Gemini and Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell died last week.

Despite travelling to the Moon twice he never landed there although he may have been the person most deserving to.

He flew on Gemini 7 with Frank Borman and Gemini 12 with Buzz Aldrin.

He was Command Module pilot of Apollo 8, travelling with Borman again and William Anders, the three becoming the first humans to orbit the Moon.

He commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight but the damaged craft’s trajectory made its three personnel, Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise,  the humans to have travelled furthest from Earth (so far.)

Lovell it was who had to make the manually controlled burns of the Lunar Module’s thrusters and engine to enable the return to Earth.

James Arthur (Jim) Lovell: 25/3/1928 – 7/8/2025. So it goes.

One of the most important cogs in the Apollo 11 team which made the first Moon landing (way back in 1969, 52 years ago!) has died.

While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin flew down to the Moon in the Lunar Module, Eagle, Michael Collins stayed in Moon orbit in the Command Module, Columbia, keeping the whole mission together, orbiting the Moon alone – the supposedly loneliest human in the universe – thirty times before the Lunar Module returned Armstrong and Aldrin to Columbia.

Having started his career as a fighter pilot and going on to be a test pilot Collins was a veteran of Gemini 10 where he became the fourth human to space walk and the first to do it twice but retired from NASA in 1970 very soon after his most historic mission.

Michael Collins: 31/10/1930 – April 28/4/2021. So it goes.

The Moon landings were faked up on a Hollywood backlot, right?

What a load of utter tosh!

It astounds me that anyone would prefer to believe that something which would have had to be kept secret for so long by quite a large number of people (people moreover, cinema technicians etc, not truly invested in the “deceit”) would not have leaked by now. But it hasn’t leaked.

And why hasn’t it leaked?

Because it would need proof of such a conspiracy to fake.

And there is none.

And why the desire to deny the endeavour and the expertise which went in to the making of man’s greatest adventure, not to mention the sheer bravery of the men who made the voyages? Buzz Aldrin was quite right to take exception to the guy who accosted him, a guy who has not one thousandth of the guts and integrity. What is it about some folk that they cannnot rejoice in others’ achievements but must find some way to denigrate them?

And the Soviet Union did not claim that the US Moon landings did not happen – which as a propaganda coup they most certainly would have – because they knew perfectly well that they did. (Compare that to now, when Russia does claim that things that happened didn’t and things that didn’t, have. And so, too, does POTUS, T Ronald Dump.)

Besides, some of the experiments the astronauts placed on the Moon are still sending back data, even fifty years on.

So, raise a glass and drink a toast to a magnificent accomplishment, a demonstration of humans’ ability to perform amazing feats of focus, cooperation and enterprise.

It’s just a pity we gave up on that enterprise so soon.

I woke up this morning to the news that Neil Armstrong has died.

As the first human to set foot on the Moon his place in history is assured.

I hadn’t consciously thought about the fact he must be getting old (he was 82) but then again 1969 is several lifetimes ago now and he was 39 when he made his “giant leap” – the culmination of what must be the greatest huamn adventure so far.

I have no patience for those who aver that the Moon landings were faked. What crabbed meanness of spirit does that belief imply about its adherents? The evidence that they did happen is overwhelming – not least the fact that scientists are still receiving data from instruments the astronauts left behind there. And, in any case, it is simply impossible to believe that in a country as open as the US a conspiracy to counterfeit a series of Moon landings could ever have been kept secret – never mind for all involved to have remained silent about it for so long. (By now – long since -someone would have cracked, someone talked.) To disbelieve it belittles the work, the huge effort put into it and the danger of doing so. No wonder Buzz Aldrin punched some idiot who asked him to swear he hadn’t walked on the Moon.

Never forget; these projects were achieved in tiny craft, with skin so thin as to be almost not there (but nevertheless beautiful) and with a computing power smaller that that of a twenty-first century pocket calculator, all with the killing power of a vacuum only millimetres away and up to 240,000 miles distant from any prospect of safety.

The achievement was not, though, in getting there. We could send a person to the Moon with little preparation, even now. The problem, the achievement, is getting them back.

The Apollo missions succeeded in that every time, even in the one mission to the Moon that was in all other respects a failure, Apollo 13, the safe return of whose crew was NASA’s finest hour.

In addition to holding the honour of being the first human to walk on the surface of another celestial body Neil Armstrong seems to have been a modest man; he certainly did not try to purvey his celebrity into attempting to gain political office.

Humans have not been to the Moon again for 40 years! That fact alone says something about the select few of whom Armstrong was the first.

Neil Alden Armstrong 5/8/1930-25/8/2012. So it goes.