One small step for Mexico…

NASA photo. Apollo 11 crew in Mexico City, 13 September 1969

Mexican science played a small… and critical… part in the moon landing, one that gave the achievement a world-wide immediate impact, and changed our concept of not just the heavens, but life here on earth as well.

Mexico was a pioneer in innovative television technology (Guillermo González Camarena invented color television in 1939) and in creative uses of what poet and dramatist Salvador Novo called the “monstrous daughter of the hidden intercourse between radio and cinema” for disseminating information. Being a country which very early (in the 1960s) began using satellite transmissions — for academic lectures to hard to reach parts of the country — Mexico was the ideal testing ground for the one thing that made it possible for the Apollo 11 Mission to be seen as it happened.

The 1968 Summer Games, while mostly remembered for other things, or for the Tlatelolco Massacre which was not televised, it was the first time sound and moving images were broadcast directly to satellites, for distribution in “real time” across the planet.  What the Summer Games showed was that it was possible for something happening in Mexico to be seen by people in Australia.  For NASA scientists (who then called in Mexican technicians for assistance),  it wasn’t implausible for people on Earth to see what was happening on the Moon.

That in itself was a unprecedented technical breakthrough, allowing for the mixed blessing of of 24/7 news cycle today… affecting not only what we know of events, but how events occur.  What happened in Tahrir Square in the spring of 2012 might have been more like what occurred in the  Plaza de Tres Culturas in October 1968 had it not been for this technical achievement.

For those of us who are earthbound, the Mexican contribution to the moon landing has been a mixed blessing.  Being able to know 24/7 what happens almost anywhere on the planet has affected not only what we know of events, but how events occur.  We are all witnesses… often helpless ones.  How we contextualize what happens somewhere on the planet has been altered forever… watching something like missile attacks on Baghdad, or the people daring a dictator to attack them in Egypt, means we are forced to give meaning to what we see as it happens, without time to reflect, or consider it in the long perspective.  On the other hand,  would the outcome of Tahrir Square in the spring of 2012 been more like what occurred in the  Plaza de Tres Culturas in October 1968 had it not been for this technical achievement.

They went, they conquered, we saw…  even those of us who were at Boy Scout Camp Babcock-Hovey in Ovid, New York…  on 20 June 1969.