaos when some Hells Angels, acting as security staff, killed an African-American student. At Melba Roy Mouton, head of a the same time, millions of people were being slaughtered in the futile Vietnam War. The group of NASA mathematicians, also known as ‘computers’ – anti-war movement became ever more vocal and persuasive as a result. Nixon was sworn 1964 © NASA in as the new American president in 1972, surviving until the Watergate scandal forced him to resign two years later. Extreme left-wing terrorist groups were on the rise, such as the Weathermen in the United States and the Red Army Faction in Germany. Ireland was dealing with the IRA. At the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich the Palestinian terrorist movement known as Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage before killing them. The group also had its sights set on the launch of Apollo 17, although the intelligence was suppressed at the time by the security services. It would also be the last Apollo mission. The decision to cancel Apollo 20 had been taken as early as 1970 and, not long afterwards, both 18 and 19 were also scrapped. This went hand in hand with a steep decline in public support for the costly space programme and a sense of general disinterest. Despite the turbulent times, the media continued to report enthusiastically on all space-related matters. Yet even television audiences had dwindled by the time Apollo 17’s lunar rover embarked on its investigative voyage. After the euphoria of the first moon landing, NASA was now in the position of having to pay the large television networks to continue their live broadcasts. Together with the Apollo programme, the Space Age – a period in the 1950s that was typified by an unbridled belief in technology and progress, a golden era of unseen economic expansion and a deep-seated belief that the sky really was the limit – was slowly dying a death. ‘I can’t pay no doctor bills, but Whitey’s on the moon. Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still, while Whitey’s on the moon. The man just upped my rent last night, cause Whitey’s on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but Whitey’s on the moon.’ In his 1970 song ‘Whitey on the Moon’, the African-American poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron criticises the fact that citizens are being taxed to the hilt to fund putting people on the moon at a time when many African-Americans were living in poverty and subjected to racism. And he was not alone: research conducted in the 1960s revealed that 45-60% of Americans believed that the government was spending too much money on space travel. The total cost of the Apollo project was $24 billion, equivalent to $150 billion 10 today. In his 1964 book The Moon-Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the A BAD MOON RISING Space Race, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni was one of the first to argue that the space programme would not result in economic progress, nor would society gain a better insight into the universe. He described the Space Race as an escapist game that avoids the real challenges facing the world. Ironically enough, many space scientists believe that the high expense of the Apollo programme had a detrimental effect on future funding: for decades afterwards, politicians refused to sink large sums of public money into space exploration. The no-holds-barred attempt to put a man on the desolate and dull globe that is the moon seems to have brought one of the most ambitious and imaginative of all scientific projects to a halt. To date, only 12 people have stood on the moon and only 24 have ever left the earth’s orbit. But the world has inevitably and fundamentally changed in the last 50 years. The technology in a smartphone is infinitely faster than the systems once used by NASA to land people on the moon (and bring them back again). After decades of simply being a grey sphere within our firmament, interest in the moon is on the rise once again. Nowa- days, too, there is that fascinating duality between the blatantly obvious (geo)political or commercial motives at play and the narrative that was born of imagination, meaning and man’s place within an infinite universe. New Space On 6 February 2018, SpaceX, the company founded by the flamboyant entrepreneur Elon Musk, sent the Falcon Heavy into space. Musk launched a cherry-red Tesla Roadster towards Mars with a mannequin dressed as an astronaut behind the wheel. Despite there being no sound in space, Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ was playing on the car stereo. The event was accompanied by a perfectly orchestrated PR campaign. Not everyone appreciates Musk’s excesses. Nathan Robinson, for example, wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian in which he stated: ‘There is, perhaps, no better way to Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster with Earth appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire in the background – 6 February 2018 © SpaceX spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into the far reaches of the solar system.’ And yet, with all his bravura, Musk conjures up a sparkle in the eyes of a great many people. Almost 50 years after the first lunar landing, space travel finally seems sexy and fun again. Not long after the Tesla stunt, SpaceX announced its intention to ferry the first tourist to the moon in 2023. The Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur and art collector Yusaku Maezawa is the ‘lucky one’. ‘I choose to go to the Moon,’ he said at the press conference, paraphrasing John F. Kennedy. The multinational Google, on the other hand, threw its weight behind the Lunar X Prize. An award of $20 million was set aside for the first private team to land an un- manned device on the moon and transmit high-resolution footage back to earth by 31 March 2018. None of the 32 participating teams were able to meet the deadline. Several of them, however, have continued working on the project: the American company Moon Express, with interests in mining, has become the first business to receive a permit from the American aviation authorities to land on the moon. The Israeli initiative SpaceIL launched the lunar lander Beresheet on 22 February 2019. And the British company, Lunar Missions Limited, organised a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter for a space- craft launch in 2024, although without success. SpaceX, the Google Lunar X Prize and Lunar Missions Limited are all examples of a movement that is known as ‘New Space’: a global and privatised space industry that clearly functions differently from the traditional, government-funded space organisations. The new race to the moon has become an international phenomenon in which nation Photo taken by the Israeli lunar states and commercial companies all compete for the rights to exploit our biggest satellite. lander Beresheet – 2019 © SpaceIL Prior to this, in the 1990s, the marketing department of the fast-food chain Pizza Hut began to investigate the possibility of projecting the company logo on to the moon. The idea was abandoned, thank goodness, on the grounds that it was too complicated and exorbitantly expensive. But the company refused to give up and in 2001 paid the Russian space agency $1 million to be the first company to deliver pizza in space (to the International Space Station).

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