Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

. . . Apollo 11 blasted off for the moon, and the man to the left of frame, then a nine-year old boy, watched it all live on TV, avidly.

My imagination, like so many youngsters of my age, was completely captivated by it all and, today, I find myself soaking up every technical diagram about the mission that is printed in the press.

Tonight, I attended the premiere in Spain of the Apollo 11 documentary which is an astounding feat of film making. Using only original footage, it brings all the mind-bending riskiness of it all to our consciousness, in particular, the feat of launching the thirty-eight storey Saturn V rocket upwards . . . yes, thirty-eight storeys of rocket upwards, completely vertically, starting from zero knots through the first inch, then foot, then yard of upward movement, before reaching a speed of thousands of mile per hour!

Above all, Armstrong stands out as a man of disciplined, non-panicking courage.

The audience, being Catalan, did not break into applause at these breathtaking feats we were witnessing on the half-century anniversary of their committal. It was a different story when on the 12th of October 1992 we attended the premier in Spain of the Columbus film screened 500 years exactly after his first-foot deed. The house erupted, then, in deafening applause when Columbus stepped onto his West Indian beach. And to think that all they did was slip the ropes and let the Santa Maria drift out from the harbour, her sails filling with the wind that would propel her, and all who sailed in her, into the history books.