The Magic of Television

Time travel is possible!

Dateline July 16, 2019, 6:32 a.m. PST, 50 years to the day. Once again I’m glued to my television watching the original CBS broadcast of the Apollo 11 launch live streaming on YouTube.

In the 1960s NASA’s Apollo program was science fiction come to life. It was July 16, 1969, I was 13 years old, watching Walter Cronkite, on a black and white Zenith console television with complete fascination and suspense; the space program held me captive. As an avid science fiction reader, this was not fiction - but mankind’s greatest achievement.

Looking back, humanity can now see the obvious advances in communications technology, medical advances, space travel, and human relations. But at the time, during those early Apollo years, people were enduring simultaneous conflicts with Vietnam, The Cold War with Russia, Civil Rights, and all the political unrest. Television news was rampant with the world’s problems.

1969 was also the year of Woodstock, the miracle Mets would win the World Series in baseball, the Beatles would break up, Richard Nixon became President of the United States, Eddie Merckx would win Le Tour de France, and the first public point of the ARPANET was installed at a computer in UCLA in September - the predecessor to the Internet.

But that morning, July 16th, the world stopped. People from all countries came together via satellite transmission to watch this history-making spectacle. Since the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the United States rallied to land a man on the moon first. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress, just twenty days after Alan Shepard made America’s first 15-minute sub-orbital flight, and proposed that the US "should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

According to a recent interview with Astronaut Michael Collins, “It took over 400,000 people to develop the technology; the computers, the software, the spacesuits, the mathematical calculations to achieve Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) of one of the most complex machines ever built, the Apollo 11 Command Module atop the massive Saturn V rocket.

Has technology moved so fast that in 50 years we’ve forgotten the immensity of that achievement? I think not. During that 50th anniversary celebration, all the television networks have once again jumped to produce some coverage of mankind’s greatest adventure.

It gives you a whole new perspective on what Einstein said, “Time is Relative.” So, though the magic of television (and YouTube) maybe, time travel is possible. It certainly was for me.

This is Patrick Ball, thanks for listening. See you in the next episode . . .

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