Chennai: The excitement in India is palpable as a new launch date has been put on the Chandrayaan-2 mission - July 22 and that will only be two days after the golden jubilee of the moon landing on July 20, 1969.
Celebrating the Apollo-11 mission of 1969 will also be the Indian television premiere of First Man on July 20 (1 pm and 9 pm) on Sony Pix and AXN.
William P. Barry who is NASA’s chief historian has collaborated on the movie which shows a riveting story of Nasa’s mission to land a man on the moon, focusing on Neil Armstrong. Barry answered a few questions from DC on the iconic astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon.
Q: Neil Armstrong’s story is obviously inspirational for Nasa? How inspirational is his story and the accomplishments of Apollo 11 to the world?
A: It’s pretty obvious, both in the film and in real life that the impact moon landing in 1969 had on the world. The people around the world recognised Nasa and the high stakes for accomplishments and Neil was an important part of that.
Q: There are a number of movies that are done around space. What do you think separates First Man from the other movies that have depicted Nasa and their space programme?
A:What I really like about First Man is its intensity, it really delivers that feeling of how risky the operation could be, how people thought about it and also it gives a good look of what the real environment was in 1960s. People weren’t happy with the space programme and there wasn’t a giant budget for Nasa’s program. It was real life, just like we have real life today, they had the same kind of circumstances back in the 60s and they accomplished great things.
Q: Do you think the movie has romanticised space travel?
A: Last 50 years whenever we think about Apollo there is this sort of narrative of one success after the other. Except occasionally, we didn’t put a foot wrong. It was a foregone conclusion that we were going to win the race to the moon. It was a lot closer than what is perceived.
Q: Mark Armstrong said that it was just circumstances that Neil Armstrong ended up being the first man to walk on the moon? But those circumstances paid off, wasn’t he the right first person?
A: Our other astronauts say that Neil was the right guy. It’s his humility and his understanding that he just happened to be one of the 400,000 people working on the programme, who got to be the first one to walk on the moon because anyone of series of successes of tests gained Between 1967 to 1969. All those success added up. If they hadn’t happened in the sequence they had, it would have been someone else. One of the other astronauts could have been the first to take a step on the Moon.
