For All Humankind by Tanya Harrison & Danny Bednar

Author:Tanya Harrison & Danny Bednar [Harrison, Tanya & Bednar, Danny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642500974
Google: xvjVDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

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After the school semester, and reluctantly returning the Ranger 7 atlas to his classmate’s father, seventeen-year-old Phil was on summer break from secondary school. He spent no small part of his vacation going through his scrapbooks, reading about the Apollo missions, and following the nightly news for updates. The first Moon landing was only days away. Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be many other people in town as excited about the Apollo 11 mission as he was. There was some chatter about it for sure, but many people seemed to be paying no attention at all. Obviously to a teenage Apollo expert with a veritable library of moon scrapbooks and magazines, this was unbelievable—in a few days, there would be people walking on the Moon for the first time in human history! How was the enormity of this moment not resonating with more of his friends and family?!

On July 20, 1969, Phil had to wait most of the day before anything about the Moon landing came on TV. The mission had been strategically timed so that the Moonwalk (fancily known by NASA as an Extravehicular Activity, or “EVA”) would take place during prime time on the US East Coast. For Phil, who was five hours ahead of that time zone, this meant that the landing would happen around 9:00 p.m., and the Moonwalk sometime after midnight. Luckily, he was on summer break and there was no need to worry about things like sleep.

To take it all in, Phil made his way into the living room on the main floor and turned on the TV, changing the channel to the BBC. He pulled his favourite chair a bit closer to the screen than usual, taking his front row seat at one of the most important moments of the century. By this time Neil, Buzz, and Mike were already in lunar orbit, getting ready to part ways by splitting the Moon-landing Lunar Module (LEM) from the Moon-orbiting Command Module.

Phil watched as the newscasters prepared viewers for the eventual landing and Moonwalk, explaining what would happen, and at roughly what time. The TV schedule ultimately depended on the comfort of the astronauts and decisions at Apollo mission control. In England, people saw a panel of experts sitting in the BBC studio, kind of like the intermission of a World Cup game. The evening was hosted by Patrick Moore, a famous English science journalist. Much of the coverage that night was about the three astronauts. Like the rest of the Apollo crews before this one, Phil already knew these astronauts’ names and little bits of their history and personalities.

One thing that was the same in the TV coverage of the landing around the world was the use of models and cartoons to show what was happening during the mission. There were no cameras filming much of the spacecraft maneuvers, and computer animation didn’t exist yet. Instead, news anchors would demonstrate the maneuvers of the lunar lander and command module with models, like kids playing with toys.

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