Spirit of space pioneers lives on

“WE choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

THE words are those of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The year was 1962. The place: Houston, Texas.

I do not remember JFK ever saying that. I was too young, but I will never forget these other, more famous words which rang around the world seven years later: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” They were spoken by Neil Armstrong. The date was July 20, 1969. The place: Mare Tranquillitatis or the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon. Armstrong had fulfilled his president’s dream.

Barely in my teens, I was sitting up in bed at 3am Irish time in striped pyjamas, transfixed by the ghostly flicker of the black and white television. I had to get up for school in a few hours, but who cared? Secondary school was further away than the Moon, as far as I was concerned. This was history in the making and I felt part of it.

I had been gazing at the screen for hours, occasionally adjusting the “rabbit’s ears” on top of the TV and watching the bulky figure make a hesitant descent on what looked like a makeshift ladder, the kind my father would have used to wallpaper my bedroom. Then, at 10.56pm Eastern Standard Time, the world changed forever as the first human set foot on the Moon.

I hadn’t done my homework but I had done my space-work.

I noted that, after lift-off, the Apollo spacecraft reached Earth parking orbit after 11 minutes.

After one-and-a-half orbits the Saturn thrusters fired and the astronauts began their odyssey in earnest. I had long ago worked out the enormous energy required to breach the Earth’s gravity and had plotted on my school notebook the trajectory required to get to the Moon.

I had done all that with the help of my very own NASA pen pals — one of them Armstrong, the other Edwin Aldrin, better known as “Buzz” and Michael Collins, commander of the lunar module.

Long before the Moon landing, the Apollo missions had fired the imaginations of millions of people the world over. I was a space cadet, still in short pants but with an inexhaustible thirst for anything to do with space exploration. Every one of those ghostlike black-and-white images on television — from re-runs of

Sputnik, which looked like a giant pincushion, to those slow motion space walks — was like The Sopranos and Prison Break rolled into one.

Two years before I had begun writing to them, asking for photos, information, anything to sate a schoolboy’s appetite for space exploration. “Don’t expect too much,” my father warned. “They are very busy men and may not even get to see your letters.” For once, dad was wrong. The letters came flying back with regularity. Mostly they were typed but they were real letters, real responses. We were even on first name terms. The last communication before Apollo 11 included a request from Neil, Buzz and Michael. “Please keep us in your prayers,” they wrote. I assured them I would.

Nineteen minutes after Armstrong made his fateful descent into history he was joined by Aldrin, who described the “magnificent desolation” of the surface. Before leaving the Moon, the astronauts removed a sheet of stainless steel to unveil the plaque affixed to the lunar module leg under the descent ladder and read to the worldwide television audience: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.” It was signed by Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin, and President Richard Nixon.

That all sounds cheesy now but at the time it meant that, with spirit and endeavour, mankind could achieve the impossible.

The footprints left by the astronauts on the Sea of Tranquility are more permanent than most solid structures on Earth. Barring a meteorite impact, those impressions in the lunar soil will last for millions of years.

For those space cadets who, like myself, witnessed it, the spirit of those pioneers will live on.