Over The Moon

We have turned our backs on our future.

‘If we can put twelve of us. On the Moon. And bring us back safely. Then we can solve anything. ‘

These are the words of our fatherly host Tom Hanks, as he closes the utterly jawdropping  Moonwalkers instillation at the Lightroom in Kings Cross in London. Which is, luckily for me, just a stone’s throw from my house.

It is a mesmerising experience. Imagine being inside a room where every wall is an IMAX screen. And onto each is projected a series of immense images chronicling Apollo 11, the first Moon landing of July 1969, and the subsequent five NASA manned Moon missions, until the last, Apollo 17, on the 11th of December 1972.

So almost exactly fifty one years ago.

I was blown away by the experience. Not just because I can be a bit of a space nerd. But mainly because of the unique way in which the Lightroom experience clearly portrayed, in photos and film footage, blown up to the size of a house, how utterly different the world that sent men to the Moon really was, when compared to our world today.

The Moon after all, has not changed one iota in those fifty plus years. Yet the Earth, and more importantly the people who live on it, have become unrecognisable. Almost an alien species.

Our Apollo journey begins with John F Kennedy’s speech of September 12 1962. When he sets out his vision, a vision he would not live to see, that ‘before the decade is out’, NASA would send a man to the Moon and ‘return [him] safely’ to Earth.

Sure we know that he made this speech in response to the Soviet Union’s extra terrestrial great leap forward. First Sputnik, then Yuri Gagarin. The Americans were playing catch up.

But that does not diminish the chills you feel, even today, when a youthful, confident, convinced and convincing, John F. Kennedy stands before that immense crowd of secure, white shirted, forward looking American students at Rice University and says

‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,’

How things have changed. Now we run from the hard. We shy away from the difficult. Avoid every challenge. And instead seek refuge in mediocrity and safteyism.

We no longer seek to be the best. Striving for excellence is frowned upon, and dismissed as supremacist. Winning, except within clearly defined boundaries, is a transgression of the highest order.

The frontier spirit has been rebranded as shameful colonialism. Curiosity has been reframed as troublemaking. Exploration is suspect. Maths is racist. Science has been replaced by emotion.

We no longer celebrate those special few who are possessed of  The Right Stuff. Now there must be prizes for all.

The other thing that seems shocking today about JFK’s speech is how he maps out the milestones of human progress. The steam engine. Christianity. The printing press. Nuclear power. The motor car and the aeroplane. Corner stones of western civilisation. All of which have been lately recast as irredeemably wicked, sinful instruments of colonialism, racism, environmental catastrophe and oppression.

Not for JFK. Fifty years ago these totems of progress were rightly celebrated as the stepping stones they were. Giant leaps which lifted humanity from a grim pre industrial past, to the giddy heights of modern western civilisation, with all its abundance, freedoms and universal benefits.

Compare if you dare JFK’s spine tingling rallying cry, his clarion call to all of humanity to rise up and shatter the very shackles which bind us to this planet, with Vice President (Vice President of the USA!) Kamala Harris’ brain numbingly incoherent pronouncements on space travel.

Or even former Prime Minister Boris Johnson at climate change conference COP 26 in 2021, when he literally apologised to the world on behalf of Britain, for being the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

We have become embarrassed of ourselves.

And I suppose, rightly so.

If the proud engineers, mathematicians, builders and visionaries who sent men to the Moon fifty years ago were introduced to the leaders of today, what would they make of them?

And what would they make of the rest us?

Instead of building cities on the Moon we are chopping bits off our children, and calling it Progress.

They would think us mad.

The ambition expressed in JFK’s speech was breathtaking.

This was 1962, less than twenty years after the Second World War, and almost ten years before the microprocessor was invented, five years before Britain had colour television, and back when there were parts of the UK where half the homes still had an outside toilet.

And yet the American President had the self confidence to look at the Moon, hanging untouchable in the night sky, and declare, we can go there.

Imagine the faith he must have had in his nation’s abilities, and the abilities of his fellow men, to make that call.

To commit a country’s resources to that endeavour. To spend so much money. (Yes, there were lots of complaints about that even then.) So much human capital. It is beyond comprehension.

As you stand in the Lightroom and marvel at the boneshaking lift off of the Apollo 11 rocket, as it carries three tiny humans across the vast vacant vacuum to the Moon. It takes a moment to step back and truly realise. Men made this.

Men made this because they refused to be constrained, hobbled and bound to just one planet. To the limits of the past.

Feel the roar of the engines, the bellow of this immense steel monster straining, and ultimately breaking, its leash, and know, that with their ambition, their hands and their brains,

Men. Made. This.

As I watched the crowd of men and women in Mission Control congratulating each other for accomplishing the almost unimaginable feat of building a machine out of metal, fabric, glass and mathematics, that was capable of landing a human being on the Moon, I wondered how this same scene would be greeted today.

Thoughtful and balanced news reader Jon Snow would no doubt take one look at this room full of engineers, technicians and specialists, sneer at their superhuman accomplishment and declare that ‘he had never seen so many white faces in one place.’

Whilst the modern BBC would be unlikely to focus its attention on the incredible dedication and resolve it took to accomplish this incredible feat, but would swiftly change the subject, and nod along as some angry academic demanded we decolonise astrophysics.

Today we are so much less than yesterday’s proud men and women. They held their heads high and wished for the stars. We crane our necks downward, eyes fixed on our iPhones.

In 1969 America was a proud nation. Sure, maybe in some regards too proud (Shout out to the hubris of Vietnam). But nonetheless a beacon of progress, freedom, and prosperity, something for the world to aspire to.

Now it hates itself. More divided than at any time since the Civil War, it is led by those who are repelled by their own people, history and legacy.

It feels as if we are no longer a civilisation capable of such things as Apollo. More interested in squabbling among ourselves over crumbs than reaching to the heavens.

And when someone does step up. A maverick like Elon Musk. He is considered an outlier by the establishment, a loon to be pilloried and denigrated for his riches, his differences and his ambition. A carbuncle to be smoothed away, rather than a visionary to be followed.

It has been fifty one years, since a human stood on the Moon. Fifty one years.

Apollo 17 is like a full stop. The moment humanity as a species ceased moving forwards and began to regress, the beginning of our spiral of self imposed decline.

As Hanks says,

‘If we can put twelve of us. On the moon. And bring us back safely. Then we can solve anything. ‘

Yet we choose to solve nothing.

In the face of a virus which only threatens the very old and the very vulnerable, we cower in our homes.

Confronted by the fixable problem of climate change we catastrophise. We don’t attempt to mitigate its effects, instead we flee, running helter skelter, toward an unattainable Net Zero future.

Which even if all goes exactly according to plan will leave us poorer, colder, and as a civilisation, vastly diminished.

We have turned our back on the world of Apollo, the world of rationality, scientific endeavour and futurism.

And have chosen instead a world where teenage prophets march against progress. Where beheaded Jewish babies have become, for some, a symbol of justice and righteous retribution. A world that has turned its back on optimism. That has lost its faith in the future. That no longer has confidence in humanity‘s abilities, much less belief in its inherent goodness.

And yet we congratulate ourselves daily for our non achievements, and wallow in narcissism.

As a species, our Ozymandian works once included a human footprint on the Moon. Now they are a semi dressed woman shaking her WAP for the kids on Tik-Tok. (And no. There isn’t a link to that.)

It is shameful.

As a civilisation we once strained outward. We defined ourselves by who we were, and what we had built.

Now we coil inward. And are encouraged to define each other by little more than the colour of our skin and our basest sexual appetites.

We once stood on the shoulders of giants. Our hands outstretched to the stars.

Today we are just a small people.

From a small planet.

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Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

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LSO.