I was 21 and a student union leader when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and I kept the student union building open all night so that we could witness this historic occasion live – even though they were hazy pictures on a small screen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I thoroughly enjoyed the big screen experience of the movie “First Man”, which was an impressive recreation of the mission, and – to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the historic event – I was delighted to see (again on a cinema screen) this thrilling one and a half hour documentary crafted by director Todd Douglas Miller from freshly-discovered 65 mm footage and more than 11,000 hours of audio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is no narrative, only voices from the time, and of course we know the outcome, but it is still a wonderfully moving experience and some of the imagery – especially long shots of the banks of men and computers involved in the launch and mission control and footage shot by Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin – was new to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking back, the whole entourage looks so white and it’s good that we have recently had the film “Hidden Figures”. Was it worth the stupendous cost? I don’t know, but it was a scientific achievement of magnificent proportions and it is right that we should celebrate it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was 21 and a student union leader when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and I kept the student union building open all night so that we could witness this historic occasion live – even though they were hazy pictures on a small screen. So I thoroughly enjoyed the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24815,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24814\/revisions\/24815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}