The TV picture was grainy – terrible quality – and the sound was distorted. Even the central character was hard to make out in the harsh lighting. But 40 years ago this month, the world was transfixed; anyone who could get near a 1969 television screen gazed in awe at the pictures of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin alighted on earth’s main satellite around 10pm eastern US time on 20 July 1969 (21 July in the southern hemisphere). It was the culmination of an 11-year project costing billions and driven by a political imperative: the need for the US to show the Soviet Union who was boss.

Politics at play
Astronomy Ireland’s David Moore, perhaps the country’s chief “space-head”, is clear-headed enough to believe that the project was all about politics not science. “In today’s money, the Apollo programme [to land on the moon] cost hundreds of billions. That would never have been given just to science.”

President John F Kennedy made his famous declaration in 1962: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.” He had announced the plan in Congress a year earlier.

Then a cat-and-mouse race with the USSR went into overdrive. However, the US had the big bucks and talent, with an almost frenzied drive to succeed, that saw the destination grow ever closer in the late 1960s, perhaps as a counterpoint to the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and the country’s deepening disaster in Vietnam from 1965.

Technological advances
Leo Enright, veteran space commentator and broadcaster, says Silicon Valley, the US hub for the information technology industry, is the real result of the moon-landing programme. “The Apollo programme affected the US culture of innovation and pushed us all along in the direction demanded by the rockets’ needs.”

Moore points out that the SilverCircle website and the billions of PCs, Macs, iPods, MPs and Blackberries used around the world are a spin-off of the drive to miniaturisation demanded by the limited space on moon rockets. “It might have happened anyway, 20 years later, but if you think back to 1969, there were very few computers and they were the size of rooms. One ‘expert’ predicted that there would eventually be only two or three gigantic computers powering the whole world. As we know, things went the other way, and companies like IBM and Motorola started to think smaller and smaller.”

Irish connections
Moore cannot remember the actual landing – “My only recollection of that period was that my sister was born and that’s what all the adults were talking about” – but he has met both Armstrong and Aldrin. Armstrong is famously reclusive and never cashed in on his extraordinary position. “He seemed to me quite a nervous person,” Moore says. “Aldrin is much more outgoing, even boisterous. Armstrong has Irish ancestry – Fermanagh, and some alleged castle rustlers!”

The “Harry Lime” or third man of the trio was another Irish name, Michael Collins, whose assignment was to circle the moon in the mother ship while the Eagle landed and his colleagues clumsily stepped into eternal fame.

A few dusty rocks
So what did the world get out of the moon project? It’s still a work in progress and NASA is going back again, looking for water. Detractors sniff that a few dusty rocks were a slim reward for the cost in dollars, effort and human life.

But what of the more philosophical or psychological side of the space odyssey? “The biggest discovery we made from the moon programme was the earth,” says Enright. “The famous photograph of ‘earth rising’, which was actually taken during the Apollo 8 mission, was a bigger discovery for mankind. And after that, unfortunately, few similar images were taken, because it had been done.”

Apostolos Christou of the Armagh Observatory says: “It shows the difference between the spirit of those times and the cynicism, for want of a better word, of today.”


Where were you?

Angela Long looks back at the summer of 1969 and hears some memories of that landmark day

For those who can remember 20 July 1969, it is graven in memory, like the shooting of JFK six years earlier. My sister, for example, has kept a skirt that she bought that day, after going into a department store to watch the landing on TV (in Melbourne, where we lived, it was mid-afternoon; our class got off school so we could watch it!)

It was the era of hot pants, the Monkees and Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Grimly, it was also the year when British troops were sent to Northern Ireland. Jack Lynch was taoiseach, Joe Dolan had a massive hit with Make Me An Island, young law professor Mary Robinson was teaching at Trinity and the country’s first family planning clinic opened in Merrion Square.

• Veteran space commentator and broadcaster Leo Enright was on a school trip to Ballydehob, Co Cork. “We drew a parallel – it was the first time we’d be in Ballydehob and the first time man had been on the moon.’

• Apostolos Christou, research astronomer at the Armagh Observatory, says he was “technically” alive but, at only eight months, retained no memories of the great event.

• Harry Browne, lecturer at Dublin Institute of Technology, who grew up in the US, “was six at the time and I think I fell asleep while we were watching it on TV”.

• Business manager Sheila Butterly from Cashel, Tipperary, remembers the splashdown by the Apollo 11 crew. She wondered why they had go to into ”quarantine”. She says: “As far as I knew, it was a place cats and dogs had to go for months.”

• Sheila Sullivan, American-born author of Follow the Moon and now resident in Achill, Co Mayo, remembers the day well. “I was 13 and on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, enjoying the school holidays. It was a beautiful sunny day and I was on my way out the door when my father said ‘look’, pointing to a grainy image on the TV in the living room… The image seemed to embody all that had been best about John Kennedy’s America, its energy and can-do optimism, even though by 1969 JFK was gone.”