It's 50 years since man first stood on the Moon. That is incredible.
It's 46½ years since man last stood on the Moon. That may be more incredible.
I'm over 50 so can actually remember watching several of the Moon landings live on TV. I didn't stay up to watch Neil Armstrong's moonwalk because it took place at three in the morning and I was only four years old at the time. But my dad did take me out onto the veranda at the back of my grandparents' house while the landing was taking place so that I could stare up at the distant satellite, and I strained in vain to see two tiny figures on the crescent surface.
I was already a big fan of all things astronomical, so didn't need Apollo 11's success to fire my imagination. I had space books and star maps and a big wallchart of the planets, not to mention James Burke and the Clangers on TV. When Brooke Bond brought out a series of Race Into Space tea cards I somehow ended up with the full set, despite being a decade off drinking the stuff myself. 'Space' was a really big thing back then, from ice cream lolly shapes to future career aspirations, in a way it very much isn't today.
I've since seen Apollo 10's actual command module, returned to Earth safely after lunar flyby, because Britain's special relationship with America grants the Science Museum some privileges. I've been to Cape Canaveral to see an actual Saturn V rocket and the gantries from which they all took off, and been duly overwhelmed. I've even seen and handled an actual chunk of actual moonrock, if you're willing to count handing round a piece of plastic with a lunar specimen embedded inside as 'touching'. I also own an actual teflon-coated saucepan, but that's about as close as Apollo now gets to my everyday life.
Even while the moon landings were underway the money ran out. Apollos 18, 19 and 20 were summarily cancelled as priorities changed. The next big project was 'only' Skylab, which while groundbreaking and collaborative didn't take us anywhere we hadn't been before. Indeed no subsequent projects have taken us any further than Earth orbit, somewhere Yuri Gagarin first reached in 1961. It made sense to fund Apollo during the Cold War when sheer propaganda value made manned space exploration worthwhile, but nothing so adventurous has been deemed worthwhile since, at least never the "getting round to actually building it" stage.
Back then the general expectation was that our future lay beyond the Earth. Space stations would be created as stepping stones to the planets, a permanent colony on the Moon couldn't be too far away, and one day soon humanity would spread out and seed the stars. As technology progressed space would eventually become accessible to all, which might not mean day trips to the Moon or holidays to Uranus but at the very least we'd end up nipping around our own planet in personalised hoverjets. But none of this happened, and fifty years later those aspirations look even further away than they did back then.
Most predictions of our technological future end up looking woefully optimistic. When Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 it seemed entirely possible that by the turn of the century space hostesses would serve passengers refreshments on business trips to the Moon. When writing Space: 1999 Gerry Anderson assumed a lunar base would be in operation within quarter of a century. Ridley Scott held out longer in the film Blade Runner, predicting interstellar travel by November 2019, but humanity's not going to hit that target either.
Only three people are in space today, exactly the same number as fifty years ago. More depressingly only 565 people have been into space in total since the 1960s, an average of barely ten people a year, which is barely enough to fill a large cinema. Almost all of them were in the military, or talented scientists, and been dispatched only after undergoing months of gruelling physical tests. Even when the first true civilians get to go into space they're going to be ultra-rich entrepreneurs who've paid handsomely for the privilege, thereby earning some private operator a handsome buck. If you were alive and wide-eyed when the Moon landings took place you are never going to go up there yourself, despite what you may have imagined at the time, and your children's children hardly have any chance whatsoever either.
In total a human has been present on the surface of the Moon for less than 300 hours, and since 1972 never. Of the twelve men who've stood on the Moon only four are still alive, the youngest of whom is already 83 years old. Twelve more men have flown around it, only three of whom have passed away, hence the number of living lunar astronauts remains in double figures. But no women have ever been, because society worked differently in the 1960s, nor are any lined up to visit in the most optimistic foreseeable future.
Technology may have vastly improved since 1969 but it hasn't got any cheaper, neither is there any sense of countries coming together to make it possible. We have different priorities today, our problems economic and environmental, our boundaries digital rather than interplanetary. The Moon is no longer a goal but a cosmic bystander. And somehow something we could do fifty years ago, enabled by a device less powerful than the one you're reading this on now, we've been entirely unable to do again since.
