Fly Me to the Moon, via Greenwich

You'd have had to be on another planet or in a remote part of the world without Internet access to have missed that it's fifty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon (or since NASA faked the entire thing, if you subscribe to the conspiracy theory). 

Only 10 other men have followed their giant leap, and none since 1972, which is something surely nobody would have expected in 1969. Thomas Cook was even printing luggage labels for the package tourists it was going to take there, and you can see one of them in The Moon, the latest exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. 

The curators use the anniversary not only to relive the breathtaking scenes from 1969 and to explore how the race to get there developed but to examine the significance and allure of the Moon around the world, before bringing us bang up to date with the latest plans for a permanent human presence on Earth's only satellite. 

As the show reveals, humans had been wondering about how to travel to the Moon for hundreds, if not thousands, of years before the Eagle finally landed. The very first exhibit you see (and it's tiny, so you have to look very closely) is an engraving made originally by William Blake for a children's book in 1793. Two minuscule figures cling apprehensively to each other while a third starts to climb a very long ladder to the Moon. I want! I want! says the caption.

Maybe the emerging great power, China, will be the next to land. A propaganda poster from 1978 depicts flag-waving Chinese children in rockets being welcomed by the Moon goddess, Chang'e, and her companion, Yutu, the jade rabbit whose image can be made out on the Moon's surface.

The Moon is ingrained in all our cultures. In Greek mythology, the Moon goddess, Selene, fell in love with a sleeping shepherd, Endymion, while in Hinduism, the Moon god, Chandra, rides across the sky in a chariot pulled by an antelope.

For the Japanese, Moon viewing in the eighth month of the lunar calendar is a major festival. In this print, children are distracted from their game by the bright light of the full Moon.

That's the Harvest Moon they're looking at, the same phenomenon as celebrated in this mid-Victorian English painting by John Linnell. Before artificial lighting, the Full Moon closest to the Autumn Equinox enabled the harvesters to work late into the night to bring in the crops, and the painting celebrates the sense of peace and plenty associated with harvest time.

The Moon sets the calendar for Easter, for Ramadan and for Chinese New Year, and though Chinese lunar almanacs should, by tradition, be burnt to release their powers back to the Moon, we can see a rare 9th-century example that was discovered in a cave in 1900.

While the Chinese and other East Asians have their Moon rabbit, we see the Man in the Moon, but it was only in the early 17th century, with the development of the telescope, that scientists were able to peer more closely at the surface of the Moon and record their findings. The English astronomer Thomas Harriott was the first to draw what he could see of the Moon's features through a telescope, with magnification no stronger than a pair of today's binoculars, weeks before Galileo Galilei.

As what could be seen on the Moon's surface became clearer, authors began to imagine life there. Science fiction was born.... One of the books exhibited is Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone, telling the tale of Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard who gets there in a contraption powered by wild geese. 

By the 1830s, telescopes had grown so powerful that a series of stories in The New York Sun that an astronomer had seen fantastical creatures on the Moon were widely picked up around the world. The Great Moon Hoax was, of course, Fake News! Good pictures, though....

A hundred years later, the idea that man might one day travel to the Moon was by no means inconceivable, and bits of the 1929 German silent film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), directed by Fritz Lang, have a degree of plausibility. There are no wild geese involved, but there is a countdown to liftoff and a multi-stage rocket. 

Of course, no woman has actually made it to the Moon. So far....

Soon, we're in the 1950s and 60s, and the Space Race is in full swing. The Soviets were the first to put a satellite, a dog, a man, and indeed a woman, into space. This propaganda poster from 1964 celebrates their first launch of a multi-crewed spacecraft, with three cosmonauts looking boldly upward atop a slogan that translates as "Peace for the People".  

But it wasn't the Soviets who made it to the Moon, it was the Americans, and a wealth of pictures and recordings (though not a lot of actual artefacts) bring back the atmosphere of 1969, recalling what an incredible technological achievement it was, though one that swallowed up huge chunks of the US budget. 

As so often in this sort of exhibition, though, it's the minor details, the footnotes to history, that stick in the memory. President Richard Nixon ordered that Moon rock be presented to all the nations on Earth as a diplomatic gift from two lunar missions. Here's one that was given to Harold Wilson. 

It's still in Downing Street, but of the 270 samples that the Nixon administration handed out, no less than 180 are today unaccounted for: lost, stolen, or sold on the black market.

Fifty years ago, the mission to the Moon was omnipresent. Toys, lunar-patterned wallpaper, and of course, even Blue Peter joined in, showing young viewers how to make their own space helmet out of papier-mâché, and there's one that has survived to make it to this exhibition. 

To finish, there's a look forward to how attempts to create permanent settlements on the moon might look, but the very last thing you see before you leave is this photograph, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968. His picture was the first to show an Earthrise and it helped to kick-start the environmental movement. 

"We came all this way to explore the Moon," Anders said, "and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

Practicalities

The Moon is on at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, south-east London until January 5. It's open every day from 1000 to 1700. Full-price tickets cost a very reasonable £9 and can be booked online here. The Maritime Museum is just five or so minutes' walk from Cutty Sark station on the Docklands Light Railway; Greenwich station on the National Rail network with trains from London Bridge is a little further away.

Images

Buzz Aldrin, lunar-module pilot for the first Moon landing, poses beside the United States flag during the Apollo 11 mission. Courtesy of NASA
William Blake, I want! I want!, published in For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, c. 1820. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Ishikawa Toyomasa, The Eighth Month: Moon Viewing, 1770-75, Victoria and Albert Museum
John Linnell, 1855, Harvest Moon, Victoria and Albert Museum
Poster for the 1929 German silent film Frau im Mond. © Victoria and Albert Museum
M. Gordon, Peace for the People, Soviet propaganda poster celebrating the first USSR multi-crewed space flight, 1964. © Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library
Diplomatic moon rock presented by US President Richard Nixon to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, c. 1969, 10 Downing Street
Earth over the horizon of the moon, Apollo 8 mission image. Courtesy of NASA