When American astronaut Neil Armstrong passed away on August 25 just days after turning 82 the whole world stopped, just as it had on July 21, 1969, when Armstrong descended the ladder of the Eagle lunar lander and set foot on the moon.
On hearing the news of Armstrong’s death, millions of people around the world were taken back, in an instant, to the event which seemed, for three days, to unite the world as it watched on flickering black and white television sets (in Australia, that is) one of the most momentous events of history unfold.
Lesser known, however, and still largely obscured by the scale of the achievement of Apollo 11 and the NASA missions that were its successors, is the way in which many, if not all, of the 24 men who travelled to the moon between 1969 and 1972 were profoundly changed by their experiences in their attitudes to life and its meaning.
This is a matter of considerable interest to anyone who believes in God and probably of even more relevance now, over four decades later.
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who flew on Apollo 14, said that “The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window [I saw] the earth, the moon, the sun and the whole 360 degrees panorama of the heavens. And that was the powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realised that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft and the molecules in the bodies of my partners were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generations of the stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness. It wasn’t ‘them’ and ‘us’. It was ‘that’s me, that’s all of us, it’s one thing’. And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of “oh my god, wow, yes! An insight. An epiphany.”
The sense of an epiphany, of having glimpsed something divine, or near-divine, was not uncommon. Today, we have displaced God from our lives as a nation and often individually, having sought to drive the Creator of the Universe out of any mention in the public square of the nation’s life and in a seamingly increasing number of cultures at a global level.
We worship instead the god whose name begins with ‘w.w.w.’ Yet Gene Cernan, who flew on both the Apollo 10 and 17 missions, reflected that the experience taught him in the most powerful way possible the limits of science and technology.
“I felt,” he said, “that I was literally standing on a plateau out there somewhere in space, a plateau that science and technology had allowed me to get to. But now what I was seeing, and even more importantly what I was feeling, at that moment in time was that science and technology had no answers for it, literally no answers, because there I was and there you are – there you were, the earth – dynamic, overwhelming, and I felt that the world had just too much purpose, too much logic. It was just too beautiful to have ever happened by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you and bigger than me and I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense, there has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we create ourselves to govern our lives.”
But more eloquent than any editorial is Charlie Duke, who flew on Apollo 16. When he returned, he said, “A friend of ours got us to go to a Bible study at the tennis club. And, after that weekend, I said to Jesus, I said, ‘I give you my life’ and ‘If you’re real, come into my life’ and ‘I believe.’ And He did. And I had this sense of peace that was… hard to describe. It was so dramatic that we started sharing our story. [Now] I say my walk on the moon lasted three days and it was a great adventure. But my walk with God lasts forever.”