{"id":107,"date":"2016-12-20T16:52:34","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T16:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/?p=107"},"modified":"2016-12-20T16:52:34","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T16:52:34","slug":"space-age-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/space-age-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Space-Age Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>
\nHere are two items I bought in W. H. Smith\u2019s recently. The first is a special (and very expensive) issue of the BBC Sky at Night<\/em> magazine about the Apollo missions, and the second (a much better deal at the same price) is a repackaging of a 2008 Discovery Channel series about NASA spaceflights from Mercury to the Shuttle, together with another magazine. Presumably both items were put out for the Christmas gift market \u2013 mainly as a nostalgic treat for people of my generation, I guess, although it would be nice to think some youngsters are interested in the subject too.<\/p>\n

I learned quite a lot from both items, particularly about the earlier and later missions. Although I was always interested in space, it was only in a vague, general way up until the Apollo 8 mission. That happened shortly after my 11th birthday, and it was the first one I really got drawn into \u2013 in the sense that I knew the astronauts\u2019 names and avidly followed every little phase of the mission. This really intense awareness continued through Apollos 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13, but then started to get murky again after that point.<\/p>\n

Not for the obvious reason, though. You might think, \u201cwell, of course, everyone lost interest in the later Apollo missions\u201d \u2013 but that wasn\u2019t it at all. I\u2019ve got files of newspaper clippings I carefully cut out about Apollos 14 to 17, as well as Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz test project. I\u2019ve got some photos and fact sheets about Skylab that I sent off to NASA for (as well as another batch about Apollo from a few years earlier). But I never absorbed the huge amounts of information about those later missions that I did for Apollo 8-13 \u2013 for the simple reason that the information just wasn\u2019t there to be absorbed<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the early 70s Britain only had three TV channels, and they were all in the \u201cgeneral entertainment\u201d category. There were no purely factual channels, no 24-hour news channels … and of course no internet. The TV gave blanket coverage to things like Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, but later missions had to compete for airtime with soap operas, sports, comedy shows and the like. Key space events were still covered \u2013 live \u2013 but they had a frustrating tendency to happen when you were at school, or otherwise indisposed. People didn\u2019t have video recorders in those days.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s an over-simplification to say that \u201ceveryone lost interest in the later Apollo missions\u201d. It was the mainstream media that lost interest \u2013 and in the 1970s, that was the only kind of media there was. We\u2019re so much luckier today!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are two items I bought in W. H. Smith\u2019s recently. The first is a special (and very expensive) issue of the BBC Sky at Night magazine about the Apollo missions, and the second (a much better deal at the same price) is a repackaging of a 2008 Discovery Channel series about NASA spaceflights from … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Space-Age Nostalgia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,27,23],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-moon","tag-nostalgia","tag-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}