Not a Partial Lunar Eclipse

I was hoping to post a photo of tonight's partial lunar eclipse for this historic day, but unfortunately it's cloudy. So instead here's a photo of an Allium from my garden.

It's 50 years ago today that Apollo 11 launched for its mission to attempt the first manned landing on the Moon. I was 6 years old and unfortunately I don’t remember the event, nor the problem stricken Apollo 13 mission in Apr 1970. I do remember the Moon missions with the lunar rover which were Apollo 15, 16 and 17 (the last Apollo mission) in 1971 and 1972. In particular I remember my mum calling me in from the garden to watch a moon walk and I protested as I’d seen it all before. In my defence, as a child I’d grown up in the middle of the space race and walking on the moon was just what we did, it was routine to me. It would never ever have occurred to me that we wouldn’t go back for any more manned missions – for 47 years and counting. 

So I’ve been making up for my lack of memory of the event by watching lots of the commemorative documentaries on tv and I’ve particularly enjoyed the podcast ‘13 Minutes to the Moon’ which is brilliant. So many things could and did go wrong, it was a true miracle we landed on the Moon and got the astronauts back home safely. It was a great group effort by a large number of people at NASA (including the wonderful female mathematicians featured in the brilliant film Hidden Figures). 

To me the main lasting legacy arose from the photos of the Earth taken from Apollo 8, the first to orbit the moon at the end of 1968.  We realised that we are all one people on one beautiful blue planet without any arbitrary political borders.  It’s so good to see that a lot of space exploration is now an international effort.