This year is the second for the 'Moon Clock'. It is based conceptually on the 'Doomsday Clock' of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In theory their clock striking midnight would mean charred copies of that publication would drift in the wind across ruined cities.

This 'clock' represents the likelihood of a human being standing on the Moon once again. If and when a person stands on Lunar soil again, the time will read midnight! Now there is still, at least in name, a funded program to return to the Moon. This program is still reeling forward, in trouble here and there but quietly neglecting the Lunar return portion of the plans. Thus the clock is moved back 5 minutes from last year to 11 minutes to midnight. The image at right is a composite of frames from the Apollo 11 video showing the LM and Buzz Aldrin, using overlapping frames to cancel out video noise and overexposure.

  The Twentieth Century will be remembered as among other things a time of unprecedented ingenuity and brutality. Once in a great while Great Projects come about where our skills are applied towards things that benefit and inspire the world. Apollo was such a marshaling of the best of our minds and our industry. It was something most of those who worked on believed in deeply. Apollo was not just another canal or weapons system, indeed it was a nationalistic demonstration of the prowess of the United States over the USSR, but it was also a glorious crusade to bring the heavens within our grasp. Apollo 11 gave a magical edge to that eventful summer of 1969, as titanic cultural forces clashed and flowed past each other in America. The Vietnam war was at it's height, demonstrations against it were becoming 'mainstream' and chemical visions colorfully enveloped many young minds. NASA was winning the technological battle but losing the mass appeal it needed to sustain human space exploration. Vietnam was swallowing up much of American discretionary funds, of which NASA as well as many other worthy programs depended. The military backgrounds of most astronauts, a natural choice considering the rigors of such pioneering missions, may have contributed to high profile space flights being largely regarded as part of the Military Industrial Complex, alien to the youth movement which was starting to grab at the reins of power. In retrospect perhaps the biggest mistake NASA made in the Public Relations aspects of Apollo was to never plan to show the world the faces of people on the Moon out of fear of the brief ultraviolet exposure if the sun fell on their faces. Apollo was thus a series of faceless armored forms, a prototype of increasinly negative public associations. It wasn't until the last Lunar expedition that Harrison Schmitt raised his visor in front of the camera to give history the best live look at a human being in a spacesuit on the Moon.

Now people being on the Moon is little more than an inner vision, and increasing numbers even view it as a fantasy. Apollo 11 was 39 years ago this summer, and forevermore it will stand as a sign of the golden age when such things were possible. Apollo will always be a beacon across the gulf of time, a benchmark, a peak, and a point of transformation in what was possible. So long as history is taught the time which brought about our first steps on another world will attract attention. If the bulk of our future advanced civilization ever lives outside the Earth Apollo will stand as an early sign post to those circumstances. If humanity never makes it to the Moon again then the fact we could once do it will mark our era as a time when the accomplishments of civilization briefly out paced its pitfalls.
  Now the Moon is 'old history'. The mighty Saturn V rockets lie in pieces displayed like the funeral barges of vanished Pharaohs, and the Moon rocks are displayed in museums alongside other artifacts of vanished times. The Moon is receding from us and becoming another Pompeii whose artifacts we marvel at under glass cases.
 We have turned our back on the future as a nation and as a people, at least for the time being. We dare not build the largest tower in the world to replace those that fell in New York, out of fear and poverty. The 'New Frontier' of the Kennedy era has been quietly re-drawn to our immediate surroundings. There are plans to go beyond Low Earth Orbit, with money flowing toward that end, so there is hope to cling to. It is possible that none of those who were there will be alive when the next visit to the Moon takes place. If it does not happen the Moon will revert to the experience of the ancients for growing numbers of people who never lived while we could visit the Moon. After the 12 who were there are all gone, those who remember Apollo will steadily dwindle in number, until some time around 2050. Then Apollo will pass into the mists of history such as the Civil War has done and World War I is now doing. The Moon walks are mere ghosts on videotape, and all of us may well be ghosts before such a thing happens again. The next photographs taken of the Apollo footsteps made by Aliens, Humans or their descendants may well show noticeable meteorite pitting across the once fresh footprints accumulated over the ages. How different the Earth's civilizations, language, and operating philosophies or physical forms may be by then!

July 2008:

Once again the gulfs of time are seen to have spread a little more widely, a few more people connected with the journeys to the Moon are gone, and museums show replicas and rarer real artifacts of the era when our reach extended to other places a person could stand on. Now the world is a harder place to work such miracles. The will do do great things is being sapped by the cost of energy and other economic tremblings causing people to look at the stability of their banks rather than up at the frontiers above. Now oil money is funding the tallest structure ever conceived, a mile high skyscraper in Saudi Arabia. The old 'Spirit of America' which once exulted in doing the formally impossible is in 'traction' with only time telling how well any renewal will proceed. The greatest thing coming from the Moon this year has been the amazing HDTV transmissions from the Japanese KAGUYA (SELENE) spacecraft. For the first time since the Apollo era stunning video can be seen passing over familiar Lunar landmarks, and showing Earth rising and setting behind the Moon. These images are better than any moving images from the Moon that Apollo has left us. In the mean time the digital archiving of Apollo photography is proceeding, the results of which will be priceless.

The past extends to Apollo 11 from now through a gulf of 39 years, and again the leap of the same step further back brings us to 1930. The question nags along the way, was progress faster and more vigorous in that time interval before Apollo 11 or the years afterwards? The answer is obviously yes to faster recent progress in some realms, but in others, such as our powers to spend the vast sums preparing for wars on noble things to enrich mankind, we are as helpless as lemmings massing for the next march off the cliff. One has to look at the progress of air and space flight since 1930 to 1969 to wonder if we have since reached the point of 'diminishing' returns regarding breakthroughs in those fields. Around 1930 the world population was 2 billion people, less than a third of todays. Banks were failing in 1930, the Bank of the United States in New York taking with it the savings of half a million people. Flash bulbs were introduced, at last allowing instantaneous photos to be captured in dim light. The first 'supermarkets' appeared in the US that year. A Yellow Fever vaccine eased the death rate due to that cause. Investigations of the outer Solar System rewarded Clyde Tombaugh with the discovery of the last of the 'classic planets', distant Pluto. Today a spacecraft speeds toward that small icy world, no longer officially a planet but now known to have numerous moons. It may be that true exploration of space is fated to be a vicarious experience through the extensions of our senses provided in faraway places by far flung robot probes. But there was a time when human beings did the exploring, and the furthest we have thus collectively reached is still remembered by a large but ageing percentage of the populace. The Moon looms bright over the uncertain world on this anniversary, bearing the remnants of our journeys there. Some day those may be the longest surviving artifacts of human existence on this world.

July 2007:

  This year the anniversary of Apollo gives us a Moon looking something as it did that glorious July day, when it was a waxing crescent in the warm evening skies. To be alive then and able to recall the moment when Humanity existed on more than one world is a treasure beyond words. 'White Bird' by 'It's A Beautiful Day' hangs in my mind, one of the memories of that wondrous era when the fabric of reality itself was being explored on a number of fronts. The collective journeys took some of us along in the adventure of Apollo, for many others the 'Space Program', as it was called when there indeed was such a thing, seemed irrelevant.The 'Vision for Space Exploration' is proceeding in methodic but languid fashion, with things looking scary on the hardware front. The new launch vehicles being developed for the VSE are fighting weight and performance problems even as the designs begin to be acted upon. The new Lunar Lander is gaining weight at a terrifying rate, as did the Apollo LM in its development days. The engineering problems are one thing, assuring political support over the required time after changes in administrations is another. It is still the most hopeful period of time since the end of Apollo for those who long to see live TV from the Moon again. The post World War II national mind set to 'be the greatest' and to 'build the biggest' and otherwise proudly show what we can do may be faltering, but perhaps it is just the basic improbability of any given idea being given life by a group of resourceful people and money. A troubling sign that our 'spirit' may have been broken by '911' is that we seem to be afraid to build the tallest building in the world because of the evacuation time required. If China or some other nation managed to return to the Moon only a minority of Americans may feel 'left behind' by then. In the mean time there has been no luck in finding any of the three copies of the original telemetry tapes of the Apollo 11 television broadcast. It is another year to look at the images we have, and admire the accomplishment. The 'inner flame' in my heart has the Moon over it. I don't care what percentage of people don't believe Apollo happened, either it will happen again in their time or it won't.

The look back in time is instructive, because by now a large percentage of my readers will remember the events of 38 years ago but not those of 76 years ago, double the interval of time between now and Apollo 11. In 1931 Thomas Alva Edison, American inventor (with help) of electric lights, sound and motion picture recording and many other things, died. A plan to shut off all the electrical devices in the United States for a minute in tribute was compromised because by then electricity had become essential in too many ways. Unemployment was a global pandemic, with starvation being averted by narrow margins in some places across the industrialized world. Prominent gangster Al Capone was finally imprisoned in 1931 from tax evasion charges. As a haranguing rabble rouser named Hitler cajoled his way to power, German films like 'M' by Fritz Lang marked the last breath of creative freedom to come from there for some time. American horror films entered a golden era of sorts with the release of 'Dracula' starring Bela Lugosi and 'Frankenstein' with Boris Karloff. In art a well remembered painting was created by quintessential surrealist Salvador Dali, 'The Persistence of Memory', with it's sagging watches in a dreamy setting. Looking back promotes looking forward. When 38 years have passed, will we have bases on other worlds or will even being in orbit appear as distant as Apollo does to us today?

July 2006:

  The heritage of Apollo is crumbling into dust and flying away in the wind. The pristine data recorded from the Moon at the Australia Honeysuckle Creek Observatory have only recently been recognized as bearing the best quality recording of the Apollo 11 moon walk video, yet searches for the boxes of tapes have turned up nothing. The last tape machine able to play those data tapes rests in a facility scheduled for closing later this year. While the best video was apparently allowed to become lost, the carefully archived Lunar samples have over the years due to failed seals become contaminated by air and humidity, to the point that much of the information hoped to be gathered from yet untested Lunar material has perished. The Moon fades from our grasp like an aging mountaineer putting off for too long revisiting a challenging climb. The current plans to return to the Moon are faltering under the burden of bad planning which sows the seeds of its own failure. there is still hope that the writer as well as the reader of these words will live to see people on the Moon again, however it is increasingly becoming a matter of faith. Gazing again at the widening gulf of time on either side of the great year of 1969 brings us to regard not only the 37 years since then, but at what that same interval ending at Apollo 11 carries us to. In 1932 the West was still mired in the Great Depression. Newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt introduced the phrase 'The New Deal' in his acceptance speech, while that year U.S.Veterans once again got a 'raw deal' as their Washington DC tent city was demolished in a bloody army raid led by General Douglas MacArthur. What for decades was considered the 'Crime of the Century' tragically unfolded as the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped then found dead after the ransom was paid. The same daring flight Lindbergh had accomplished five years previously was done by Amelia Earhart that year. Short wave radio was first tested by Marconi, an invention which brought radio programming to world wide audiences. Werner Heisenberg was earning the Nobel prize of that year for formulating Quantum Mechanics while James Chadwick shed more light on the building blocks of matter by discovering the Neutron. And what of our end of the 'double time line'? To one yearning for a return to the Moon, the ray of hope offered recently is getting harder to see. In a few decades the last of those who remember watching TV from the Moon will be regarded with the patient indulgence of the young for the ravings of the aged. But as long as we live we will carry within us the sacred memories of the most privileged generation in history, that which combined the daring and abilities of an affluent post war America to accomplish great things. And the Moon continues to loom over us all, slipping from a place open to Humanity to a shape changing light in the sky as the ancients knew it.

July 2005:

  Using Apollo 11 as a 'time mirror' to survey the widening gulf between then and now is sobering.Traveling 36 years before Apollo 11 brings us to the year 1933, the year the Austrian demagogue Adolf Hitler celebrated his rise to power in Germany with fires fueled by piles of books as well as by the Reichstag. It was the year FDR declared "The only thing we have to fear is...fear itself!". 1933 was the year FM radio was first demonstrated, as was broadcasting of the first educational Television programming, from the Iowa State University station W9XK. The faltering film company RKO was saved by the 'monster' hit film 'King Kong' featuring the animated models of Willis O'Brien and the screams of Fay Wray. The year ended with widespread celebration as the disastrous imposition of Prohibition came to an end. Now the Moon has moved a little farther away. More people born after this time never knew what it was like to live in a civilization capable of sending men to other worlds, and fewer of those who know remain. Few people even see returning to the Moon as worthwhile, however the trend is toward smaller percentages of the population feeling strongly about almost anything. This year there is more hope that it could happen again, however this writer who has seen hopes raised and dashed before patiently awaits signs of dreams becoming reality. When designs are frozen and hardware is being built that will be the time to look at the Moon not as a sign of the past but of the future.

July 2004:

  35 Years have now passed since Apollo 11, and when again using the 'historical mirror image' approach we see that 35 years before the year 1969 Prohibition had just ended in America, and famous criminals Bonnie and Clyde as well as John Dillinger died in hails of police bullets. Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, and astronomer Carl Sagan were born in 1934, the same duration before Apollo 11 as we now are from that great event. Adolf Hitler proclaimed that year that his Third Reich would last 1000 years, and with the death of German President Paul Von Hindenburg he consolidated his power with the aid of his army of thugs. Time is leaving behind the world of voyages to the Moon as surely as the events between the first two World Wars, all receding into the fog of the dead past. There has been a flurry of hope this year that a return to the Moon may be in the works, but considering the source does not necessarily engender confidence. Besides the uncertainty of a highly polarized election, money does not seem to be eagerly offered to make hardware out of paper dreams. At least as preliminary support for renewed flights to the Moon, renewed robot exploration may well happen even if the manned flights do not follow. In the mean time Apollo 11 still stirs proud memories in those old enough to remember. The Moon eternally beckons to us as a place we have been, and of a time when we dared to accomplish something great during a brief interval when we could afford to. Perhaps we will again soon. Hope is something to cling to when it is offered and this year we have at least a little of that thrown our way.

July 2003:

  It is sad to contemplate the wasted opportunities of the decades since we threw away our ability to visit other worlds. Looking at the 'mirror timeline' centered on 1969 assists in grasping what an interval of time has been wasted. 34 years have passed since Apollo 11, and 34 years before then brings us into the world of the American 'Dust Bowl' climatic catastrophe, the enactment of the U.S. Social Security Act, the introduction of the Douglas DC-3 airplane passenger service, and the marketing of the first modern plastic based color film, Kodachrome. Little by little the world of 1969 becomes as extinct and abstract as the era opposite Apollo 11 on the time line. One day the very thought of being able to go to the moon will seem as fantastic as the legends woven into religion, with tales of miracles which no longer happen.

July 2002:

 Another year passes since we could go to the Moon, soon it will be a third of a century since Apollo 11. The belief that Apollo was a hoax has gained ground since last year. As long as the Moon is beyond our reach, legends and lies will continue to be poured into the mix of the circulating ideas. Once the last of us who remember people landing on the Moon are dead, the disbelievers will gain ground significently. When real events are in short supply, legend will move in to take their place. The night of the anniversary I gazed at the Moon with the satisfaction of knowing it was once possible to travel there, and that I will die knowing of an age when miracles like that were possible.

July, 2001:

  The Moon still lives in our minds, but it has also passed into the realm of dreams as much as if it had never happened. There is increasing exposure since last year to the idea that Apollo was a hoax! A science television program on as I write this is spending time to refute this 'conspiracy theory', followed by a segment on the problems museums are having with preserving deteriorating Apollo spacesuits. It seems increasingly unlikely that human footprints will ever be made on the Moon again. This is subject to things changing, of course, but such changes seem beyond the horizon on a continuing basis.

July, 2000:

  Yet again we pass a yearly landmark many of us remember, the mission of Apollo 11. Every year the wonder returns, the Moon in the sky reminds us of what once was, and the fact that we were once capable of great things brings inner comfort for a moment. I continue to await any sign of some change in the current restriction of humanity to Low Earth Orbit.

July, 1999: 

 When I was a child there were still veterans of the Civil War alive. Hopefully some of us who remember will still be lucid enough to appreciate the second generation HDTV views some future visitors to other worlds will beam back to Earth. While waiting for that day I will always carry with me the transcendent feeling of looking up at the Moon and knowing there were people up there at that moment, and then walking indoors and seeing them live on TV!   In time such things we remember may seem miraculous, but such are the hazards of events passing from living memory. May the Moon never pass from living memory.