As America quietly–and we mean quietly–marked the 50th anniversary of the moon landing this week, TIME magazine decided to use nostalgia for its cover story on the topic.. Back when the moon was the hot location to get to, when John Kennedy’s promise of landing a man on the moon during the 60s ended with Richard Nixon’s Administration celebrating it, and back when they were relevant as a weekly, they featured a ‘race to the moon!’ article a few months prior to the famed event..
This year on the 50th, they are placed a “next space race” re-do with SPACE X as the main racer.. Business taking over!!
Things have changed since then, obviously.. The ole-timers who lived through this event tell me that the world stopped in its tracks to watch coverage on TV of the moon landing.. The wiser elders of today inform me of the emotions of that time, the amazement and bewilderment so many had as they watched history being made in real time.. on TV sets–a new medium for so many in that era..
Even the Brits did it their way across the pond.
BBC mounted programming to celebrate the great event. One of the shows featured a live jam by Pink Floyd. The program was a one-hour BBC1 TV Omnibus special with the whimsical title of So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?. It was broadcast on July 20, 1969, at 10 p.m.. The Floyd session eventually came to be called “Moonhead.”
TV GUIDE issued a cover story at the time cementing history: As major a worldwide television event as you can get.. Broadcast live not from our planet but from a satellite of it, the moon..
Children across America watched one small step for man became the giant leap for mankind, and turned to space .. they wanted to be astronauts when they grew up. Neil Armstrong became an American hero–looked up to by countless around the planet..
It was America’s moment, the shining example of how WE could make it.. how WE could strive for more.. how WE could get to the moon and maybe one day beyond.
MALAISE DAYS
That brief but albeit amazing American moment of being the first to plant an earthly flag on a desolate space dwelling wore off quickly.
About 50,000+ deaths in Vietnam, Watergate, the Manson murders in Cali, high gas prices, inflation, and other world wide events suddenly forced people into a corner where pride and patriotism was not as evident.. Where we lost our focus on leaving this planet.
Instead, we decided to stay, and fight.. and argue.. Burn bras and protest war!
There was economic turmoil and other vastly amazing and historic moments of political upheaval.. whether it was Richard Nixon resigning before impeachment, or a sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter telling the nation to conserve its energy, it all led to the Reagan Revolution.
He indeed paid for that microphone and he intended on using it..
PATRIOTISM UP IN SMOKE
President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation on January 28, 1986, hours after classrooms and media across the nation watched the Challenger explode on LIVE TV..
He called it a national loss.. He said during that broadcast, “I want to say something to the school children of America… I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the faint hearted. It belongs to the brave.”
There seemingly something about this moment that killed the dreams of space.. The malaise 70s turned into roaring decade of greed in the 80s, and somehow we trashed the notion that space mattered.
By the 1990s, a decade when miraculous and amazing discoveries were being found on Mars and other moons of Saturn, we continued just finding ourselves finding space to be the frontier not worth mentioning..
George W. Bush had a similar moment when he addressed the nation in 2003 when the Columbia exploded after mission control lost contact.. Debris fell from the skies above Texas as the Columbia was lost without survivors..
And now, 50 years after the moon landing moment, even the business SpaceX cannot get attention unless one of its rockets blows up on the way to the Van Allen Belt.
TAPES AND LEGACIES DESTROYED
I mentioned before the ole’ timers.. those who lived through the decade of revolution.. As an 80s child, I only can contemplate the death of space exploration. .When I was just 5, I may or may not have known of the Challenger horror.. when I was growing up in the 90s, my love of space was not because of NASA exploration but instead because of my healthy diet nightly of staying awake late to listen to Art Bell expose and expand on potential alien life and UFO sightings around the world.. But my interviews of those who lived through the live stream — the true live stream during the 60s of the event — produce another interesting side effect of the moon landing: I am told the youth of that day were glued to TV sets, but the older Americans had disbelief in what they were seeing..
Hogwash! Man on the moon!? No way!
Perhaps this is where conspiracy theories were formed.. This could be the beginning times when people just could not believe their eyes.. It was all too perfect a story. Kennedy promised men on the moon before the end of the decade. And suddenly at the end of the decade we were going to the moon, safely on LIVE TV for the world to watch, land then leaving the moon without incident, arriving back at home.. all without injury. All without a situation. Without a disaster…
Also destroyed.. a legacy? This was reported last year:
US astronaut Buzz Aldrin is suing two of his children and his former business manager alleging they stole money from him and are slandering his legacy.
The lawsuit, which also claims they are stopping him from getting married, was filed after his children petitioned to take control of his finances.
They asked a judge to name them as his legal guardians because he is suffering from memory loss and confusion.
HOAX OR NO
There is still a large amount of people (and actually growing if you see popular opinion polls and compare throughout time) that do not think we actually were on the moon. Some real events may not have helped the NASA defenders over the years..
Back in 2009, media reports told us that Nasa taped over its only high-resolution images of the first moon walk with electronic data from a satellite or a later manned space mission, officials said today So the most historic event in the agency ever, and someone they managed to record something else over it to save money.. huh!?
Stories like that don’t help…
Rumors like this don’t help either: Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining‘ was released 11 years after the first landing on the moon. In that movie, Danny Torrance – played by child actor Danny Lloyd – is seen wearing a knitted jumper with an Apollo 11 rocket on its front. In the scene where Danny first encounters Room 237, he is seen playing on carpet that it is said to resemble an aerial photograph of the launchpad of Apollo 11.. When Danny picks up the tennis ball, which is supposed to represent the hoax itself, he then enters Room 237 and comes out of it attacked and bruised. Later, in the climax of the movie, Jack Torrance – played by Jack Nicholson – screams and raves about the responsibility that’s been placed on him, and that he has signed a contract to maintain the hotel and that he is responsible for holding its secrets.
The interpretation asserts that ‘The Shining’ was, in part, Kubrick trying to confess his role in the moon landing, from the carpets up to Jack Nicholson’s crazed rants acting as Kubrick’s vented frustrations.
Stanley Kubrick’s daughter was forced to push back against this in 2016..
Also this.. There was a viral video that was released on the internet where Buzz Aldrin was attending the National Book Fest in Washington DC and was being interviewed by an eight-year-old girl named Zoey.
Zoey asked the astronaut: “Why has nobody been to the Moon in such a long time?”
Aldrin’s eyes grow wide in the video and he says to the little girl:
“We didn’t go there, and that’s the way it happened. And if it didn’t happen, it would be nice to know why it didn’t happen.”
And just on Friday night, Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis featured this as the topic for the program.. and also included a strange clip of the astronauts joking to mission control about cue cards and stage hands!!
Mission Control to Neil Armstrong: Is Buzz Holding the cue cards for you… over?
Neil Armstrong: Cue cards have a no. We have no intention of competing with the professionals believe me.
Unidentified voice: yea Ron’s getting to be known as the silent CAPCOM. (unintelligible) OK.
Buzz Aldrin: The only problem Charlie, these TV stagehands don’t know where they stand.
Mission Control: Well he doesn’t really have a union card there we really can’t complain too much I guess.
Neil Armstrong: Hey the restraints here are doing a great job of pulling my pants down.
x x x
NAZI CONNECTION
There are tons of questions that people will constantly ask about whether the moon landing REALLY happened in space or in front of TV cameraman somewhere on some elaborate set directed by Stanley Kubrick..
If you side with the conspiracy theory that the landing was a hoax, suspend your disbelief for a moment and believe.. because there is a whole other conspiracy theory/fact for your enjoyment..
Filmmaker Aron Ranen got a grant for $65,000.. He got this grant in order to travel across the USA to interview former astronauts, mission controllers, scientists and others, in an attempt to prove that NASA actually sent men to the moon in 1969.
But instead of proving it was real, he was left with countless questions over whether it really happened.. His movie, MOONHOAX, is available for free download on YouTube and other platforms..
Along with the questions that persist whether it was real or not, Ranen asked some other question. If it was real, the set of facts that presents itself may be much more discomforting..
In the documentary, one of the Apollo mission’s few black employees reveals that the Ku Klux Klan operated openly at the Kennedy Space Center during the ’60s.
And more: A retired tracking engineer said that Nazi scientists helped the U.S. test hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific during the ’50s. This was a claim substantiated by recently declassified documents.
A former slave laborer recalls esteemed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun overseeing huge forced-labor camps in Germany during World War II (true).
And, finally, it turns out that all the basic data taped during the Apollo 11 mission has been misplaced–something confirmed in 2009 by NASA itself as we talked about earlier.
For your discernment, all the uploaded segments of MOONHOAX featuring some of the hard to stomach facts that Nazis helped the United States get to the moon, with one allegation that Neil Armstrong was the first to walk on the moon because he was a German, and Nazis assisting the US get there wanted it that way..
PUNCH DRUNK
50 years on…
50 years later. We have not really been back since….
We have been stalled here on this planet. A planet filled with war and mayhem. Instead of reaching for the stars we are just forced to continue grasping at straws that something will change..
If the moon landing really even happened to begin with.
And on that note, we will end with Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. When he was approached about the factual matters of the moon landing several years ago, he had an interesting response..
Back in 2002, Buzz was approached by a moon landing denier.. Aldrin decided to take action..
It would have been the punch heard around the world.. but after decades since 1969, everyone stopped listening.
