Dr Space Junk vs The Universe by Alice Gorman

Author:Alice Gorman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244495
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

CHAPTER 5

SHADOWS ON THE MOON

The grey unknown

was acceptable for so long

but then we got close

and color leaked in

Christine Rueter, ‘Color Leaked In’

Next time you look up in the sky and see the Moon, perhaps a full disc illuminating a dark night, or a sliver of silver suspended in pale evening blue, think about this. The Moon is a battlefield of competing ideologies: it’s a strategic military base vs a romantic lovers’ lamp; a scientific triumph vs government hoax; a resource to be exploited vs spiritual icon. More than anything, perhaps, the moon is magic vs science.

Nothing captured these contradictions more than the US sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. It was a weird kind of time slippage: I had witnessed the Apollo 11 landing with my own eyes in 1969, but in I Dream of Jeannie it hadn’t yet taken place. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, we watched the handsome astronaut Major Tony Nelson and his bumbling sidekick Major Roger Healey grapple with the whims of a genie straight out of The Thousand and One Nights, while they trained to go to the Moon. It was masculine science against feminine logic, and Jeannie won every time. If anything, I was more interested in her than in him, as I was enamoured of story-telling and the world of Scheherazade. The message was clear, though: if you tried to restrict the Moon to apparent rationality, the magical would keep bubbling through.

The prospect of space travel, as it emerged in the post-war world, gave the Moon a military function it had never had before. In The Complete Book of Space Travel, a 1956 book aimed at boys, Albro T Gaul said:

Today, space travel is one of the ultimate goals of scientific and military research. The familiar cry, ‘Who rules the moon controls the earth!’ reflects our readiness to exploit space. Our military might is ready for space; our economic strength is ready for space; soon our ships will be ready for space.

By which he meant, of course, American spaceships. Albro T Gaul was an entomologist who recorded insect sounds, including ‘butterflies and dragonflies in flight, flies caught on flypaper, Japanese beetles on a rose, and insects walking and chewing’. Who knew mild-mannered Albro was harbouring such bellicose thoughts? He chose to write about space because he had an unusual perspective. In the introduction to the book, he says ‘space travel is also a biological problem, even perhaps to a greater extent than it is an engineering problem’.

And indeed, the role of the Moon in human affairs is intensely biological. The Moon is essential to life on Earth, controlling light, tides and time. There is no living thing which has not been influenced by it; no person on Earth, from our hominin ancestors to the present day, who has not looked up at the Moon in the night sky, experienced lunar cycles, or felt the effects of the tides. The Moon has always been a huge part of terrestrial ecology and of human culture. It’s the inspiration for stories, myths and science about how the heavens and Earth came to be.

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