I don’t know which part of this story is more mind-boggling, the fact that forty years ago today people from Earth first walked on the Moon… or that someone taped over it.It is absurd to think archival footage of one of the Top 10—Top 5—achievements in the history of the species suffered a fate that would be a cliché premise for a sitcom episode:Debra: Ray, how could you tape over our wedding video?Raymond: It was the Super Bowl. The Giants. Eli. Manning.Looking at the footage from the period, it is rather monochromatic: everything is white—the spacecraft, the spacesuits, the astronauts, the personnel at Mission Control. And they are all men. There were people of color (and women) who worked on the Apollo Program but you wouldn’t know it to look at the official records. This may be one reason why black people were not overly supportive of the space program. To this day, there are those who don’t believe people have walked on the Moon or who view every loss of life as God’s punishment for trying to “go up in His heaven.” And there is the sentiment expressed so eloquently in Inner City Blues (Make We Wanna Holler):Rockets, Moon shotsSpend it on the have-nots…How much did the Apollo Program cost? Adjusted for inflation, over 14 years, $147 billion, about $10.5 billion/year. How much will the food stamp program cost US taxpayers this year? $36 billion. Arthur C. Clarke said everything in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey could have been realized in real life for the cost of the Vietnam War, adjusted for inflation, $686 billion. How much has the Global War on Terror cost the US since 2001? $864 billion… and counting.Reaching the Moon was supposed to be the first step in our conquest of the universe. By this time we were supposed to have permanent, self-sustaining bases on the Moon and human explorations of Mars. Our only permanent human presence in outer space is the International Space Station, and that’s only about 200 miles away.
There were no people of color in 2001, but in 2009, today Charles Bolden becomes the first African American chief of NASA, appointed by the first African American President of the United States. Another small step, another giant leap.And that’s pretty mind-boggling.
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