John,

Nice piece.

I want you to keep going on this Space theme because now you got me interested.

In Nashville, last night, I conversed with a moon denialist, and started thinking about all this. He raised the argument that nobody ever returned to the moon after 1969, and also that it is too far away, though I forget which statistics he cited about distances. I don't ever want to become one of the condescending legions who act superior to those who harbor doubt about "indisputable" facts; My use of the word "denialist" was just my own inside joke with myself...but having said that, I wonder what YOU think.

I've given it some thought, and all my feathers are smooth.

I think it's much better if they never did go to the moon. I mean, who needs it? Above all, no mother should ever have to go through that kind of anxiety about her son's whereabouts and safety. That's who I care about--the astronaut's mothers. It's barbaric! Imagine their delight when their sons reassured them, "Mom, we're not really going to the moon. We're just going to a studio in Santa Fe..."

Joy!

Win/win.

Thanks. I have in fact been looking back into the moon hoax literature. The notion that the Moon is "too far" is just wrong. The hard part was getting big payloads out of the earth's atmosphere. Which really only meant building huge rockets and hoping they didn't blow up on the pad. Once you get your vehicle up out of our atmosphere, the rest is just math to aim it correctly. And of course we went back after 69 -- there were six landings from 69 to 72. What kills me is that we abandoned it after only 3 years.

I don't dismiss the hoaxers out of hand. I don't dismiss most conspiracy theories out of hand. Of course we should always question the official version of anything. Even when conspiratologists are wrong in their specifics they're right to be skeptical and even paranoid. Regarding manned space flight, eg, I'm pretty sure that there has been an entire black ops military space program going on in the shadow of the ostensibly civilian one, and we in the public only know a fraction of it.

Personally I want the moon hoaxers to be wrong because I want us on the Moon and on Mars and out to the stars. I still believe what I grew up believing, that pioneering and exploring is what we're meant to do. It happens that I had lunch just the other day with Frederick Ordway, a former NASA guy and the technical consultant to Kubrick on 2001. He grew up in Manhattan reading sci-fi and went on to join rocket clubs as a teen and become a rocketeer and work with Wernher von Braun and the whole deal. He said that if the space program hadn't been derailed for the shuttle we could've been on Mars by 1987. Broke my heart. I think we SHOULD have been. Yeah it's dangerous and all that. So what? So was sailing to America. It's what we do. There are no good economic or scientific arguments for it. We should do it because we should do it. Like climbing Everest or reaching the South Pole. On the face of it those are ridiculous, useless endeavors. But they beat the maundering, sissy, Oh what's the point malaise our culture has been in since the mid-70s. "Say, let's go to the Moon!" "Naahh. It's too far. And there's nothing to do up there." Aaargh. Fine. Stay home and watch Real Housewives.

Your comment as a mom reminds me of a line from a Robert Heinlein young adults novel of the late 40s, "Rocket Ship Galileo," where this group of teenage rocket enthusiasts plan a trip. One kid's mom wraps a scarf around his neck and tells him, "Now you be a good boy on the Moon, Arthur." Awww.

Let’s agree with the moon denialists for a moment and say that the entire Apollo program was nothing more than a very elaborate miniseries. If that’s the case, we can then judge the results on aesthetic grounds
Start with the Sistine Chapel of space art: the earthrise photograph (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia...e_102.html) that the Apollo 8 crew took on Christmas Eve 1968. Here is an American re-telling of Genesis: light separating from dark, the land created sui generis from the void. The point of view contrasts the existentially bleak surface of the moon with the vivid dot of Earth painted in American white and blue (red absent from the picture.) Here is your home in the middle of nothing, the picture says, and we, the United States, contain it whole. Earth is being born as it rises from behind the nothing of the moon. As Frank Borman read the King James telling of the creation story, we see for ourselves the modern version: NASA is revealing what you land-bound mortals have never seen, which is how utterly humble the pretty disc is. I find it harder to believe that a screenwriter could conjure this scene than that Frank Borman was in fact, circling the moon in a canister equipped with a radio and TV camera.
As for the moon landings themselves, denialists say they were fictions, built out of Hollywood tricks. If so, then we paid NASA billions of dollars to produce an exceedingly dull movie. From the moon, the camera angles are dull as ditchwater, slightly hazy and video keeps blowing out the highlights. (A good cinematographer would have fixed that on Day One.) As documentary work, the moon shots are about as interesting as gold course groundskeeping. You would think that the product would have been slicker, more refined. And even if the rough edges were left intact for verisimilitude, a half-decent director would understand the attention span of the American public, which is to say, nothing These videos, instead, go on and on. I own a CD collection of unedited audio tapes of the Apollo 11 mission and as you might imagine, for all the drama of the 3-2-1-ignition (not blastoff) 99% of the transcripts sound like plain old military speech. The astronauts talk in acronyms and shorthand. (“ACFs cut off”, “DMG progressing”, “switching over to manual override”). No attempt is made for anything that smacks of drama, that would make for a compelling story line. Could the moon shots be nothing more than elaborate fabrications? Remotely possible, I guess, and in fact, I have no first hand knowledge of any of this. For me, the space program was entirely a televised spectacle. But real people witnessed rocket launches at Cape Canaveral.
All successful technology is magic. We can flick a switch to light a room, which is equally as unlikely and far-fetched as landing on the moon, but no one denies that we can do such a thing. Apollo 11 was magic on a grand scale. To me, the space shots glow with the grace of science, making something beautiful out of the humilities of physics and telecommunications. I would expect the lies to be prettier than the messy but compelling record that NASA left behind.

I've been saying for a long time that it was a darn shame NASA didn't hire BBD&O or some other New York firm to do their PR. Rob Godwin, a space nut who publishes lots of NASA-related books at his Apogee Books, told me that the tv camera on Apollo 11 was a last-minute afterthought. They were going to go all the way there and record the giant leap with an Astro Brownie or such. As it is they goofed by shooting b&w, which made it all look even bleaker than it is. Then they blew out the cams on the next two landings. By the time they got it right (and in color), it had been two years since the first landing and everyone had forgotten the series was even on. Knocking golfballs around up there sealed it. A good PR firm would have sent a troupe of Moon Maidens or something to bounce around and shake their pom-poms. Anything other than... golf. It made the Moon look like a place to go after you retire.

Mr. Strasbaugh: I, too, want the future back. Really, I'd settle for a small bit of the future as promised in my childhood in the form of robot maids. Yes, robots to do the cleaning and the laundry. Mop the kitchen etc.

Do I feel cheated by this lack of robot maid service?

Deeply, Mr. Strausbaugh, perhaps even to the point of being bitter.