Mission to Planet Earth

Earthrise from the Moon – as photographed by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders at Christmas 1968 (NASA photo).

On the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, why should we care about the space program?

Image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay


On a warm summer evening in 1979 – we are told by Joshua Zeitz – some 7000 violent fans rioted in a Chicago baseball stadium, leaving it in tatters. ‘It wasn’t bad pitching that incited the mob to storm the field between games,’ he quotes from a newspaper account, ‘It was disco.’

Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay

It seems that a local media celebrity had proposed “Disco Demolition Day” which would feature physically blowing up a pile of disco records on the playing field during intermission. Egged on by the local media, fans brought along their vinyl for destruction, which they used in part as frisbies (or projectiles) to assist in the build-up of escalating tensions, which also included waving protest banners, storming the field and tearing out the batting cage, setting off firecrackers and starting fires; and ultimately inciting a riot that led to dozens of arrests and injuries. Ultimately, Zeitz concludes of this particular demolition sentiment:

“… An obvious explanation for the Disco Demolition Night riot might center on the desire of white, working-class baseball fans to strike out against an art form that they associated with African Americans, gays and lesbians, and Latinos. A long decade of stagflation, conflicts over busing and affirmative action, fallout from the Vietnam War, and popular anxieties about relaxed sexual mores left working-class whites desperate to put a human face on the impersonal, highly disruptive social changes that were reordering their world. Disco, which claimed its roots in urban black and gay neighborhoods, and which celebrated a libertine approach to sex and personal expression, was a perfect target for white rage.”(Zeitz, 2008)

A generation after the Disco Demolition movement, we observe a much larger, vocal and potentially dangerous groundswell that has been building over the intervening years. We now see a large voting bloc of disaffected US whites who face a choice: to vote for a President out of a spirit of fear and anger, seeking to destroy everything that they perceive as a threat to their privilege; or to vote more wisely for temperance and democracy. This situation is reminiscent of “Nightfall”, an old science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, about a world that faces darkness once every era, when an eclipse covers their world, with the resultant societal panic and chaos causing the downfall of civilisations.

How does this relate to the space program? Aside from the obvious loss of science and scientists in any upcoming Christian Taliban Dark Age, there are lessons that western leaders and culture have failed to learn from our science and its history.

Learning for Life

AI generated image
Image by dlsd cgl from Pixabay

“If I could travel back into time, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls. The destruction of the library was a warning to us 1,600 years later: we must never let it happen again.” – Carl Sagan (Ovenden, 2020).

In Cosmos, Sagan spoke about the loss of the Library at Alexandria, repeating a common myth about the methods and forms of its disappearance (O’Neill, 2017; Ovenden, 2020). However, one thing that he did explain accurately: the loss of the Library was a tragedy to the world’s literature, sciences and history. We must avoid a repeat of the social conditions that led to its disappearance, so as to avoid a repetition amidst our modern forms of libraries, repositories and archives – plus all the networks, educational centres and opportunities they represent. As I write this, the world is recovering from an outage that disrupted some elements of the world Internet. Can we ever afford to lose it all, even for a short amount of time? Or what would a fascist Gilead era do to our accumulated wealth of knowledge today? Or for that matter, if the great unwashed white hordes with their pitchforks and torches descend once again on Washington DC after the upcoming November Presidential election, who will speak for civilisation?

Sagan made one final observation about the fall of the library: that its loss did not appear to make a splinter of difference to the world as it was at the time. Why was this? Because the scientists and scholars in the library did not apply their knowledge to the outside world. Expert knowledge about agriculture or ploughing, for example, might have been left inside the walls of the Library and not shared with the farmers outside – hence its loss made no difference to the huddled masses.

We must be careful to avoid a repetition of this cultural failure. Education (including public television education) is needed. Perhaps this is where we need to have fewer Kardashians and more Cosmos; less Survivor and more Sesame Street. We need to point out to anti-science conspiracy theorists and Moon landing deniers that they live in the modern world, replete with space age technology – ranging from their smart phones and GPS tracking to the CAT and MRI scanners that may have saved their lives. We need to educate them about how much of the modern world – ranging from agricultural and food refrigeration techniques, from satellite weather forecasting to bushfire and flood mitigation, from air traffic control to vaccine storage technology, from the Internet to social media – have impacted their lives after being invented or assusted by the space program.

Apollo 11 lunar footprint (NASA photo)

This to me is NASA’s greatest deficiency: not because they failed to return to the Moon for fifty years, but because they neglected to inform the masses during the last five decades of how their spinoff technology has changed and improved our lives forever. They forgot to remind us all about space spinoffs beyond astronaut ice cream, gravity defying pens, and space blankets. To me, that’s like Christopher Columbus returning from his voyages of exploration, invasion and conquest, and informing Queen Isabella that the future of the Americas might be extrapolated as providing paltry farming land for corn and a few forests of firewood – but little else.

The Apollo program provided the largest injection of cash and funding into non-military science in history. Its offshoot so far is over 2000 spinoffs and ongoing technological development that is worth at least $469 billion today.

Against this reality, NASA’s greatest failure of imagination was not failing to anticipate and prevent the Apollo 1 disaster, but neglecting to fully exploit its own proven potential to change and save our future. The best is yet to come.

“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” — astronaut Bill Anders.

In 1968. astronaut Bill Anders photographed ‘Earthrise’ from lunar orbit (see photo at the top of this article) and this spearheaded the greatest environmental movement in human history. NASA’s subsequent ‘Mission to Planet Earth’ became the vanguard for a movement to utilise space technology and research to focus on improving our lives on planet Earth, that pixel of colour in a cold, largely dead cosmos. This included using space and satellite data to warn the world about the hole in the Ozone layer, motivating world governments to fix the problem. The same opportunities exist today to mitigate against climate catastrophe.

This is the greatest reality we overlook: that despite our insular wars, even refugees have access to space age mobile phones that link them to the outside world; that satellites are documenting our escalating climate change crisis; and that it is becoming increasingly difficult for dictators and monopoly news media to censor and oppress nonconformist voices. This is the genuine dissent that conspiracy theorists promote without any real understanding of its true potential: we are the world; we can shape and change our future thanks to space. Science can get out the word if we make it a priority.

Radio personality Casey Kasem, is known for the sign-off signature of his radio program: “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.” Such a metaphor summarises our daily challenge: to keep striving for betterment through the space sciences while remaining firmly grounded in reality. This may yet prove to be our ultimate calling as a species.

References:

Burtel Edison, 1985, “Mission to Planet Earth”,
Science
(New Series) Vol. 227, No. 4685, January 25, p. 367. (JSTOR)

Tim O’Neill, 2017. “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2 July.

Richard Ovenden, 2020. “The Story of the Library of Alexandria Is Mostly a Legend, But the Lesson of Its Burning Is Still Crucial Today”, Time, 17 November. (JSTOR)

J. Zeitz, 2008, Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October), pp. 673-688. (JSTOR)

©2024 Geoff Allshorn.

Waking in Fright to Suzi’s Story

“Wake in Fright” is not only a title of a 1971 Australian film, but it is a call to arms for people who want to stir themselves from the sleep of complacency or inaction, and commence the journey from awareness to action – the difference from being awake to being woke. But a generation ago, this film touched upon a number of themes that were becoming relevant during its time, and it can still speak to us today as part of Australian culture – challenging the “She’ll be right, mate” dismissal of injustice and suffering.

And perhaps not surprisingly, women led one particular movement for related social activism, and one early advocate effectively used her life (and death) to call for calm compassion.

US film critic Roger Ebert reviewed the film under the headline “An Outback horror story” – which it certainly is, with its depiction of outback isolation and alcohol-fuelled violence, its toxic masculinity (including sexual assault and virulent homophobia), and its repulsive documentation of kangaroo slaughter (a scene which reportedly caused a walkout of some audience members during a 2009 screening at Cannes).

Given that “Wake in Fright” is a no-nonsense expose about living on the geographically and culturally violent fringe of Outback Australia – and I have seen it referred to as being one of a wave of “Ozploitation” films that might also including “Mad Max” and “Wolf Creek” – it is perhaps not surprising that the film was “lost” for about forty years, and rediscovered a generation later. James Guida in The New Yorker suggested that:

“…When it was released it was so angrily denounced by the filmgoing public in Sydney that it disappeared forever — well, nearly. They were so aghast at the world of violence, aggression, ritualistic drinking, brutality toward nature and warped homoerotic sexuality masquerading as macho masculinity and bogus male bonding, that [the film] was a box-office flop.”

Somehow during my tender teenage years, I watched this film on television (before it disappeared) and its scenes of boganism were later recalled when, like the film’s protagonist (a school teacher), I was also assigned a job in the school of a dusty country town. For me, the isolation and culturally desolate landscapes were very real, and the film’s kangaroo killings were revisited when I joined some local “mates” on what I thought was a social night, but which became (for them) a night of “bunny bonking” (hunting rabbits by guns and spotlight). The film’s underside of Australian culture was very evocative of real life.

But for me, the film’s most frightening depictions of violence were its cultural hatred and repulsion towards homosexuality. Created during the same era in which Hollywood was churning out films like, “The Boys in the Band:” and “Midnight Cowboy”, inferred depictions of LGBT+ characters in films were generally self loathing or aberrant, adding an undercurrent of seediness or villainy to characters who were destined to either die or lead lives of loneliness (later revisited in “Brokeback Mountain”). Aussie films during this era, such as “The Everlasting Secret Family” and “The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie” followed suit, with LGBT+ characters either queer coded as part of their inferred displays of deviance, or were subjected to larrikin slurs of being comedic “poofters”. Such stereotypes were later examined by film historian Vito Russo as part of the western culture of queer invisibility or oppression. It would be some time before our culture would feel the impact of the US Stonewall Riots, or the publication of the gay liberation tome, “Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation” by Australian activist Dennis Altman.

Meanwhile, “Wake in Fright” disappeared and was presumed effectively lost. I recalled the film with probable confusion caused by my having seen it at such a young age and being probably unable to fully absorb and process its nuances and multilayered meanings. I vaguely recalled its homophobic depictions of male bonding and homophobic male self-loathing, reinterpreting these through the lens of a fellow teacher, a woman who once casually commented about teenage schoolboys fighting in our schoolyard: “I wonder if boys like to fight and wrestle because it’s the only way that they can touch and have emotional closeness to other males without being accused of being gay”. I saw the deep-seated threat of homophobic, toxic male violence first-hand in that country town one day, when the local radio station had declared the day to be “Blue Jeans Day” and had jokingly called for people to wear blue jeans as a way of “coming out” as gay. I had coincidentally worn blue jeans to school that day, and my students joked about it while I tried to have a mature (but age appropriate) conversation with them about human rights and equality – in the days before Anti Discrimination laws. One of the other young male teachers (a known womaniser), when also jokingly questioned by his students about his blue jeans, became loudly and physically aggressive, literally threatening to assault the nearest student if anything more was said on the matter. It seemed that the visceral violence of the outback country town from the film could also be found in real-life locations elsewhere in Australia. And there I lived: in an isolated, threatening, cultural desert.

But the most frightening correlation between the film and real life happened in 1995 when its star, Gary Bond, died of AIDS. His gay life – and his death – remained largely hidden from polite Australian society. Perhaps his homosexuality was another reason why the film had largely disappeared.

This was the era of AIDS, when public toilets frequently boasted graffiti that read “GAY = Got AIDS Yet?” or “AIDS = Anally Inserted Death Sentence” and became one focal point for roaming gangs of “poofter bashers” (I even recall reading in the newspaper about a young father who was bashed to death on a nearby train just for allegedly looking gay). Despite a number of prominent Australians speaking up for tolerance, acceptance, and in opposition to homophobia and AIDSphobia, other prominent Australians spoke of gay men (and other disempowered cohorts) as being ‘radical deviants’ (Simper, 1986) or purveyors of ‘brazen indulgences… to spread AIDS in Australia” (Nile, 1986).

The gay community had rallied and successfully conducted “safe sex” campaigns to reduce the spread of HIV, but this had remained largely within their own or related affected communities – all of them stigmatised and marginalised. They needed someone to speak up on their behalf. One early such advocate was a young woman who, along with her husband, became a mouthpiece for AIDS activism that had the potential to heighten and spread fear – but their loving, gentle voices gave testimony to a more compassionate, loving approach.

Suzi’s Story – Be Awake and Be Woke

“Forgive.”
– Vince Lovegrove explains Suzi’s advice to him about life in Suzi’s Story
(Lovegrove, 1987a).

The television documentary Suzi’s Story focussed on the family of Vince and Suzi Lovegrove, a young couple in Sydney who had met in the 1983 and had married shortly after the birth of their son Troy. Before long, the tragedy of AIDS would strike this family.

Vince Lovegrove later recalled their early days together in New York City and the ignorance that pervaded communities that were already affected:

“During my time in New York I lived in Christopher Street, Greenwich Village and the homosexual community would demonstrate in the streets, handing out information pamphlets and collecting fighting funds for this new disease that was confined to the gay community. We thought.

“This was 1983, and we had nothing against gays. But even so, just to ensure our safety, when we descended the three flights of stairs in our small apartment block and walked onto the street, we scanned the sidewalks. We wanted to be doubly sure we wouldn’t catch AIDS by accidentally brushing past someone who was infected. We talked about it often, sometimes seriously, but mostly jokingly, congratulating ourselves on how lucky we were not to be at risk.”(Lovegrove, 1993. p. 2.)

But even back then, warning signs were present:

“Ironically, Suzi was constantly ill from the moment we met. She often suffered from tiredness, lethargy; on a few occasions there were skin rashes, vomiting…. Maybe a cold, a change of weather, a hangover, stressed-out Manhattan living. Always a plausible explanation for the simplest of symptoms.” (ibid)

On 10 March 1986, now living in Australia, their worst fears were confirmed. Blood tests revealed that Suzi had HIV antibodies, indicating that she had been exposed to HIV some years earlier (ibid, p. 4), and both she and her son Troy were eventually diagnosed with AIDS.

The documentary Suzi’s Story was filmed in early 1987, chronicling their family’s life in the weeks leading up to Suzi’s death. The love and support they received from relatives was contrasted against the mixed response from friends – some supportive, others fearful and rejecting. The program was sensitive but also blunt: Vince shared how he and Suzi had enjoyed sex together for years without his becoming infected; his daughter from a previous marriage discussed whether her school friends (or their parents) would be supportive.

It was also a time of great testing – and not simply from their battle with AIDS. Vince reported that he had to battle four court cases over his and Suzi’s right simply to film their documentary at all, as many people evidently disagreed with the wisdom of filming the last months of a dying woman’s life (ibid, p. 66). It seemed that the societal taboo against death was another hurdle that people with AIDS would have to overcome if they wanted to have their problem dealt with openly and honestly.

Suzi’s Story aired on Channel 10 on 23 June 1987, only nine days after Suzi Lovegrove’s death from AIDS. The viewer response was “unprecedented” (Johnstone, 1987) and led to a repeat screening on 9 July 1987, preceded by newsman David Johnstone reading aloud extracts from three sample letters which had been written by viewers responding to the first screening. He also stated at the end of the second screening that the viewer response led Channel 10 to believe that the documentary had contributed to breaking down the stigma associated with AIDS (ibid).

Positive viewer response also led Vince Lovegrove to write a eulogy to his wife in Sydney’s Sun newspaper prior to the second screening of the documentary on 9 July:

“Well, you really did it this time, my love…Viewers fell in love with you and your dignity…You smashed all the myths of AIDS to smithereens…

“And they now know what is needed most by victims. Love. You should be damned proud. And Australians should be proud of their response…” (Lovegrove, 1987b).

The newspaper also reported that “a massive wave of sympathy and support” included money to support young Troy Lovegrove in his own battle against AIDS (ibid). The documentary even won a 1987 Human Rights Award as testimony to its widespread impact in fighting stigma.

The emotional and compassionate response of Australians to this young heterosexual couple and their family began a slow, glacial transformation to extend compassion to others at risk, who remained invisible: gay and bisexual men, injecting drug users, haemophiliacs, and their female sexual partners and infants. That stigma was still there – although Vince and Suzi Lovegrove (and their children) had challenged such fear, ignorance and stigma with their own brand of calm courage. Australia woke in fright – and began a journey forward into a new era of both effective HIV medications and a more compassionate society that was learning respect for diversity.

Other advocates – especially women – would come forward in those early days of a terrible double epidemic (one of a virus, and one of stigma and rejection). But young Suzi Lovegrove set the scene for change by appearing on televisions in living rooms around Australia, and making people weep for those lost to AIDS. Her husband Vince was tragically killed in a car accident on 24 March 2012, but Suzi and Vince should be remembered and honoured as people who were willing to stand up (at considerable cost to themselves) against a terrible plague and its terrible stigma. We can still learn from their example today.

References:

Author unknown, 1996. “Proud lives remembered: World AIDS Day 1996”, in Sydney Star Observer, 28 November, pp. 2 & 3.

Roger Ebert, 2012. An Outback horror story, RogerEbert.com, 31 October.

Gilda Golden, 2024. The Impact of Queer Invisibility: from Alienation to Inspirational Representation, Medium.com, 7 June.

James Guida, 2012. “Wake In Fright”: Prepare to Be Disturbed, Mate, The New Yorker, 4 October.

David Johnstone, 1987. Introduction to repeat screening of “Suzi’s Story”, Channel 10, 9 July.

Vince Lovegrove, 1987a. Interviewed in “Suzi’s Story”, A Carlyon-Gillespie Production, in association with Pro-image Productions for Network Ten Australia.

Vincent Lovegrove, 1987b. “My Dearest Suzi”, the Sun (Sydney), 9 July.

Vincent Lovegrove, 1993. A kid called Troy, ABC Books.

Andrew McCallum, 2014. The Hunt: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), Key Moments in Australian Cinema, Issue #70, March.

Fred Nile MLC, 1986. “Scrap Gay Mardi Gras”, The Australian, 21 February.

Errol Simper, 1986. “CEP funds wasted on ‘deviant radicals’,” The Australian, 12 March.

= = =

This was preparatory work for my PhD studies on, “A Social History of HIV/AIDS in Melbourne During the ‘Crisis Years’ 1981 to 1997”; this latter work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

©2024 Geoff Allshorn.