This year is the fourth 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!

The prospects of another Moon landing have receded to the unknowable future due to the political decisions of President Obama. Thus the hands of the Moon Clock are put back to 27 minutes past the previous hour, reflecting the virtual abandonment of the idea.

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.

Below: Apollo's footprints will last longer than any on Earth exposed to the elements, but over time even on the Moon time changes things. Micrometeorites and subtle soil movements will gradually erase our first footprints on the Moon over perhaps a million years. This unique moment in our history, indeed the coming and going of Man, is but a moment in Moon Time.

  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. The last Lunar expedition gave the world a brief look at Harrison Schmitt raising his visor 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 40 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 the First Step step 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 shown 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 still flowing toward that end, so there is hope to cling to. 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 things happen again. The next photographs taken of the Apollo footsteps made by Humans or their descendants or even visiting aliens 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 2010:

1969 is beginning to be a long time ago. The recent abandonment of the Moon as a factor in Human affairs makes it seem a little longer, bringing the wonderful images of Apollo into the cavalcade of images of the grandeur of past civilizations. Newer political leaders try to make changes from the past course and sometimes delight in erasing the pet projects started by their predecessors, like the new pharaohs defacing the statues and monuments of their forebears. The previous year has not been kind to those who yearn to see the Moon returned to Human reach. Between the economic convulsions and the political reappraisals of the times, it seems hard to justify establishing a settlement on another world. It is clear that only a small minority of enthusiasts even care about such things. The Space Station was conceived as a stepping stone to the Beyond, it has instead contracted its mission to represent the sole permanent Human presence in space. After the retirement of the remnants of the Shuttle fleet the US will lack any means to reach the ISS itself, until commercial launch systems can hopefully be weaned into handling the task. Other countries make occasional statements about going to the Moon, but when it's all said and done there is a lot more said than done. In the mean time the U.S. orbiter continues to map the Moon in unprecedented detail with its final data set promising to be a treasure. If and when future civilizations want to go the the Moon, if the data (and our technology) survive that long it will prove useful to them.

Using 1969 as a 'time mirror' is intriguing to visualize the intervals of time on both sides of that pivotal moment in history. Now the time interval since 1969, applied to before Apollo, takes us to 1928. In aeronautics the Atlantic Ocean was still the subject of firsts, such as Amelia Earhart's first flight across it by a woman. The gargantuan Graf Zeppelin made its first passenger crossing of the Atlantic. Our ability to probe the universe improved with the completion of the 200 inch telescope at Mt. Palomar, for decades to come the largest telescope in the world. The eventual rocket trips to the Moon were first seriously visualized in the German Science Fiction film 'Frau im Mond', by Fritz Lang. who as a dramatic device for the film invented the 'countdown', later adopted in rocket launches and atomic tests! Medical news was highlighted by the discovery of antibiotic properties of the Penicillium mold by Alexander Fleming. Events in the world made news and contributed to the flow of events. Hirohito was crowned Emperor of Japan. Haile Selassie was crowned King of Ethiopia under the name Ras Tafari. Radio and films were the mass media, with the Will Rogers 'cowboy philosopher' broadcasts beginning, and the movies showing a new comedy team named Laurel and Hardy. Television was trying to emerge from the experimental workbenches, as the first receiving sets made in the US were offered for sale. Among the births of the year 1928 were Andy Worhol, Stanley Kubrick, Shirley Temple and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

And so another year passes, and the Moon becomes a steadily dwindling collective memory, the time when we could go there dying along with the people who remember it. Some day the last person who remembers will see the Moon and be reminded of a time unknown to everyone else alive then, presumably in the 2060's, as now the last veterans of the 'War to End All Wars', the First World War, are leaving us. The time before WW I was written of by H.G. Wells in his 'Outline of History' as a golden age never to be regained. Will Apollo 11 look the same as Living Memory of the Moon drains away? There are dreams of commercial space flight, but even sending people to Low Earth Orbit is now a long ways away with such means. Commercial justification for trips to the Moon seem to be a pipe dream. Still, we who remember know it could be done, and until Peak Oil consumption happens and closes it's fist around civilization it can be done again. May there still be some who remember if it happens again. May our being on the Moon never pass from living memory.

July 2009:

This year sees a Moon which has been recently orbited by probes launched by Japan, China and India, and the USA now has a well equipped orbiter scanning our neighbor world. It is good to see attention paid again to our shining neighbor in the heavens, always beckoning, still perhaps to be one day revisited by people. As a new administration takes over, the political continuity once again undergoes a convulsive reappraisal of ongoing priorities. NASA spent months without a new administrator being named, while the biggest economic down turn since the Great Depression was in progress. It is hard to imagine voyages to the Moon will last long among the priorities. Nagging doubts about the new rockets involved plague the process even as hardware is taking shape. The sands of time are running out for the Shuttle program, and the interval to come in which the USA will lack a capability to launch people into space looms ahead as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The time line for an actual landing on the Moon keeps being pushed further into the indefinite future.

In the mean time careful searches of government paper trails have at last revealed the fate of the fabled slow scan telemetry data of the Apollo 11 television transmissions. Many years ago all the data tapes were gathered, erased and recycled due to a shortage of tape stock in times of reduced funding. Thus perished the best quality Apollo 11 television signal before it was compromised by the video converters of the time. Scraps recorded in Australia on super 8 film of the superior signal provided by the Honeysuckle Creek facilities are all that exist. Tantalizing clues linger of another pair of missing Australian tapes possibly bearing a copy of the slow scan data. NASA gave a media briefing in July 16 admitting the loss but also showing samples of efforts to optimize the appearance of the best surviving video copies of the Apollo 11 EVA video. In a process similar to the restoral of a nearly lost silent film from scraps scattered world wide, video from news networks and other sources was gathered and duplicated with modern methods. Samples of the ongoing work were shown which were clean of 'snow' and other noise but suffered reduced detail compared to the originals.

As the Moon we saw revealed that wonderful July day shines down upon us, the percentage of those who remember it as I do steadily declines. It has been 40 long years since TV gave us the first shadowy images of fellow human beings on another world, 40 years since the Heavens welcomed us when we ventured beyond Earth. It is getting harder to anticipate a New Frontier beyond the Earth as we could back then. A journey starts with the first step, and 40 years ago that first step marked what is beginning to look like a 'high water mark' rather than the start of a trend. The Moon was a waxing crescent when we first visited it, today the Moon is a waning crescent, fading with more of the lives of those who made it's first human visits possible. Walter Cronkite, a man whose journalistic professionalism helped generations appreciate the importance of the Space Program and so much else died July 17. Another giant of those times thus passes into history, part of the silent migration from the living to the dead of those who remember the days when we dared to dream big. The passing of time invites looking across the panorama of memory, leaping onward to the recorded knowledge left by those who have come before. 40 years is a long time, the events in that snippit of the Time Line inviting sober reflection. Using Apollo 11 as the 'reference point' centered between 40 years of it's past and future is an interesting exercise. In this moment of history we are ending a brief interval where a small number of people have lived to see three centuries in their life times.

What was our world like 40 years before Apollo 11? Twice the distance into the past takes us a lifetime away, where many WW I vets and indeed those of the Civil War were still telling their stories. A spectacular silent film set in WW I, 'Wings' won the first Academy Award for best picture that year. The silent movies were fading fast, with directors using sound as soon as it was practical such as Hitchcock's 'Blackmail', Britian's first 'talking picture'. For home movie makers Kodak introduced 16mm color movie film. An enduring song released that year was 'Singin' In The Rain'. 80 years ago a connection with America's 'Old West' faded with the passing at age 80 of lawman and gunfighter Wyatt Earp. Contemporary crime took on an intensity possible with machine guns with the Chicago 'St. Valentines Day Massacre', where seven men were slain in a beer warehouse sparking public outrage destined to end the flamboyant career of 'Scarface' Al Capone. The October 28 Wall Street 'Black Friday' brought catastrophic losses to the stock market, beginning a convulsive transition to a poorer America where millions of people learned to make do with next to nothing. In the Soviet Union Leon Trotsky paid the price for opposing the absolute rule of Joseph Stalin, banishment and months of being a hunted 'man without a country'. Human access to distant locations improved. The Graf Zeppelin, leaving from Lakehurst, NJ, flew around the world in the record time of 21 days 7 hours 26 minutes. Coast to coast passenger air service in the US commenced that year, making several stops and sleeping in trains at night during the 36 hour trip. The world was rapidly becoming accessible to growing numbers of people even if few could afford to go anywhere. In 1929 we were reaching our furthest at the time, as the first flight over the South pole by Admiral Richard Byrd took place, and building the highest with the beginning of construction of the Empire State Building, tallest building in the world for many years to come.

Looking both 'directions' 40 years from Apollo 11 brings us a widening view of the evolution and faltering of our progress in expanding the places people can experience. The dream that Apollo 11 was the first step in Human presence being established elsewhere dies hard among those of us who treasure our recall of that magic time. It is a dream for a time when Ability meets Will, a realization of a potential we will always know can be done because it has been done.

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.