Spaced-Out

In 1960, when I had to write an essay answer on the English comprehensive examination for my master’s degree at Columbia University, I chose the topic that was related to Space (I do not recall how it was worded, but that’s neither here nor there). I began my essay by pointing out that by calling what is beyond Earth as “space” we imply that there is an emptiness there. However, I went on, in past times humans thought that “space” was inhabited by all sorts of beings—gods, angels, and what Alexander Pope called “The light militia of the lower sky.”*

*

Space has, over the years been a testing ground for outrageous conspiracy theories. Perhaps the one that is most familiar to us Americans is the imputation that the United States never landed a man on the moon—that all the supposed moon landings were elaborate, expensive hoaxes, perpetrated by NASA, with the desert in Arizona or New Mexico substituting for the surface of the Earth’s satellite.

Moon landing conspiracy theories  claim that some or all elements of the  Apollo program  and the associated  Moon landings  were  hoaxes  staged by  NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim of these  conspiracy theories  is that the  six crewed landings (1969–1972)  were faked and that  twelve Apollo astronauts  did not actually land on the  Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos,  telemetry  tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock  samples.**

*

I bring this up today because I have just discovered the following in my research into old New Yorker magazines. Responding to the first manned orbit of the Earth by the USSR’s Yuri Gagarin. the columnist David Lawrence wrote a disputatious article in the New York Herald Tribune under the headline 

REDS' SECRECY RAISES QUERY:

DID GAGARIN REALLY ORBIT?

Was the Soviet stunt in outer space, as announced officially from Moscow, a hoax?

Granted that something went around the earth, was a man really in it, or did the astronaut merely make a separate flight similar to that which an American airman, Joseph Albert Walker, recently made in an X-15 rocket plane at an altitude of 32 miles? These questions are being asked by scientists because there are some obvious discrepancies in the boastful account of his trip given by Major Yuri Gagarin.***

*

So, yes indeed, there are humans who believe in the emptiness of Space and that nothing human could penetrate it. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese claim to have sent a rocket to the dark side of the moon to collect rocks there.

Do you believe that?

I have bridge to sell you.

***

* Though I didn’t know of that reference then.

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories

*** Quoted by A. J. Liebling in his article “The Wayward Press” in The New Yorker, April 29, 1961. Liebling with the utmost sarcasm calls Lawrence