When Neil Armstrong first stepped on our satellite, the world received the news amidst disparate sensations of cosmic conquest and suspicions of crude staging in the midst of the Cold War and its space race, which have reached the conspiracies of flat-earth conspiracies until today.
However, the final sensation of a historical milestone, the significance of the moment, the meaning of Armstrong's first words that reached a whole world at the dawn of total connection, the particular impressions of each of the millions of humans who followed the space odyssey became a magical melting pot for all human civilization. Optimism soared and the cosmos seemed to open up like a highway that, in the general imagination, a few years from now, could translate into the conquest of new places plus the blue planet.
Fifty years later, the highway has not yet been inaugurated and the space continues to be a place that is difficult for humans to occupy. And perhaps that is why the trip is seen today as an epic, an inciatic journey stagnant in the inability to continue facilitating a spatial mobility that that half a century ago seemed to be projected into a reality comparable to any science fiction novel by Julio Verne.
As part of this legendary aspect, the arrival of the 50th anniversary is a celebration to which this book by Eduardo García Llama, NASA aerospace engineer, invites us to relive the milestone from a vision of a technological epistolary novel, that of the back and forth messages between the ship and the station. And surely most of the magic of that manned trip beyond our planet resides in that sum of communications, impressions and anecdotes of the heroes who managed to put the flag on the moon.
The team formed by the three emblematic astronauts (remember that poor Michael Collins did not get to step on the moon, as the pilot in charge of the module, which is also a bitch ...) they are opening up our vision from that moment lived from Earth by televisions ( live or through reruns for those of us who weren't here yet). And there is no better way to don one of those three old suits to live the greatest adventure of the human being so far.
You can now buy the book Apollo 11, an interesting volume with novel overtones, by the physicist and NASA engineer, Eduardo García Llama, here: