An extract from Wise Traveller: Loss
In 1972, the year of my birth, the last booster ignited and propelled the last landing module up from the surface of the moon to glide silently through the thin-air darkness and meet the last command module. For the last time that tube of tin-can electronics pointed its nose back at the thumbnail earth in the far distance, shot through space and back into the comforting arms of earth's orbit.
We are 6 billion or so here, with common rock under all our feet. Only 21 have ever properly left home, actually escaped fully the drag of our world's gravity; only 12 from 6 billion have placed their feet on the surface of a truly foreign land.
Their wonder, their transport, was a rocket comprising 3 million components all with a 99.9 per cent success rate. Which meant that, in any given launch, around 3,000 parts were likely to fail. Somehow, none ever did. For some reason, these men sat over 100 metres up, atop 3,000 tonnes of propellant, ready to be fired like peas from a cannon.
Why?
In his book Moondust, the author Andrew Smith went in search of those who remained to ask them. Navy pilots, aeronautics experts, astronomy graduates, scientists. These rational minds who coolly followed launch patterns and calmly told Houston if they had a problem were now lost for words. ‘Lunatics' all, going mad back on earth wondering why NASA wouldn't let them return to where eyes saw 20 times more clearly and little leaps could be metres.
Will we ever go back? Why did we stop?
These moon-landers are the naïve believers in us all, walkers on rare places, temporary inhabitants of a smaller, simpler world.
Their grief is our common latent loss, the human ache for the part of us that once flew divinely. Now we stand with leaden feet, wings clipped, staring at the stars, wondering. We must breathe this heavier air for a while, and experience the weight of a whole life lived before we are allowed to return. We will be wiser then.
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