** Because ‘Back to the Future’ was a tad too obvious. **

The moon was back in the news this past week so I thought I’d blog about that, rather than my regular scheduled topic. The attention is due to Google’s $30m Lunar X prize, and yes I’m referring to that Google. It sounds like a lot, but US$30 million is a pittance for the giant of search engines when you think of all the attendant publicity that’s going to occur in the next few years. Hmmmm, starting to get a bit snarky, aren’t I? Okay. According to the prize’s website, the money goes to the the team who manages to:

land a privately funded robotic craft on the Moon that is capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters [sic] and [send] video, images and data back to Earth.

Before I continue, let me take you back to … oh, let’s say 1966. What was the world’s state of play in that year? Well,

• India and Pakistan sign a peace agreement (but neglected to tackle Kashmir … an opportunity lost)
• the United States of America was still involved in the Vietnam War
• Robert Menzies had just resigned as Prime Minister of Australia
• Ian Smith still governed Rhodesia

All those things set the time clearly for me, but are all political aren’t they? Let’s see if I can find something else:

• PanAm is still a viable US airline
• Hewlett-Packard releases its very first computer
• IBM releases DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory). Yes, the precursor of all that RAM you read about in PCs nowadays
• The world’s first effective rubella vaccine is introduced
• Andrew Warhol is still alive
• The Beatles were still together (Yellow Submarine album)

The following books were released:

• The Comedians by Graham Greene
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
• A Dream of Africa by Camara Laye
• Rocannon’s World by Ursula K le Guin
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• The Thirty-First Floor by Per Wahlöö

and the following TV shows had just started:

• Batman (the Adam West version)
• Star Trek (Classic, with William Shatner)
• also The Green Hornet (with Bruce Lee), The Monkees, and Mission Impossible (the original series)

Okay, got the picture? (The snapshot is thanks to reading at Answers.com, by the way.) Why am I harping on 1966? Because that’s the year Luna 9 landed on the Moon and sent back postcards (five black-and-white stereoscopic panorama photos of the lunar surface).

The mention of the Lunar X prize gives me the opportunity to correct a few misconceptions that have been bugging me for a while. It was the Soviets, not the Americans, who put the first man-made object on the moon, way back in 1959 (Luna 2), just as they put the first probe into Earth’s orbit in 1957 (Sputnik), and just as they put the first man into space in 1961. Everybody knows about Yuri Gagarin, but it really is troubling that the space programme of the Soviets (developed without the kind of help from, as Jon Stewart once put it, the “ageing Nazi scientists” that the USA had) has somehow been forgotten.

The Soviets had a very healthy and successful lunar exploration programme that began in the late 1950s and went right through to 1976, centred primarily around … tell me if this sounds familiar … self-contained robotic probes. And now, almost 50 years — or, half a CENTURY — later, we’re trying to replicate that?! Doesn’t it all sound a bit retrogressive to you? Surely after five decades of technological advance, we should be a teenier step further along the space exploration timeline?

The answer in this particular case is, of course, political will. For both empires’ space programmes, the 1970s (for various reasons) spelt the death-knell for lunar habitats and all that kind of space-geek candy. If there’s anything that so starkly illustrates the way human will trumps technology, it’s the space programme. Likewise, whenever I hear about a “ground-breaking technological advance that will change the very way we live”, I always try delving into the human factors behind it … like the ageing baby boomer generation and Viagra. Yeah, couldn’t see that one coming (no pun intended). * snicker * The human factors determine the technology, which then determines other, consequent, human factors. But the human factor was there first … always is.

So now we have those factors coming into play again (Google, fame, sense of romance, entrepreneurship, government apathy) and we’re back to where we were HALF A CENTURY AGO (just in case you’d forgotten). Oh joy. Can’t wait. Be still my racing heart, etc. etc.

POSTSCRIPT: A great book on the invisible topic of the Soviet space programme is Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration by Brian Harvey. We have it in our library.