In 1994, on our way to the reunion dinner of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I took Jackie up to Honeysuckle Creek.
She had been there before, bushwalking. She had seen the old buildings, wrecked and vandalised, had parked in the old carpark — a convenient place to begin the climb across the hills. But we had never been up there together.
The only signs that this was once part of the moon program were the concrete slabs, where the buildings and the dish had once stood, and the remains of the gardens, the flowering shrubs and the lawn, still kept trimmed by the grazing kangaroos.
I had expected the place to be deserted. Instead it was crowded with tents and motorbikes — the Apollo Motorcycle Club was camping there, to celebrate the anniversary too. They looked at us as though we were intruders.
Above us the Moon rose bright and full through the gap in the mountains, just like it did 25 years before, in a direct line of sight that made this such an ideal spot to track the men headed for the Moon.
Jackie and I walked up to the old dish site and watched the Moon rise higher in the sky as three huge guys heaped wood on the concrete pad for that night’s bonfire. I told Jackie about those days: the thrill and deep satisfaction of that afternoon when Neil Armstrong spoke to the world, knowing that all of us at Honeysuckle Creek had been a part of it.
The biggest of the bikers must have overheard my story. He muttered something to his friends and they moved the bonfire off the concrete pad where the ‘dish’ that tracked the spacecraft had once been. I realised that the moon landing was also important to them.
It was all a long time ago now, of course. But we are the inheritors of all that those days achieved.
For years after that, most of the Honeysuckle Creek team and their families got together every year to ‘refly’ the missions and reminisce.
We used to meet at Honeysuckle Creek, until the 2003 bushfires swept through the surrounding mountains. While the trees and flowering shrubs were destroyed by the fire, the commemoration plaques still survived. The area has since been reopened to the public, the Moon still rises above the mountains in the clear cold air, and the Emu still dances in the sky. Perhaps one day, we will meet there again.
There are far fewer of us now. Apollo was the god of youth, as well as of the Moon, but we are all old now, those of us who are left. Sadly we have had ‘LOS’ (Loss of Signal) from most of our members — we used to use this phrase when the Moon had set, or the spacecraft had gone below the horizon and we could no longer track it.
Going to the Moon was a young man’s dream. Nearly all of us who worked on the Apollo missions were young then, too.
If it had been left to the older heads, the experienced scientists and the politicians, it would never have happened. They said it was impossible, that the risks were too great.
Apollo was also the god of learning and healing. I often think President Kennedy’s use of this name was more appropriate than he ever knew. The Apollo program brought us photographs of our blue and cloudy planet, spinning in the darkness. For the first time, we united as people of Earth, not Americans or Russians or Japanese or Australians.
Possibly, the greatest lesson we learnt from the Apollo program was to follow our dreams of knowledge. We did not expect the vast social and technical results of the race to the Moon – the US government just wanted to get there first.
But when you give the world’s best minds the freedom to play with ideas; when you give them security to follow each innovation; when you equip them and let them soar, you will get results you never dreamt of. How could you dream of them, before those who could imagine them were given the freedom and security to change the world?
We are one planet now, linked by satellite communications and instantaneous translation. We are able to see our common problems, share our hopes and fears for the future, see the dangers to our small miraculous planet . . . and because we (or some of us) are now citizens of Earth as much as of our own nations, the tools and vision Apollo gave us may help to save us all.