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The Fair’s keynote speaker.

The Fair’s keynote speaker.

Who the hell mentioned the Man in the Moon?

Claes Britton | Nov 9, 2007 | 2 comments

Feel like I’m walking on the Moon.

So goes the rhyme from that notorious Method Man, in that classic sex rap from the epic classic double CD Wu Tang Forever from 1999.

Well, down in Cannes the other week, we had the privilege of of hearing how it really is from one of the few — even the first! — who actually knows. The opening speaker at the 60th annual Global Travel Retail Fair was no other than the guy in the picture, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. It was a true treat to get to see the man in real time. The wings of history blew a real horrorshow breeze. What’s more, he was the best speaker I’ve ever heard and seen — masterful in language, expression, gestures, humour and, above all, content.

The theme of the speach was the future in general, and the future of the aviation industry in particular. ”Looking into the future is like looking into a fog,” Armstrong said. ”We don’t know anything about it. What we can know is our history, and from that we can learn something”. I pricked up my ears even more, as this precise thesis — our vain and childish fixation with the future, at the expense of knowledge of history — is one of the central subthemes in my own book Turn of the Century in Stockholm. Armstrong proceeded to speaking about the World Future Exhibition staged in New York in 1939, of all years, which was a tremendous success so popular that it was extended with a full year, drawing a total audience of 20 million (our fascination with the future seems a universal syndrom). In this fair, Armstrong said, nobody came even near to forseeing that three such major inventions as the transistor, the jet engine and nuclear energy would be more or less fully developed less than ten years later (war is of course the turbo of technological innovation).

Armstrong recounted that we entered the nineteenth century at the speed of ten kilometers per hour, on horseback; then entered the twentieth century at one hundred kilometers per hour, by train, and then entered the twenty-first century at one thousand kilometers per hour, in jet plains. He posed the question whether it would be possible for our future fellow men to enter the twenty-second century at ten thousand kilometers per hour, answering the question himself with that, yes, this should be no impossible feat. Our supersonic passanger air traffic history as of yet, as we know, is limited to Concorde — a splendid machine, as Armstrong, himself originally a pilot, said, which flew for 35 years with only one accident, even this not caused by technical faults in the plane, the only major misigiving of which was that is was too small to be commercially succesful. Future supersonic commercial air carriers, however, will not have the conventional bird shape, Armstrong said, but instead that of rays, as the fear-imposing American Stealth Bomber, seating many hundred passengers, with no window seats at all. The real longterm, environmentally sustainable solution for commercial aviation, however, Armstrong continued, may well be liquid hydrogen, which of course is used as fuel in space rockets. The two main technological challenges that must be mastered are that liquid hydrogen requires huge tanks and that these are very difficult indeed to insulate, as the temperature of the hydrogen is 272 degrees below zero Celsius.

Armstrong then told the tale of what already in the fifties evolved into the Space Race, in which Russia won gold, silver and bronze for the first satellites in space (Sputniks). and then gold and silver for the first men in space (Gagarin and Titov), while the United States had to settle with bronze with John Glenn. He then concluded by saying that this race then continued with the moon expeditions ”a project in which I myself have a special interest.”

He didn’t get off quite that easy, though. The host speaker excused himself for having to pose the question which Armstrong must have been asked too many thousands of times and must be dead tired of: so how was it then — walking on the Moon?

”Well, it’s a quite special experience, as the day is about 300 hours long, and the night the same. Then it’s Earth, which never moves, but remains fixed in the exact same position. Then there’s the surface temperatures, which causes some problems, as it’s about 170 degrees above zero Celsius in the daytime and about 85 below in the nighttime. So on an averege, it’s quite OK.”

 

”As Isaac Newton said: to every advantage, there’s also a disadvantage. Well...to be honest, I’m not sure that he actually said that — but he would have if he would have thought about it...”
-Neil Armstrong

 

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