:: Shekhar Bhatia

Back to the moon

Shekhar Bhatia

July.10: It’s been 40 years since man landed on the moon.

I remember listening to the running commentary on our primitive tube radio in 1969. I think it was a Voice of America live broadcast from Mission Control in Houston, or perhaps it was BBC. I had attached an extra-length antenna cable, a thin black wire, and stretched it to a window. We believed that the longer the wire the better the reception.

This was long before television was launched in India. I don’t recall the exact time of the moonwalk, but I had made an elaborate note of the Apollo 11 sequence of events, and converted all times to Indian time: when the capsule Eagle would separate from the mother ship, the time it would land on the Sea of Tranquillity, and when Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin would open the hatch and step out for their historic moonwalk.

It was a momentous mission, filled with tension and drama at every stage. The third astronaut, Michael Collins, was orbiting the moon in the mother ship, 70 miles above. His job was to bring them back. Imagine the suspense: what if something went wrong and the two were stranded on the moon? Three astronauts had died in an earlier mission, Apollo 1, when their capsule caught fire on their way back to earth.

I was worried about the quality of reception. I had already missed out on the entire descent sequence, including Armstrong’s line, "The Eagle has landed", and did not want further disappointment. There was a lot of disturbance on the line, and reluctantly, I tried to turn the knob to another station. I say "reluctantly" because it was an old radio assembled by the neighbourhood electrician, and I was afraid I might not be able to tune it back to my original setting.

We heard Armstrong’s voice as he emerged out of the lunar module. We could feel the suspense, and huddled closer around the radio. There was a lot of crackle and their voices weren’t clear. We imagined the scene some quarter of a million miles from earth, and tried to focus on every word. And suddenly we lost transmission! Not a sound out of the box. Just a few more minutes and we would have heard the immortal words, "That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". Missing out on Eagle’s landing was bad enough; this was a double whammy. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. The two astronauts spent two-and-a-half hours on the surface of the moon, and I couldn’t hear a word of their conversation with the scientists in Houston. I tried every possible thing — stretched the antenna cable further outside the window and ripped open the cabinet and gently re-fixed the hot tubes — but nothing worked. We had missed the moment we had waited so long for. One billion people heard it and we couldn’t. I could have killed the man who sold us the radio. The day after the landing, I switched it on and lo, it worked brilliantly. I could have kicked it.

A year later, in 1970, the three Apollo 11 astronauts — Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins — visited Bombay. You cannot imagine the three-deep cheering crowd that had lined the route of their motorcade from the airport; I read the next day that over a million people had come to the public reception in Azad Maidan in downtown Bombay. I was there in that crowd.

There were more lunar landings after that but it wasn’t the same. The last time man stepped foot on the moon was in 1972. George Bush had announced plans for a return to the moon by 2020 when astronauts are expected to spend a week on lunar soil. That would be quite a historic achievement, a milestone.

India, too, has ambitious plans to land a man on the moon. But we first have to send a man into orbit. The only Indian to orbit the earth, cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma, went up on a Soviet spacecraft Soyuz. (The term "astronaut" is derived from the Greek word ástron meaning a star and nautes meaning sailor. The Russians call them cosmonauts from the Greek word "kosmos" meaning universe.)

When I read that it would be 40 years since man landed on the moon, I was tempted to revisit that moment. I downloaded the two-minute voice clip of "The Eagle has landed", and also watched the video of Armstrong taking slow, halting steps down the ladder.

It’s quite clear that he said "One small step for man" and not "for a man" that he was meant to. Journalists wondered if the word was lost in transmission, but experts at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) who scanned the tapes thoroughly state that he didn’t say it. Perhaps he was too excited.

When my son was in school, he told me there were kids in his class who still did not believe that man had actually landed on the moon. I have no reason to disbelieve him. Do a Google for "man landing on moon" and in the first 10 results you will find "Was the Apollo moon landing fake?" and "top 10 reasons why moon landing was a hoax". When news broke that Nasa had lost the original recordings of the moonwalk, these non-believers became more active: "It’s all a cover-up", they said. I lost interest in the story and have no idea if the tapes were found.

There’s an interesting tailpiece to what Armstrong said on the moon. It was rumoured that soon after landing, he looked up at the earth and made an enigmatic remark, "Good luck, Mr Gorsky". It seems when he was a kid, he overheard his neighbour, Mrs Gorsky, tell her husband, "Sex? You want sex? You’ll get sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!"

Armstrong, a recluse for a long time, laughed when he heard the joke, but denied it. I came across an official Nasa transcript of the moonwalk with the words, "Neil never said ‘Good luck, Mr Gorsky’ at any time during the mission". What he said was, "Yes, the surface is fine and powdery…"

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com