Moonstruck

The night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon I was in the bathroom, puking my guts out.

This is not because I had anything against Neil Armstrong, or NASA, or was made physically ill by the idea that there were actual homo sapiens out there who thought the whole thing was A Dang Old Gummint Lie. It is because I had appendicitis.

The docs yanked the little rascal out the next day. So I'll always associate the moon landing with throwing up a lot and then lying in a hospital bed with my lower abdomen on fire.

It's hardly the way I wanted to remember Apollo 11, which lifted off toward the grandest human achievement of the 20th century 50 years ago this morning. I was, after all, a space program nerd of the first order. I could rattle off the names of all seven Mercury astronauts, in the order they went up. The day the last of them, Gordo Cooper, went up, I stood out in our backyard looking up at the sky, hoping to see him pass over (I didn't).

I wanted to be Ed White, jetting around in space at the end of a shiny umbilical cord. I wanted to eat food out of tubes. I even liked Tang, because supposedly the astronauts drank it.

The last was probably more because I was a 10-year-old kid who'd eat anything. But, still.

Anyway ... the further we get away from what Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins began a half-a-century ago today, the more astounding and lucky and straight-up ballsy it seems. So I can understand, a little, why people with small minds still believe it never happened, that the whole thing was faked by shadowy forces who apparently had the technology to completely fool the entire world in 1969, but not the technology to actually go to the moon.

Polite society used to dismiss folks like this as "wingnuts" back in the day, but that was before the Supreme Wingnut occupied the White House, and rampant wingnuttery became mainstream thought in America. And so every interview with Buzz Aldrin or Michael Collins, the surviving Apollo 11 astronauts, is attended by comments from the usual suspects about how we're celebrating something that never happened and Buzz just keeps lying and that flag is clearly waving in the breeze and how can that be when there's no breeze on the moon and yada-yada-yada, blah-blah-blah.

My reaction to this is there are a lot of people out there who have seen this too many times. And who might want to finish with their comments, because they're late for their tinfoil-hat fitting.

That's because, if it's impossible for some to believe we pulled off the improbable in 1969, it's beyond impossible to believe the whole thing was a gigantic coverup. Somewhere close to half-a-million people worked on the Apollo 11 mission in some capacity or another. Yet they all kept the Great Coverup secret? In a nation that can't keep a secret about anything for five minutes?

Plus, Hollywood lighting experts will tell you it would have been impossible in 1969 to artificially create the moon lighting we see from the Apollo missions. And if you were going to fake the video of Armstrong stepping off the LEM, wouldn't you have used better production values? And how do you explain, if the moon missions were faked, the photos of the landing sites sent back from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2011? Or the fact that you can still bounce Earth-bound lasers off the retroreflector mirrors placed on the lunar surface by the astronauts?

None of this, of course, will make a dent in the wingnuts' narrative. That's the whole problem with conspiracy theories, see: They're a one-size-fits-all alternate universe where you can plausibly dismiss even the most established of facts.

Thus the moon landings never happened because all those half-a-million people are lying. And the Holocaust never happened because all the survivors of the camps, and every single serviceman who liberated them, made it all up. And can we really prove Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927? Or that Hillary didn't personally fly to Benghazi and kill those four American soldiers, just like she did Vince Foster?

On and on. You can't kill lunacy. All you can do is try to keep it down to a dull roar.

And so I will. And so, in four days time, I'll go outside, look up at the moon, and know that the footprints of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are still there, 50 years along.

Then I'll watch this again. God bless you, Buzz.