Texts for Translation 2011:
  Gregory Beekman

Has NASA Photographed the Face of God?

G. Beekman

We humans are a funny lot. Switch off the lights and we’ll swear we can see ghosts. Get a phone call from someone ‘out of the blue’ and, if we were just thinking about them, we’ll swear there’s a telepathic connection. 

But ask us to go to church and we’ll claim we’re atheists. We’ll rant that differing religious beliefs have been the cause of all the wars that have ever taken place. We’ll say there is no God but in the same breath say that of course there must be aliens.

Only we don’t believe humans have ever been alien visitors to other worlds, not even to our own moon. No way, that’s not true!, we’ll say. The fact that the American government claims it sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin there is proof of government conspiracies. 

It was a huge big lie, we’ll say. A global con.  Just like democracy itself. We all know there’s really just Seven Men That Rule The Planet. And they do it in secret. We don’t know who they are or where they live – but there’s definitely seven. Of that, we’re sure. They rule the world and that proves governments lie about everything. 

Including the Moon, the biggest lie of all.

The moon-landings were a hoax. Filmed in a studio somewhere. Probably by Steven Spielberg. He was born in 1946 and made his first movie by the age of twelve. His Dad made computers. Yeah, way back then. Before computers even really properly existed. Before the Internet. Even before what would become the Internet existed. Yet he made them. And Steven Spielberg – Mr. ET, Mr. Jurassic Park, Mr. I-can-make-anything-look-real – knew all about them. He used them. To fake it. It was him. It was Spielberg. He faked the moon landings.

We never got there. 

Not the Americans, not the Russians, not any human.

Because we know. We believe.

Not even the Hubble Space Telescope could show us that man had landed on the moon. Turn it to the moon, we said. Show us Neil’s footprint, we demanded. 

It can’t, we’re told. It’s only just in space, we’re told. Still so close to the Earth that it’s really no closer to the moon than we are, we’re told.

But the Hubble can see back to the Dawn of Time. And photograph it. Creation itself. The Big Bang. All the way to the edge of the Universe. But not Neil’s footprints. Oh no.

We don’t understand.

Now NASA has a new claim. A new mission to the moon. The first in a decade. Not a man but a robot. A satellite currently flying low over the moon’s surface, automatically taking photographs of every square inch. 

And it’s photographed Neil’s footprints.

No!, I hear you say.

Yes, I tell you. It was all true. We really did go to the Moon.

I mean, of course we did.

And now we have the proof.

The LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) satellite was launched from Florida in June 2009 and is now just 50 kilometres above the surface of the moon. On Earth, space is defined as starting 100 kilometres up. If the LRO were orbiting Earth, it wouldn’t even be in space. That’s how close it is. It’s also about a quarter of a million miles closer to the moon than the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a big difference. 

Astronomical, even.

And the satellite is now flying over the old Apollo landing sites. Photographing them from 50 kilometres up in the freezing coldness of space where only space-age digital camera’s can work. The information is beamed back to Earth. Giant satellite dishes hungrily devour the signals, like giant mouths that can only feed on space. 

Their computerised bellies turn the signals back into pictures. And what do we see? We see that man really did land on the moon, that Apollo 11 was real. We see the mobile launch pad that was left there. We see the equipment Neil and Buzz left behind. We see trails of footprints snaking between the launch pad and crater, between launch pad and the array of equipment set up there. We see footprints.

We actually see footprints.

On the Moon.

So it wasn’t faked. Spielberg can finally remove the moon-landings from his CV. It wasn’t him after all. 

It was NASA. NASA put Man on the Moon. 

The Apollo 11 Eagle really did fly all the way to Tranquility Base. Houston, I really am on the Moon, said Neil. 

We know, said Houston. We’ve always known. Because we believed.

It was true.

And if one Apollo landing is true, then they all must be true.

NASA has been keeping LRO busy: Apollo 11 isn’t the only site to be imaged. They’ve done them all. Every single one. They even found Lunokhod 1, the little robotic rover the Russians let wander on the Moon and then lost contact with back in 1971. Scientists had been searching for it for decades. Really. Searching for it on the Moon. Even though they were stuck on Earth. Yet still they searched. Now LRO has found it, these scientists can ping laser beams off it as they do with the four other reflectors up there on the Moon. They’re going to use it, even after all this time. Not to drive it again but to reflect laser beams off it. 

With the discovery of Lunokhod 1 they’ll now have five reflectors on the Moon that can be used to track the motions of the Moon so precisely that they’ll be able to study the liquid outer core of the Moon. Yes, that’s how good it is. Even after all this time.

And three of those other reflectors were placed there by human hands, by NASA astronauts. By men who walked on the Moon. And jumped there. And maybe even skipped a little  too. They were having fun.

Wouldn’t you?

They even raced around the Moon in their cars, like big boy racers. Doing wheel spins and throwing up clouds of dust. Moon dust. And now thanks to the LRO image of the Apollo 17 landing site, we can even see one of those cars. Yes, really. It’s parked there on the moon. NASA calls it an LRV, a Lunar Roving Vehicle; we call it a moon-buggy. But it’s just a car. And it’s parked. Up there on the Moon.

We can see it. Or at least, the few dark and blurry pixels NASA claim is the LRV.

But this time we believe, for the world has changed all around us.

The impossible is now the ordinary. 

When it’s dark and clear at night, I can pull my mobile phone out of my pocket and point it at the night sky, and it’ll tell me what stars I’m looking at. Just with my phone. Just by downloading a little bit of software. It’s now that easy. 

I can travel the Universe. 

With just my phone. 

Technology so new and so unbelievable in the late 1960s is now part of our every day. And it’s not just computers. Amateur rocketry societies abound across the planet. Dads let their kids build and fly model rockets. Adults compete to see who’s design can go the highest. They launch them off little launch pads they stick in the ground. The engines, with real rocket fuel, you can simply buy from model shops. Real local shops. You don’t even have to jump online and try and smuggle them in from China or some place like that. Just buy them from a city-centre model shop for the same price as a couple of pints of beer. It’s that easy.

It’s as if anyone on the planet can now be a rocket scientist.

Even you.

Did you know, private companies are springing up in America and complaining that NASA’s way of doing things is the way of an old dinosaur? Yes, that’s what they’re saying. 

But we put Man on the Moon, NASA cries. We changed the world. Forever. 

But now you’re holding us all back, the private companies say. We can do it better. Cheaper. We don’t need a government to get in our way.

The world really has changed.

We can go to space ourselves.

Just ask Richard Branson, who has set up Virgin Galactic. Trains and planes weren’t enough for him. Scaled Composites, the American company that in 2004 won the $10 million Ansari X Prize to be the first commercial company to send a person into space, has done a deal with him. They’ll build the space ships, he’ll sell the tickets.

Their first space ship, the one that won the prize, is already in a museum. Not just any museum. The Smithsonian. In Washington. Their winning ship is called SpaceShipOne. It shares museum space with the Apollo 11 command module, that bit Neil, Buzz and Michael (Michael Collins, remember him? He orbited the Moon while Neil and Buzz walked on it) sat in with their fingers crossed as it hurtled back through Earth’s atmosphere and they hoped its parachutes would eventually open. 

But they didn’t need to cross their fingers inside SpaceShipOne. 

No, they just flew it back. Like a plane. From space.

And now we can buy tickets for it. 

We can be space tourists; we can be astronauts.

The Russian’s are leading the way on this. They were the first to send a man into space. They did it a half-century ago. Yeah, that’s how far back it was. Half a century. On the 12th of April 1961, the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into space and thus invented manned spaceflight. If you could plant a flag in space and claim it, it’d be Russian. They would own the Universe. But you can’t plant a flag in space. And now the Americans think they own it because they stuck one on the Moon. 

You can even see their flag on the LRO images of the Apollo 17 landing site. You can’t see the stars and stripes though. You can’t even see the flag pole. But it’s there. Those two blurry pixels. That bit of dark against the lunar grey. That’s our flag, they’ll say. We own the Moon, they’ll claim.

But they don’t.

No one does.

But they argued with the Russians as if they did. 

We don’t want space tourists, said the Americans. Space is special. It’s for special people, for heroes. Not for just anybody. 

Oh no. 

We beg to differ, said the Russians. We put the first man in space, they said. Then we put the first woman in space just two years later, they said. That was Valentina Tereshkova, back  in 1963. But it took you Americans another two decades to do the same, they pointed out. That was Sally Ride, back in 1983, the first American woman in space. Twenty years behind the Russians. 

Americans are so macho, so chauvinist – so behind the times.

Russia is the true democracy. We got there first and we make it available to all, the Russians are saying. And so when the Americans refused Denis Tito’s offer to buy a seat on the next Space Shuttle trip to space, the Russians opened not just their doors but their spacecraft hatches as well.

And so in April 2001, Denis Tito – a Californian billionaire – became the first space tourist. He was launched by the Russians from Kazahkstan after buying his ticket for just twenty million dollars. He enjoyed eight days on the ISS, the International Space Station. The Americans had eight days of anger. Denis Tito is not Neil Armstrong, they said. He doesn’t even look anything like him. They forgot to mention that he didn’t look anything like Yuri Gagarin either.

And that’s the point.

Thanks to the Russian governments, thanks to private American companies like Scaled Composites, thanks to those that believed, we’ll soon all be able to go to the Moon.

We can be our own heroes. 

We don’t even have to believe anymore. We can see for ourselves.

Oh look at that!, you’ll be able to exclaim one day from your seat on the Lunar Space Bus. It’ll be the number M-1. Painted bright white. It’ll be driving around the Apollo 11 landing site. You’ll try to stand but your leg will be stuck to the seat. Eeugh, yuk!, you’ll go. It’s chewing gum. And you’ve sat on it. Now you wished you’d paid for the private tour. You don’t get messy kids on the private tours.

But then you forget the chewing gum. You look out your Space Bus window. You’re amazed – it’s Apollo 11. 

You can hardly believe it.

But then you forget the conspiracy theories, you forget everything. And suddenly you understand.

We really did go to the Moon. And that’s Apollo 11.

Yes, Apollo 11. Just sat there on the Moon.

It’d been there all along.

I knew it of course. I knew it wasn’t fake. I mean, how could it be? Did Newton fake his laws of motion, did Einstein fake his genius?

Of course not. 

But for those people who lived in a cocoon of comfort created from the belief that the moon landings were fake, how will this affect them? They were the sceptics. They were the ones that didn’t believe. What will the LRO images of the Apollo landing sites do to them? 

Will their heads explode?

Will they spontaneously combust?

Will their whole world come crashing down around their ears?

They didn’t believe.

They thought governments lied.

They thought the moon-landings were fake.

Now they’ve been brought face to face with the truth. Like a heathen suddenly seeing the face of God. No longer needing to believe. Knowing.

To all those that didn’t believe Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, welcome to the real world. In a way, I’m jealous of you. You have seen the face of a God you didn’t believe in.

But this is the real world. I doubt you’ll remain in it for long. The governments are all hiding something from you. You know they are. They’re hiding the truth. The real truth. 

Man on the Moon is yesterday’s theory. The God of the sixties. This is the new millennium. The Age of Aquarius. A new God will arise. Like that ancient Mayan one. The one that says the Earth will end on the day of the Winter Solstice in December 2012. Because when a calendar ends, the world ends too. It’s obvious. I believe it.

Yes, that God will do. For now.

I think I’ve even seen Mayan ghosts. Yes, yes I have. They’re in telepathic communication with me. They’re telling me things. Strange things.

Yes, we humans really are a funny lot…

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