Rocket to the Moon

The word that kept coming to mind after watching First Man was ‘audacity’. One of the key scenes accentuating this point was someone attempting to draw on the chalkboard how far the Earth is from the Moon. It was orders of magnitude further than anything attempted so far – orbiting the Earth. It was audacious!

Courage or madness, or a combination of both, must have been part of the early NASA days. One could spin it positively and call it ‘vision’. Audacious vision, no doubt. The contraptions that were built for testing – some of these things looked flimsy and highly unsafe. As an observer, I would have pegged the chances of success as very, very slim. Having visited the Air & Space museum in D.C. ten years ago, I was reminded of how small and compact the lunar landing module was. Many scenes in First Man show the shaking head-face of an astronaut as he was being rocketed into space.

I did not know much about Neil Armstrong, I suppose because he was such a private person and the movie tries to portray this with sensitivity. First Man is firstly a movie about people and relationships, and this keeps it engaging throughout – even though you know the ending of the movie historically. Those early astronauts, engineers and scientists were audacious; I’m a wimpy play-it-safe scientist compared to them.

After witnessing all those tests in flimsy contraptions, the movie shots of the huge Saturn rocket were awe-inspiring. The marvels of engineering! Given the technology at the time, those scientists and engineers seem like wizards! But marvels come in all sizes, from awe-inspiring buildings, the sun gleaming off endless glass, to my cell-phone – a pocket-sized computer in itself. Other creatures on earth are sometimes dubbed “nature’s engineers” but none come close to the insatiable wanderlust for engineering new things as humans do.

The movie briefly shows protests by the populace. Is going to the moon worth it? Aren’t the funds being wasted for a pipe-dream? Shouldn’t we be trying to tackle hunger and poverty here on this Earth? Why are we building a rocket to the moon? Think of the human lives that have been lost in this ill-fated endeavor? There’s an old replay of Kennedy saying that we are going to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Very, very, very hard. Audaciously hard. And while the science and technology plays its role in the movie, First Man is aptly named because it’s really about what it means to be human.

It’s been a while since I’ve played the card-game Fluxx, but I do remember one of the goals: Rocket to the Moon!