{"id":77241,"date":"2019-08-05T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T16:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/25yearslatersite.com\/?p=77241"},"modified":"2023-10-20T23:07:41","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T03:07:41","slug":"fly-me-to-the-moon-the-apollo-11-moon-landing-in-popular-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tvobsessive.com\/2019\/08\/05\/fly-me-to-the-moon-the-apollo-11-moon-landing-in-popular-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Fly Me to the Moon: The Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Popular Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
There are few moments of our modern cultural history that resonate so deeply they become touchstones. Where were you when?<\/em> or Do you remember? <\/em>people ask. How you answer reveals a lot about you: your age, your ideals, how capital “R” Romantic you are.<\/p>\n Many of these events are tragic. Think of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., or John Lennon, or the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and July 7, 2005 attacks on the London Underground. But some are triumphant: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, and the July 20, 1969 Moon landing.<\/p>\n That last one is especially rallying. The Moon landing represents so much about mid-century America, the hopeful leaders of the world, still poised as a land of opportunity and hope in spite of the massive unrest in its populace. It was the culmination of more than a decade of jockeying between two nuclear superpowers no longer satisfied with world domination but setting their sights on the cosmos now, instead. And it inspired a generation to dream big, and infiltrated the pop culture products that they would grow up to produce.<\/p>\n It was, perhaps, emblematic of the last gasps of optimism in our collective future. NASA no longer sends manned spacecraft to the Moon (though they are hoping to do so by 2024<\/a>) and other nations are just not able to put the money into developing their own space programs to do the same, as much as they might want to. We also have some pretty<\/a> pressing<\/a> issues<\/a> to<\/a> deal<\/a> with<\/a> at<\/a> home<\/a>. It seems unlikely that we will ever live on the Moon, or Mars, like The Jetsons<\/em> promised.<\/p>\n But, the International Space Station is operated by teams of scientists from around the world. That’s the closest thing we have to the United Federation of Planets, I guess.<\/p>\n Which is where our exploration of the Moon Landing begins and ends: in the world of pop culture.<\/p>\n October 4, 1957 was the day the Russians sent Sputnik into orbit. Sputnik was the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object sent into Earth’s orbit. It also kicked off the Space Race.<\/p>\n Our fascination with space is nothing new. Everyone, living ancient civilizations right on up to that moment, had looked to the sky with wonder at what it contained and what it might mean. Science fiction had dabbled with ideas throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; art and social movements like Futurism pushed the boundaries through designs based on movement, speed, youthful innovation, and industry. But the idea that we could actually send things there<\/em> was the first of many giant leaps for mankind that happened in the next 12 years.<\/p>\n When U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration into being in 1958, the race to colonize the heavens shifted into high gear. By 1961, President Kennedy made the promise to put a man on the Moon by the close of the decade. These were big dreams. Up until that point, Russian scientists had sent animals into space (most famous of these being poor Laika, the stray dog from Moscow doomed to a near-Earth orbit death on Sputnik 2, a little more than a month after Sputnik launched). It didn’t seem feasible to send humans to the Moon.<\/p>\n Here, too, the Russians beat the United States, sending cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space in March 1961. Two months later, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space.<\/p>\n The race was on.<\/p>\n Pop culture had caught on to the feverish pace of space exploration by this point. Instead of shlocky B-movies like\u00a0Plan 9 from Outer Space<\/em>, the world had been turned on by the cool gadgetry of shows like The Jetsons,\u00a0<\/em>which imagined a somewhat-idealized look at where our future might be headed. Flying cars, houses above the clouds…yes, you still had to commute to work, but you got to do it in so much style!<\/p>\n That style was called “Googie<\/a>” in architecture and “Atomic Age<\/a>” in industrial design and “Space Age<\/a>” in the world of fashion and decor. It reached its heyday during the Space Race and is fairly universally recognized in connection to the 1960s today. Think starbursts, chrome detailing on everything, sweeping angles and lots of glass, brightly-coloured plastics, shiny fabrics for your clothes—that’s what we’re talking about.<\/p>\n Food products like Tang became immensely popular because of its association with the manned spaceflight program (following its inclusion in John Glenn’s Mercury mission in 1962); what followed it was a variety of “convenience foods” like Cool Whip and Jell-O, the precursors to the kitschy “astronaut food” you can buy at science museums today. But their history as products of the Space Race links them inextricably with this period in time.<\/p>\n And if all of the experimentation and wild design ideas could have a sound, it was in the Space Age music of bands like The Tornados, whose hit 1962 song “Telstar<\/a>” celebrates—of all things—a communications satellite.<\/p>\n The early ’60s were tremendous fun in the world of pop culture, art, and design. But the Cold War was still a war, after all. Nothing reminded people of that quite like the failed Bay of Pigs<\/a> invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis<\/a>. The Space Race was a cutesy offshoot of a very real international crisis between the world’s two nuclear superpowers; our very existence hung in the balance like never before.<\/p>\n Pop culture responded to these and other tensions by the mid-60s. TV shows like\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0<\/em>explored a world in which we had learned to live in peace and relative harmony not just with each other but with other species as well. By 1968, Kubrick’s\u00a02001: A Space Odyssey<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>had taken the utopia of\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0<\/em>and turned it dystopic, forcing us to examine the intersection of humanity and technology like never before. It was a time of introspection, a hint at what was coming for us as the nascent environmental and various social justice movements kicked into high gear following the lead of the Civil Rights movements earlier in the decade.<\/p>\n What was clear was this: the desire to explore beyond the reaches of our Earth had produced anxieties and exultations in us as a species. That’s what the pop-cultural record shows us.<\/p>\n When Apollo 11 launched on July 16th, 1969, an estimated one million people watched from the area surrounding the launch site. Several dozen million more likely watched on televisions the world over. It was an American mission, with an American flag on the side of the shuttle and Americans in the cockpit, but this was something tremendously important for the whole of humanity. Astronauts had completed orbits around the Moon before but no one had attempted descent to the lunar surface. If successful, the implications were staggering. The sky, quite literally, was no longer the limit.<\/p>\n The technical details of Apollo 11’s flight are tedious to list off in great detail. The basics of it are as follows: it took the crew four days, six hours, and 45 minutes to reach the Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the two astronauts chosen to pilot the\u00a0Eagle<\/em> lunar module from\u00a0Columbia\u00a0<\/em>to the surface, while Michael Collins stayed inside to man the orbiting spacecraft. The\u00a0Eagle\u00a0<\/em>didn’t land where it was supposed to and experienced some computer problems on the way down, but Armstrong and Aldrin landed successfully. After several hours of preparation, including the taking of communion, they made egress. Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on an extraterrestrial surface.<\/p>\nSet Out For A Great Adventure<\/h2>\n
“One word: P<\/em>lastics<\/i>“<\/h2>\n
One Giant Leap for Mankind<\/h2>\n