Night Sky

Re: Night Sky : Fri Nov 14, 2014 6:13 pm

Just to hark back to the comparison between the Philae landing and the Apollo moon landings and the question of the hype (or lack of it) attached to both, as a 12 year old at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing I can confirm that it was a huge story and not one single element of the media did not carry wall-to-wall coverage of the whole eight day mission even to the extent where the BBC opened up transmission times at a time where breakfast TV was unknown (other than for major events like Olympic Games).

Other than the mind shattering fact that it was a manned mission to another planet (well ok, a moon) there had been a constant feed of missions building up to it, I only recently realised how quickly they had been firing off manned rockets in 1968 and 69 and the first manned craft to leave earths orbit had only happened seven months before and only three more missions took place before the moon landing.

So the news coverage came thick and fast in that year and with the limitation of just three TV channels you couldn't really miss it and in addition to that, the cherry on the cake, was that NASA were very pro-active in their publicity work and were more than happy to send out A4 colour photos from previous Apollo and Gemini missions, on eof our English Masters (we didn't have plain old teachers at grammar school you know) wrote to Nasa and received pretty quickly a big portfolio of photos and information on their work which was like having the holy grail posted to your school.

So yes, the hype in that one or two year period was intense and I was one of those who got up at some ridiculous hour in the middle of the night to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon even though the images were so bad that you could have been watching anything, it just felt like a huge life event, live on TV.

In many ways the Philae landing is even more remarkable but given the fact that non-star-watchers were completely unaware of it until this week, given that its taken years to get to this point with no other missions or any importance attached to it, and given that its not American then its hardly surprising that there has not been anything like the life important "happening" attached to it, more the pity.