Today, July 20th, 2009 marks the fortieth anniversary of humankind's first landing on the Moon. The lyrics to the song of the same name by US indie-pop band REM have been resonating in my mind for about the past week as the media has begun to mark this marvellous achievement and for me, as an amateur astronomer, it continues to be one of the greatest human feats of all time.

Forty years ago today, New Zealanders listened on their radios on what was actually Monday, July 21st, 1969 (and as with the anniversary of September 11th, we mark these occassions on the date when they occurred in the US and not in New Zealand due to the quirk of our just being over the International Dateline). As with many people throughout the world, New Zealanders who were around at that time listened with their ears glued to the radio, in anticipation of the words that would mark humanity's touch down on the lunar surface: "Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed".

It was only later that night that New Zealanders (due to our not having a direct satellite receiving station at that stage) saw the pictures on the first ever New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC) network link up of that historic moment that had been seen live in Australia and throughout the Northern Hemisphere earlier in the day.

The words that had launched that journey to the lunar frontier had been uttered by the late President John F. Kennedy before the US Congress in one of his first addresses as the then new US leader in 1961. On May 25th of that year, he told them and the American people:

"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

What had inspired Kennedy and his scientific and military advisers to act was the need to compete with the Soviet Union (which was then under the leadership of Nikita Khruschev) in space. It is a well established fact that the US was shocked by the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957, an event that caused consternation and alarm within both the US military and political establishments due to the USSR's ability to now potentially develop intercontinental ballistic rocket technology which could then be used to deliver nuclear warheads. It must be remembered though that the White House had announced before the launch of Sputnik it's own intention to launch a space bound satellite by late 1958 only two months before the Soviet Union surprised the world with Sputnik.

Sputnik's launch was the seminal event that really drove the so-called 'Space Race' between the global superpowers into high gear. Spurred on by this, the American political response, led by then President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was to establish the infamous military-industrial complex through the mechanism of the National Defense Education Act which expanded funding for education and specifically of the scientific variety so as to counter the Soviets who were perceived to be leading the way in this area.

Eisenhower's successor, Kennedy, wanted to take this one step further by sending a human being to the Moon itself (given that the Soviets had sent the first human being into space in the form of Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, just two months into Kennedy's presidency) and he wanted the US to be the first country to do so, thereby beating the Soviet Union. Probably this desire to get to the Moon was not so much fed by the desire of Kennedy and his military/scientific advisers to compete with the Soviets on a non-military level but was more due to the fear that the Moon and the extraterrestrial space above the Earth could become the next superpower military and geopolitical battleground. In fact, Kennedy explicitly addressed this motive in his other famous speech on the space race, that delivered at Rice University in 1962:

"The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines. ... For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."

After Kennedy's tragic assassination in November 1963, the impetus to make the journey to the Moon continued unabated as public sentiment swung towards supporting the lunar exploration programme that now went by the name 'Apollo'. Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson therefore found little trouble in keeping financial support for the planned mission flowing in the wake of the late president's death despite his administration becoming mired in the Vietnam War and the need to expend resources on the 'War on Poverty' at home (with such luminaries as the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Junior, questioning the Johnson Administration's priorities in terms of funding a space programme and a war at the same time when poverty was a real issue at home).

For all that, the landmark date of July 20th, 1969 will go down as one of the greatest days in humanity's existence. A race, driven by the socialist desire to show how much the Soviet Union had progressed since the November Revolution of 1917 had ended with the Americans seeking to show that capitalism could mean progress too (with the unadded but subtle hint that the Americans, to paraphrase Nikita Khrushchev's famous Moscow kitchen debate quip to Richard Nixon in 1957, did possess the ability to bury democratic centralist socialism as well which it proceeded slowly to do).

If it were not for the geopolitical machinations of the two great global superpowers, then we would perhaps have heard a different track from REM in the 1990s, perhaps one along the lines of "When are they going to put a man on the Moon?" Due to the contest between the then great superpowers of the USSR and USA, that could have ended so much more tragically for us all, we did not need to ponder that question beyond July 1969.

Note: Both of the JFK quotes used in this blog were sourced from the Wikipedia website.