Last night I did something I haven’t done for over fifty years. I watched a moon rocket take off.
I’d forgotten just how exciting it was.
I only just remember seeing the moon landings. I was three years old when my parents woke me in the middle of the night. They brought me through to the little black and white TV in the lounge to see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I was tired, I wanted to go back to bed, but my parents refused. They said I would remember this. They were right. I don’t remember very many other things from that age1.
I quickly grew to love rockets, though. They were on the television all the time, both real ones and pretend ones like Thunderbird 3. Everyone I knew, it seemed, had the Airfix Saturn V kit. I knew (or I thought I knew) everything about rockets. I was surprised, watching the TV last night, just how much the presenters were having to explain. About countdowns and separation and launch delays.
But of course, people nowadays don’t have the advantage of Ladybird books, in particular ‘How it works’ THE ROCKET2. I went and found my copy this morning. There’s a photograph of it at the top of this post. This is a book from a very different time, when six year olds were expected to read about Newton’s third law of Motion (see page 8).
Looking back, it seems as if they were launching rockets every week in the early 70s (I know they weren’t, but I was very young.) I quickly got bored with launches and discovered other things to be obsessed with, like trains and lego.
The trouble was, space exploration was an every day thing to me. It had been part of my world for as long as I could remember. Literally
But watching Artemis II lift off last night, I remembered just how exciting rockets were. There was the countdown. Countdowns are exciting, every writer knows that. Even Mr Spoon knows that. I watched on and off throughout the evening, watched the astronauts being fastened in, listened to the back and forth at launch control. I was there for the breathless pause at minus ten minutes when it looked as if things weren’t going ahead, I felt excitement at the resumption of the count…
And finally, the lift off. Watching that ship climbing into the sky (it seemed to rise much faster then I remembered) the sheer visible power of the thing, the thought that four people are leaving our planet… I was surprised how moved I was. I’d forgotten what it was like.
I remembered why I became an SF writer
Every so often I’m reminded that we live in the age of miracles.
I wonder how long it will be before we take it for granted again?
- I do remember the BBC News leading with the Beatles breaking up. I’m not sure I knew who the Beatles were at the time ↩︎
- If you like Ladybird books and you live near Cambridge you might want to visit The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists Exhibition ↩︎
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Tony Ballantyne 