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This year's big movie was "Midnight Cowboy," a scathing portrait of Times Square's X-awarded gangster, who later won an Oscar. Woodstock – three days of peace, love and music in the mud in northern New York State – was followed a few months later by the Altamont Festival in California, where a man was killed in front of a camera while the Rolling Stones were singing "Under my thumb. "
This fall, the Beatles began to part quietly.
On the eve of the launch of Apollo 11, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy arrived in Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a team of mules and a delegation of poor singing "We will defeat". launch and spend money "to feed those who are hungry, clothe those who are naked, care for the sick and shelter the homeless".
The long break
Two weeks later, on the return from Apollo 11, President Richard M. Nixon, who succeeded Lyndon B. Johnson 1969, described the mission as "the greatest week in the history of the world since creation". But the Apollo program was already under political and budgetary pressure. The last three missions were canceled in 1970. The last flight, Apollo 17, in December 1972, was the only one to put a scientist, a geologist and future senator – Harrison Schmitt – on the moon.
So much for science or cosmic destiny. At that time, technology, or at least our cult, became suspicious. The moon shared headlines with Vietnam. The same feats that put men in space also killed people in Southeast Asia and contributed to the cleansing of nature. Some feared that governments and businesses, armed with computers, would make an army of numbers.
"I am a UC student: Please, do not bend, do not bend, do not shine and do not mutilate me," read the sign on a shirt during the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, referring to the instructions on the punch cards used at the time in computers.
This is how the age of Aquarius was born.
After defeating the Russians, we left the moon as awkwardly and cynically as we had kissed it ten years earlier. No goodbye. No infrastructure, such as bases or stations in orbit. Nothing allows you to come back easily. We have it ghostly.
Science continued. Since then, unprepared probes have visited all the planets of the solar system. robots invaded Mars; Space telescopes like Kepler and Hubble have revolutionized astronomy. And later lunar probes discovered water, in the form of ice, on the moon – things that we could drink, maybe, or break down to produce gasoline for rockets.
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