Movie-A-Day: The Dish – Or, why can’t we go back to the moon?

Starring: Sam Neill, Billy Mitchell, Roz Hammons, Patrick Warburton Director: Rob Sitch Year Of Release: 2000 Plot: In order to keep track of the Apollo 11 mission as it heads to the moon, as well as to get live TV pictures back, NASA needs at least two massive radio telescopes, one on either side of the Earth, to maintain constant surveillance. As well as the Goldstone Antenna in California, NASA hires the Parkes radio telescope in rural New South Wales, Australia. The dish staff and locals suddenly find themselves in the middle of one of the biggest events in the history of mankind, dealing with power cuts and high winds to ensure the world gets see Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface.

Sometimes modern life is a bit disappointing. I can’t quite understand why, before I was born, we were able to send men to the moon and get them back, yet since 1972, still six years before I made my appearance on this Earth, we haven’t been able to get beyond low earth orbit. What went wrong, as it seems a bit pathetic?

In fact it’s even more pathetic that despite the fact they’ve known since they built them in the early 80s, that the space shuttle would come to the end of its usable life this year, NASA hasn’t managed to come up with a replacement yet, meaning that that from next year, Americans will have to get into space on Russian Soyuz rockets – a launcher that has only changed a relatively small amount since it first started being used in 1966.

In the late 60s the possibilities seemed endless. While 1969’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seems hopelessly optimistic  to us now, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke deliberately set out to create a story that was based on real science and what seemed at the time to be genuinely realisable predictions of what would be possible 32 years on. Although the black monoliths were a bit of a stress, orbiting hotels, a permanent base of the moon and a manned mission to Jupiter didn’t seem too much of a stretch for the year 2001. Sadly though, politics and money have ensured that while we’ve filled the area between 100 miles and 25,000 miles above our planet with satellites and space junk, human beings have never gotten further than about 400 miles up for the last 38 years (by comparison, Neil Armstrong and co. went about 600 times further, and also managed to land and lift off again from another ‘world’).

It’s the thing I can’t help feeling when I watch The Dish. Although not a huge amount actually happens in the film – there are a couple of problems, but essentially the men who run the Parkes radio satellite have to monitor the Apollo 11 and get the TV pictures back, which they do – it’s brilliant at conveying  the sense of what a momentous moment it was. It was one of those rare times where all the people of the world came together as one to watch something that seemed utterly extraordinary and game-changing.  For billions of years, animals have been looking into the sky and seeing the moon, and now, for the first time, we’d reached across the 240,000 mile gap and landed there.

Yeah, we might have had mobile phones, the internet and God knows what other technological advancements since then, but there’s little that can capture the imagination like going to the moon.

Film has been fascinated by our neighbour in space since the very beginnings of cinema. This fascination has stretched from fantastical interpretations, such as Georges Melies’ seminal 1902 sci-fi short Le voyage dans la lune, through Fritz Lang’s more science based 1929 movie Frau Im Mond, through Hollywood’s 1950’s Destination Moon and onto the rather intriguing 1963 movie First Men In The moon, based on H.G Wells’ novel, where the world’s leading astronauts head for the lunar surface, only to discover the British got there first in 1899.

Yet it seems that once we went actually there, between 1969 and 1972, it was a bit of a case of ‘been there, done that’, and since then we’ve never gone back. At least the Russians are having fun planning for a Mars mission, and currently have a group of people locked away from the world in cramped conditions for 18 months, to see the effect on the human body and psyche of the long periods of isolation a Martian trip would involve. Even so, we’re still decades from it becoming a reality.

And just to finish off, as The Dish celebrates Australia’s part in putting men into space, I thought I’d relate a story I found in Bill Bryson’s book Australia, which the writer discover when he travelled to Shark Bay.  That part of Western Australia is now a World Heritage area, due to its outstanding wildlife, not least an area of stromatolites, rare life-forms that are the only remnants left of what life on Earth was like 3.5 billion years ago. However before these were discovered it was mainly a telecommunications outpost.

Another satellite dish NASA used in the 60s and 70s to track spacecraft as they passed over the Indian Ocean, was at Carnarvon, just up the road from Shark Bay. However disaster struck in 1964 when the communications link between Carnarvon and Adelaide (and therefore NASA itself) broke down. As a result, a middle-aged telephone operator called Mrs Lillian O’Donaghue, sitting at the exchange in Shark Bay, became all that stood between the success or failure of that Gemini mission, as she stayed up all night relaying complex messages about the spacecraft between Carnarvon and the outside world.

It seems Australia really was extremely dedicated to space travel, and it’s just a shame the rest of humanity hasn’t kept up that spirit, and that in 40 years we’ve never been back to the moon.

TIM ISAAC

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