Moonshot memories

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

the moon landing from the african american perspective.

I must admit I heard Whitey on the Moon, around about the first time I saw my first documentary about apollo (Which would have been at about 15 when we got satellite tv) and Gil Scott Heron makes a strong point. I think it's a flawed point, but It is very easy to see how so many african americans might come to the conclusion that the primary purpose of apollo was to troll them. The issue I have with this line of thinking is that spending on apollo, and spending on alleviating institutionalized racist poverty aren't competing with each other, it's not an either or, it's just that the US govt had an interest in doing one, and no interest in doing the other. It's an argument that could have been more convincingly made about the Vietnam war, which unlike the apollo programme had no upsides, and cost ten times as much (Or the sort of level of spending you'd need to undertake to make serious improvements in alleviating poverty across the US) and didn't actually do anything other than humiliate the US. One of the things about being the global hegemon, is that there is always enough money to do pretty much anything. The trick is to convince people that there isn't.

[DCI Harry Batt]

I was 5 when they stopped. We didn't have TV though. I have no memory of seeing anything at the time, though I do remember moon talk.

[Sits]

I remember listening to something about that on the radio a few years ago. The Apollo 11 pictures were relayed to Australia, because Australia was facing the moon at the time. The video on the screen in Australia couldn't be rebroadcast to television because of broadcast format incompatibility. So they simply pointed a television camera at that screen, which is actually the main reason for the poor quality of the television picture. Now, apparently somebody in Australia was actually recording the original live feed directly to tape, but forgot about it and wiped most of the tapes. But a couple of years ago, they found some unwiped tape that had a couple of minutes of the original feed on it.

If you get a chance watch the Aussie movie The Dish which tells the story from the country town of Parkes where the dish which bounced the signal remains today. Decent little museum.

Parkes also hosts an annual gathering of Elvis impersonators.