Like millions of people over the last few weeks, I’ve been following the progress of the Artemis II project to orbit the moon and return home.
I’m no expert on space, but the mission appears to have been a textbook one. The splashdown was even timed perfectly for primetime Friday night TV in the US, although we in the UK had to stay up somewhat later.
Since the last visit to the moon, computing power and data rates have improved enormously, offering a multimedia experience that was still science fiction in 1972. Despite this, I largely followed the trip in audio form.
BBC Sounds already had an podcast called 13 Minutes to the Moon that was resurrected for the occasion. The title is somewhat misleading because the episodes aren’t 13 minutes long; rather, it orginally covered the final 13 minutes before the Apollo 11 landing.
In its most recent form, Maggie Aderin from The Sky at Night presented a daily summary with guests including the astronaut Tim Peake.
Oddly enough, the lack of visual information didn’t diminish the coverage at all. At times, in fact, it helped when the presenters stepped in with context and small details that a video stream probably wouldn’t have paused to explain. I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy audio drama, and listening to each update felt like the next part of the saga.
These missions are all but guaranteed to seep their way into popular culture over the next few years because we’ve seen this pattern before.
We’ll see retrospective documentaries and scripted dramas exploring the relationships between the crew members. We’ll see a glut of novels using space travel as a backdrop or a metaphor, much like we’ve seen terrorist attacks used since 2001.
Some works will be thoughtful, and a good many more will – frankly – be opportunistic. Either way, they’ll be trying to make sense of a moment that’s not only historic, but already feels that way.
Gavin Cameron 