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AT THE CENTRE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Matching the observations of the wandering stars – the planets – of the night sky with the idea that the Earth was at the centre of the solar system required extremely complex models. In the case of Venus, combining the Earth at the centre with the observations meant that Venus had a circular orbit around a point midway between the Earth and the Sun, so-called epicycles, with all the other planets having similar complicated orbits around various points scattered around the solar system. Placing the Sun at the centre of the solar system, with the planets arranged in their familiar order, with the Moon orbiting the Earth, gave a much simpler system.

1968 was a difficult year on planet Earth. The Vietnam War, the bloodiest of Cold War proxy tussles, was at its height, ultimately claiming over three million lives. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, prompting presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy to ask the people of the United States ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world’. Kennedy himself was assassinated before the year was out. Elsewhere, Russian tanks rolled into Prague, and France teetered on the edge of revolution. As I approached my first Christmas, my parents could have been forgiven for wondering what kind of world their son would inhabit in 1969. And then, as Christmas Eve drifted into Christmas morning, an unexpected snowfall decorated Oakbank Avenue and Borman, Lovell and Anders, 400,000 kilometres away, saved 1968.

Apollo 8 was, in the eyes of many, the Moon mission that had the most profound historical impact. It was a terrific, noble risk; a magnificent roll of the dice; a distillation of all that is great about exploration; a tribute to the sheer balls of the astronauts and engineers who decided that, come what may, they would honour President Kennedy’s pledge to send ‘a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 40,000 kilometres per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun – almost as hot as it is here today – and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out’. If I heard that from a leader today I’d be first on the rocket. Instead I have to listen to vacuous diatribes about ‘fairness’, ‘hard-working families’, and how ‘we’re all in it together’. Sod that, I want to go to Mars.