The Long Shadow

Reproduced in this volume is a selection from the thousands of photographs taken 30 years ago of the Apollo missions to the moon. They illustrate those voyages stage by stage: the launch, the flight, the landing and exploration, and the splashdown return to the earth.

Children today speak easily of these doings. To them, it’s quite the natural thing to be shot from the earth, take a walk with nothing underfoot, bounce around on the moon, and then fire themselves back home--as though they’d only gone to the corner half a block away. To their elders, you among them, the feat of Apollo is a marvel, made possible by a complex of sciences and brought off by crews of dauntless men. In black-and-whites and color, they show man quitting the streets and the cornfields not for a mere 59 seconds over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, but to go where none had been before, to another sphere, and they show him doing so in images of dazzling clarity.

Especially memorable are those of the approach to the moon’s surface, taken from a distance of several thousand miles off in space, and what you see in them is the convex of a pristine world, a world new to man though now in its ancient age. There have been invasions, millions of them in the measureless course of time, but they were the trespasses of debris, of the leftovers and offcast of the universe. A work of chance, they nevertheless formed a pattern on the moonscape, a sprinkle of disparate circles that look rather like a still of raindrops falling on a pool. Even the smallest of these is miles across from rim to rim, and they dimple the moon as though by design. It’s the golf ball of space, you think, and you turn the pages.

You turn the pages--and suddenly you’re confronted by an image that expunges your pretty conceits: the shadow of a human lying athwart the moon. It’s that of an astronaut, of course, but the name that comes to mind is not his own. It’s that of Leif, who in the year 1000 set the first foot on Vinlandia, otherwise known at Here. True, there’d been earlier feet, but they were the kind that counted for nothing: We slew some few inferior people before we left. Skraelings, they were called. Save for such, for such debris, the place was a paradise, but alas, it did not remain so long.

Nor will this one, this still pure world, this other still possible Eden: It’s within man’s reach, and man has a baneful hand. He’ll bring water to this suburb, and he’ll furnish it with air (he has a knack for that sort of thing), and he’ll make flowers bloom, and birds will be heard to sing. But then (being man and having the knack) he’ll do what he’s always done best: his worst. He’ll litter it with corpses and other broken machinery, and he’ll crisscross it with railroad track. There’ll be private cars for the few and public toilets for the mass, and they’ll be told to keep their mouths shut and steer clear of the grass. Two hundred and forty thousand miles from Appomattox, they’ll still be unequal, they’ll still be inferior (Skraelings, they’ll be called), for the shadow of man now lies upon the moon.

The photographs? They’re superb.