(In half a century, we never even came close again. I’m betting on you, Elon!)
Even before being able to grasp much more than my immediate environment, I was obsessed with space. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that the regime in charge of my country only allowed television in our country in 1976. More about that below. This was a mere four years after the final Apollo mission and the era we lived in was generally referred to as The Space Age. Non-stop.
(Still at a loss for words when considering the Voyager Mission)
There were Skylab and Salyut 1, Pioneer, Viking, the brutally brave and often very successful achievements by the Soviets. And the odd photo appearing in newspapers of the a new space plane mounted atop a jumbo jet. One which would eventually land on a runway after returning from orbit.
Of course we were some years behind the rest of the world with regards to TV content and, being the late 70s, space operas and action series flooded our single government-owned channel. It all hit at once: Moonbase Alpa, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Ark II, The Thunderbirds and Battle of The Planets. There were more, but things are getting fuzzy after 40 plus years.
(These are Cylons. I reject any other representation. Blinding specular lens flares not negotiable.)
We had what South Africans refer to as Lucky Packets, a genericized brand name stemming from the fact that the biggest market share of these candy packs belonged to the ubiquitous process-yellow coloured Lucky Packet™.
With the release of the Star Wars franchise, Lucky Packet™ started replacing their variety of toys with space ships only. The most sought after were the shiny red and gold USS Enterprise NCC-1701. You could never find a bloody TIE Fighter and only two kids I knew ever owned these. I did get a metallic red Enterprise though.
What you’d get 75% of the time would be either an X-Wing Fighter and to a slightly lesser extent, a Cylon Raider. I started throwing the X-Wings away, but could never have enough Cylon Raiders. My favourite ship from my favourite aliens.
As NASA scaled down to what amounted to a glorified space trucking company and shuttle missions becoming invisibly routine (except for the tragedies), general interest waned until I, as a young adult, stumbled upon the genre of hard science fiction. I’d borrow two novels and two non-fiction titles from the library(!) at a time. The non-fiction by authors like Sagan, Hawking and Dawkins. Things I could digest. This changed my life forever and I found myself a skeptic while leveling up my capacity for logic.
Things are starting to look interesting again, but the heyday of insane creativity and production without the help of anything that we’d call a computer today, are over.
(Drinking their own piss since long before Bear Grylls)
Thought I lost this, but forgot that I kept it safe in an Arthur C. Clarke novel until my brother read the book and found it.
This is the man who uttered the words “Houston, we have a problem” and captained a completely fucked up spacecraft safely back to earth during the Apollo 13 mission. No, not Tom Hanks. Jim Lovell. Personally signed with my dad’s pen on the dark side of earth.
