Moon landing 50th anniversary: Small steps, giant leaps and a marriage spent gazing at the stars

Saturday, 13 July 2019

The climax of the space race captured the world's attention.

July 20 marks 50 years since NASA's Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon. This week Kiwis remember where they were when they heard those famous small steps.

'Houston, Tranquillity Base here,' astronaut Neil Armstrong said as his lunar module, Eagle, touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity on Sunday, July 20, 1969.

'The Eagle has landed.'

As millions of Americans sat gripped to their television screens that Sunday afternoon, across the Pacific dateline in New Zealand, future astronomer Alan Gilmore was getting ready for work. It was Monday, just after 8am.

Buzz Aldrin, walking on the Moon July 20 1969.

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](http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/2563890/Meanwhile-back-on-Earth)* Pilot who delivered landing tape to NZ

Buzz Aldrin walks by some scientific equipment on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission.

* Restored Mission Control comes alive 50 years on

The Kilmartin/Gilmore family with son Edmond in Wellington in 1979.

* The dark side of the moon landing

* The best TV to remember the moon landing

* Astronomers honoured on NZ stamps**

In his first year out of university, the physics major with the horn-rimmed glasses listened intently to the transistor radio propped on his bed while he got dressed.

The Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, prepares to dock with the command module after ascending from the Moon's surface.

'I dimly recall hearing the Apollo landing and a reply from Mission Control about a bunch of guys there turning blue holding their breaths.'

It took six hours from landing for Armstrong to step out onto the Moon's surface and utter the immortal 'one small step for man' phrase. Gilmore, then an acoustics engineer at Fletcher Construction in Lower Hutt, was listening in with colleagues.

'Someone quipped that the two men getting into space suits in the small landing module was like two women getting dressed in ball gowns in a telephone box.'

Mike Chunn was preparing for a 6th form exam when a teacher turned on the radio in class so they could listen in to the moon landings.

That same day another young amateur astronomer named Pam Kilmartin – Gilmore's future wife – was on a bus heading to Auckland University.

The 19-year-old student struggled to hear Armstrong's crackled words over the din of the bus's engine and amid the static of her transistor device.

'I missed all the famous words, but gathered that the event was successful. It was all very exciting.'

David Bowie's Space Oddity was released a few days before man landed on the moon. It would only become a major hit when it was re-released in 1975.

It would be another two years before Gilmore and Kilmartin would meet.

'IT WAS FREAKY AND ODDBALL'

Novelist and poet CK Stead watched the moon landings hoping that they would make it back to Earth safely.

New Zealand in 1969. A young Minister of Finance named Robert Muldoon was being credited with steadying the country's economy.

Amid a skyrocketing road toll, the first breath-testing procedures would be introduced that year. (Of the 2928 drivers tested, only 214 blew less than the legal rate at that time of 100mg per 100ml of blood).

At Sacred Heart College in Glendowie, east Auckland, a couple of aspiring musicians were preparing to sit English exams.

The Meridian Energy power station at West Arm, Lake Manapouri.

Mike Chunn, future bass player with Split Enz and founder of Play it Strange, was sitting in a 6th form English class that Monday morning. Chunn recalls he was 'destined for the mind-warp of scholarship exams and a deep intense grappling with Shakespeare and TS Elliot'.

'But this English lesson with Brother Richard was different,' Chunn recalled this week. 'He said 'OK boys, we're going to listen to the radio' and the English lesson ceased and a history lesson suddenly burst its way out from the transistor radio sitting on his desk.'

Buzz Aldrin is photographed by Neil Armstrong as he stands by the lunar module on the moon.

For Chunn and his classmate Tim Finn, the real distraction from studying was the imminent release of Abbey Road, The Beatles' last album.

'There was no denying the uniqueness of people wandering around on that ball of rock and dust two hundred and something miles away. It was freaky and oddball.'

Sam Neill watched the moon landings on an old black and white TV.

Musicians were reflecting the events around them. A song by a young British artist named David Jones, released days before the landing, implored a fictional spaceman to 'take your protein pills and put your helmet on'.

That year marked an environmental awakening in New Zealand. The Save Manapouri campaign signalled the beginning of the mass environmental movement in NZ – a 10th of the 2.8 million population signed a Forest & Bird petition against a dam on the pristine Lake Manapouri in Fiordland, an effort which was ultimately successful in stopping the project.

Current Forest & Bird chief executive Kevin Hague was nine when he watched the Moon landing on TV at his home in England.

Gavin Trethewey flew the moon landing tapes back from Australia to New Zealand in record-breaking time.

'In the way that some kids nowadays are experts on dinosaur taxonomy, the equivalent at that time was full-on Apollo geekdom, and I remember being absolutely obsessed with the mission and its every detail.'

In the United States, civil rights clashes, the political assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the Vietnam War had created a deep existential angst.

The doyen of Kiwi literature, CK Stead, recalls watching the epoch-defining events with a swirl of emotions.

'I remember some keen interest, some anxiety, and thinking, 'could it go wrong?'

The crew of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing mission are subjected to a period of quarantine upon their return to earth. Through the window of their Mobile Quarantine Facility, they speak with President Richard Nixon.

'And excitement seeing it on TV. It was just anxiety. Would they survive? Would anything go wrong up there?'

Stead says he was incapable of feeling any flag-waving 'pro-American' sentiment at that time. But he felt an overwhelming 'pro-human' desire in wanting to see the spacemen returned to Earth safely.

A GIANT LEAP IN BROADCASTING

While humankind was taking its first steps on the Moon, a different kind of mission was under way to deliver images of the event to New Zealand screens.

A view of the Earth appears over the Lunar horizon.

Due to the moon being above the Australian sky on the historic day, grainy footage of the first moonwalk was beamed down to the Parkes Observatory in outback New South Wales, an enormous telescope located on a sheep farm 400km west of Sydney.

The events leading up to the broadcast are loosely depicted in the 2001 film The Dish starring Sam Neill as the pipe-smoking scientist in charge of the telescope.

Neill told Stuff he recalled watching the landing on an old black and white TV set 'you had to smack hard to make work properly'. He poured all of that memory into his portrayal in The Dish.

New York City welcomes the Apollo 11 crew in a showering of ticker tape down Broadway.

Legendary US film reviewer Roger Ebert called The Dish a smiling human comedy 'that treats the moon walk not as an event 240,000 miles away, but as a small step taken by every single member of mankind, particularly those in Parkes'.

People watch as the Nasa shuttle destined for the moon takes off.

Back in Wellington, an elaborate plot possibly worthy of its own feature film was being hatched to deliver the images to New Zealand television sets.

The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC), a precursor to RNZ, had set up a studio in what was then known as the World Trade Centre Wellington, and asked the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) for help obtaining the footage from Australia, where it screened live courtesy of Parkes.

Pam Kilmartin holding Chris aged two, and Alan Gilmore with Edmond at their first Lake Tekapo house in 1984.

Pilot Gavin Trethewey flew a B12 Canberra jet from Ohakea to Sydney, watched the landings live, and was given a special cargo of a video tape to bring back to New Zealand.

Legend has it Trethewey set an unofficial trans-Tasman record of two and a half hours on the return flight to Wellington.

Playing down his role in the drama, he told Stuff this week how he was met at Wellington Airport by a car from the NZBC, which disappeared into the distance with a police escort.

Astronomers Alan Gilmore both have asteroids named after them.

With television in its infancy in those days and no national broadcaster, engineers had set up a temporary network to align the four regional television stations in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

Doug Eckhoff, then the NZBC's duty editor, told Stuff in 2009 how a patchwork quilt of broadcast vans and other temporary installations was erected across the country.

Astronomers Alan Gilmore and Pam Kilmartin divide their asteroid discovering duties.

'It was very much a belts and braces, number eight wire-type job,' Eckhoff said. 'And it worked.'

At 7.30pm, half an hour after Trethewey landed, Armstrong's moonwalk were broadcast nationwide.

STARDUST AND MOON TIDES

Alan Gilmore and Pam Kilmartin recall watching the grainy images back at their respective homes.

'There wasn't much to see,' says Gilmore. 'Just a blurry view from a camera placed on the underside of the lander with the ladder in view and lots of harsh shadows.

'We saw a silhouette of Armstrong descending the ladder. Given that it was direct from the Moon we thought it amazing at the time.

'Obviously there were immense challenges and great risks and the astronauts were extraordinarily brave and well trained.'

As Gilmore, 74, tells it, the scientific discoveries gleaned over many years from the rocks brought back by the Apollo programme were earth-shattering.

'They gave a whole new chronology to the evolution of the inner Solar System,' he says.

Scientists figured out that the moon had been created by debris from a grazing impact on the Earth by a Mars-sized planet early on in the Solar System's history.

The Earth and moon shared a common cloud of debris for a while, most of which would eventually settle back on the Earth. Debris remaining in orbit around the Earth formed the Moon.

At first the moon was much closer to the Earth than now. The Earth was also spinning faster. Over billions of years, 'tidal drag' by the Moon slowed the Earth's spin and caused the Moon to move further away.

The moon continues to slow the Earth's spin so the length of a day is increasing by 2 milliseconds (0.002 seconds) per century. The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of 38mm per year.

But despite the advances that the moon landing brought to our understanding of the universe, Gilmore ruefully says humankind hasn't yet heeded the biggest lesson.

'The pictures coming back that day of the Earth rising above the lunar landscape showed it as it truly is; small and blue and wonderful. A planet sitting in space. It's all we've got.

'We really haven't taken that message aboard that there is no Planet B.'

AOTEAROA'S VERY OWN ASTEROID

Kilmartin, 69, says the Moon landing, while exciting, didn't have much of a bearing on her choosing a career in astronomy.

'What happened later on was mostly luck, and being in the right place at the right time.'

They met in 1971, both worked at the Carter Observatory, and married in 1974.

Since 1980, they've been based at the University of Canterbury's Mt John Observatory, Tekapo, where together, they have discovered 41 asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

They've given the asteroids names such as the Aoraki and the Aotearoa.

In May, they both featured on a series of New Zealand Space Pioneers postage stamps.

'We were kind of pioneers I suppose,' says Gilmore.

'We weren't out to discover asteroids, we often picked it up while other things were going on.'

Space-watching duties, like everything else in their marriage, have been divided harmoniously.

'I work the telescope, while Pam does the image processing and measurements,' says Gilmore.

The couple also have two asteroids named after them: Asteroid Gilmore was named after them jointly by Dr Brian Marsden of the Minor Planet Centre.

An astronomer or two thought this was unfair as Pam Kilmartin is known by her maiden name in astronomical circles. So Marsden named a second object Kilmartin.

'Thus we have a joint one and Pam has one of her own, like our bank accounts.'

MOON LANDING EVENTS

Te Papa's Moon Rocks: 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing: Saturday July 20, 10am–noon

Photo exhibition at AUT University, WG Building, Auckland campus, July 16-21, 8am-7pm daily.

Free public film screening of The Dish, AUT Building, July 17, 7pm.