NASA - A Human Adventure

Today we visited the Tekniska Museet to tour the NASA – A Human Adventure exhibit. The exhibit contained over 400 objects ranging from a replica of the Soviet Sputnik to a close up view of a space shuttle command deck showing the great leaps in space exploration achieved in such a short time.

We are space age babies. The “space race” glued our eyes to the TV as Walter Cronkite gave us witness to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo countdowns. We can recount in detail our personal story when Neil Armstrong announced the “Eagle has landed” and took his - and our collective - first step on the moon. It seems so long ago now.

We wondered how Swedes responded to the exhibit. Forever calm and inclined to maintain a balance, can a Swede ever identify with the intense sense of national angst we Americans felt when President Kennedy challenged us to land a man on the moon and return him safely? More importantly, can an American born into an Internet connected, iEverything world ever appreciate the sense of urgency we once felt to achieve a singular goal?

Replica Eagle Lunar Module

This observation had a note of irony as we received instructions on use of the exhibit’s iPod audio tour guide. “Simply move your fingers up and down to select the menu item you want.” On the tour, we selected menu items, listened, adjusted volume, opted to hear augmented narration and viewed supplemental photos on the iPod. As we stood in front of a replica of the Eagle Lunar Module command center, we wondered how anyone ever thought we could fly to the moon using computers with 16Kbits of memory. Truly a human adventure.

The exhibit designers understood the power that imagination played in launching humans into space in what we would now consider haphazard contraptions. Photos of imaginative writers such as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and others filled an early display area. Also showing was a continuous video loop of Georges Méliès’s 1902 film Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage Dans la Lune).

Méliès’s film gives us not only a glimpse of the yearnings of our early 20th century European ancestors to travel to the moon, but also their sensibilities on exploration. Upon landing, the intrepid travelers’ first response upon encountering the moon’s Selenite population was to dispatch each creature encountered with a club. The Selenites, from a European mindset, had a king who was equally dispatched. The travelers then made their escape with spear-carrying Selenite natives in hot pursuit.

Harder to comprehend is a life that saw the original release of this grainy black and white science fiction film and also lived to see grainy black and white images of a human actually step on the moon. This time, “we came in peace.” Many changes indeed for a single lifetime.

A English narrated version of Le Voyage Dans la Lune.  There may be a brief "commercial" at the start of the film...but this film is a classic and worthy of whatever commercial benefit someone may achieve.