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The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks

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This post is based on an article that will appear in the Summer 2024 edition of the Newsletter from the Open University Physics and Astronomy Society.

Out of the twelve men with personal experience of walking on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, only 4 remain. It was a unique event in human history that by chance occurred in my lifetime. Carl Sagan’s words captured this exceptional nature saying “In all the history of mankind, there will be only one generation that will be first to explore the Solar System”. 

Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks is an immersive audio-visual experience in a unique venue in the centre of London. The 50-minute show is centred on the recollection of the then 13-year-old Tom Hanks’ experience of seeing the first men to walk on the surface of another world. The script was written by Tom Hanks and Christopher Riley. Riley is a well-known author and filmmaker, specialising in documentaries on the early phase of the Space Age (i.e. First Orbit available on Youtube and Director’s Cut of Moonwalk One DVD) on Amazon.

The Space Race was a product of the Cold War and ostensibly a race between the mighty political ideologies of Western Capitalism and Eastern Communism. But when it came to the extraordinary achievement, seeing the men walk around the Moon on a tiny black-and-white screen,  it transcended national identities and political ideologies. At the time, around a quarter of the USA population (53 million) and around a sixth of the global population (around 650 million) tuned in. 

It will not see it Netflix, BBC or even Youtube because the immersive experience only works in a specialised multiscreen venue, like the Lightroom in London. The lightroom is like a large warehouse. During the 50-minute show, multiple projectors dynamically project multiple images on all four walls and the floor. Seating is a series of low-level cushioned benches without a headrest and standalone cushions to sit on the floor. Once the show starts – you have to look all around you – including behind you. Best not to sit too close to the front.  Subtitles are included – out of the way at the top of the front wall. Taking the odd picture or video on your phone is not prohibited. I am including here a few of the images and videos I captured during my visit.

Tom Hanks, who has had a fascination with space since childhood, narrates the show. He shares his wonder of experiencing the Moon landing as a teenager. He played Jim Lovell, the commander of the aborted Apollo 13 mission, in his 1995 film – Apollo 13. He co-produced the 1998 12-part drama, From the Earth to the Moon. The series covered the space programme from the Mercury programme to the Apollo 17, the final Apollo mission and went on to win multiple nominations and awards. 

The visuals are provided by 26 Panasonic laser projectors but I felt there were many more. The high quality of the images and video was in part the contribution of Andy Saunders, author of Apollo Remastered. He is credited as a Collaborating Producer.  He produced the single giant pictures that wraps around multiple walls. Despite two walls meeting at right angles, there is very little sense of distortion. In addition to the video on the main front wall, throughout the show, numerous stills of people, spacecraft and instrumentation are displayed simultaneously. Occasionally with multiple videos. It is the cumulative impact of these multiple threads of audio, stills and video that evoke the emotional response and the immersive experience. 

I could not see where the speakers were so assumed they were high up in the ceiling. But not so. Lightroom London is one of three venues around the world kitted out with a German-made Holoplot speaker system. Two panels are embedded, one inside the front and another inside the back wall. Each panel has a matrix array module of 800 speakers each.  A little like phased array antennas, the matrix array modules can generate multiple beams of audio, in the vertical and horizontal plane. Just as what you see depends on where you are, what you hear is also finely tuned to location. You are invited to pay once but stay for multiple screenings. If you do – try different locations within the venue.  Tom Hanks’s narration, rocket launch and the specially commissioned score by the composer Anne Nikitin provide a lavish emotional experience. The speakers rumble when the Saturn 5 launches and your chest joins in.

The depiction of the Apollo 11 landing sequence was disappointing. I know footage of the descent from the Lunar Module exists but is not shown here. This was a choice to illustrate Mission Control’s limited perspective at this critical phase of the mission. I would also have liked to have seen more footage from the Apollo 13 mission, given Hanks’ back story. I felt the title – Moonwalkers, undercut the contribution of the other 12 astronauts who went to the Moon but never made it down to the surface. 

I was surprised to see the long queue but then again I was attending the 4 pm show on a Saturday. I enjoyed it but that was pretty much a given. At the end of my screening, the audience clapped. So I guess most of them did too. 

Currently, the Lightroom in London is the only place you can see this but there is a desire to take it elsewhere where suitable venues exist. The £25 per adult (there are concessions) entry is typical of London. But pricey for non-Londoners.  They will need to consider the additional cost of travelling to London.

This is a unique opportunity to experience an exceptional achievement of the 20th century played out using 21st-century technology. It is timely. Humans from the Earth are returning to the lunar surface in in the next year or two. . For all the information and to book tickets see Lightroom.uk

Pennine Pioneers of Science on Allfm.org

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Between December 2023 and April 2024, I did a series of radio programmes for a local radio station – allfm.org. Called Pennine Pioneers of Science, the 8 programs profiled the lives and scientific achievements of 15 individuals associated with the north of England.

I will be continuing the live radio programs (every other Tuesday live at 1 pm on allfm.org) but with a focus on scientific research being undertaken today rather than in the past. This new series is available here.

Surprisingly on 24 March 2024, this series got to number one in the Global Science category on Mixcloud.com

Recordings of the radio programs, without the music tracks and adverts, are available to play or download below. On the grey horizontal bars below, click the arrow on the left to play or the three vertical dots on the right to download.

0: 14 December 2023 – Introduction to Pennine Pioneers of Science

The industrial revolution that spread across the globe started here in Manchester. It was science that made it possible.

In this short series of “Pennine Pioneers of Science” on Allfm.org I will profile the lives and achievements of people who have lived and worked where you and I live today. You may be familiar with names such as John Dalton (atomic theory), James Joule (energy), Ernest Rutherford (structure of the atom), Bernard Lovell (Jodrell Bank) and Alan Turing (first stored program computer). But the achievements of others such as physicist Gilbert Walker from Rochdale, J. J. Thompson from Cheetham Hill, astronomer William Crabtree from Salford and physicist James Chadwick from Bollington, are obscured by the mist of time.

1: 9 January 2024 Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804) John Dalton (1766 – 1844)

Joseph Priestley, born near Leeds discovered Oxygen had a tough time as a dissenter and in the end, had to leave for America where he is buried in Pennsylvania.
John Dalton, originally from near Cockermouth but spent most of his life in Manchester conducted research into colour blindness, something from which he and his brother suffered. He is best known for advancing the case of atomic theory.

2: 23 January 2024 – William Crabtree (1610 to 1644) and Jeremiah Horrocks (1618 to 164)

On Sunday 24th October 1939, William Crabtree in Salford and Jeremiah Horrocks (born in Toxteth) in Preston observed the planet Venus pass in front of the Sun, also known as a transit. Horrocks had calculated this would happen only a few weeks earlier and told Crabtree. Occasional breaks in the clouds on the day allowed them to see it. They were the only two in the world who saw it. The measurements they took then helped us understand the planets’ sizes and the solar system’s scale. There was a transit of Venus in 2004 and 2012. Here is my recording of the 2004 transit of Venus.

3: 6 February 2024 – William Lassell (1799 – 1880) and James Joule (1818 – 1889)

William Lassell, a brewer by trade designed built and operated some of the largest telescopes in the world during his lifetime from Liverpool. He understood the importance of location and took his telescopes to Malta to observe. He collaborated with James Naysmith in Manchester.

James Joule was born in Salford and lived in Whalley Range, Salford, Stretford and Sale. Conduct research in heat, and energy and came up with the first law of thermodynamics – energy cannot be created or destroyed.

4: 20 February 20204 Edward Appleton (1892 – 1965) and JJ Thompson (1856 – 1940)
Edward Appleton from Bradford was for a time the world authority on the ionosphere. His work was timely coinciding with the arrival of radio. JJ Thompson from Cheetham Hill went beyond Dalton’s work and discovered that you can pick apart an atom and look at its constituent parts.

5: 5 March 2024 – Gilbert Walker (1891 – 1974) and James Chadwick (1868 – 1958)
Gilbert Walker was sent to India in 1904 to understand the Monsoon and provide weather forecasts. Analysing global weather phenomena is essential for our time but it was Walker who started it over 100 years ago. He also played a role in the story of the gifted mathematician – Srinivas Ramanujan who ended up in Trinity College in Cambridge between 194 and 1918.
James Chadwick from near Macclesfield discovered the Neutron, established the University of Liverpool as a centre for nuclear physics during the 1930s and helped ensure the UK had its own Nuclear Weapons after WW2.

6: 19 March 2024 – Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) and John Cockroft (1897 – 1967)
Originally from New Zealand, he made his mark in history with an experiment that helped establish the nature and size of the Atom. Through experiments, he demonstrated what John Dalton had theorised 30 hundred years earlier. Member of the Royal Society, Rutherford established that most of the mass of an atom is locked away in a tiny nucleus and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1908. He succeeded JJ Thompson as the professor of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Typically, the atom is around a thousand times larger than the nucleus. Short audio recordings of his 1931 lecture at the university of Goettingen.

7: 2 April 2024- Fredrick Williams (1911 – 1977) and Alan Turing (1912 – 1954)
Manchester can claim many first. The execution of a stored program stored in memory on 24 June 1948 stands out. It was the development of digital random access memory by Freddy Williams (from Stockport) along with Tom Kilburn from Dewsbury and Geoff Tootill from Chaderton that made this achievement possible. Alan Turing came to Manchester later in 1948 because it was the only place where he could put into practice his thinking on the universality of computers. I learnt about his family links with India and Ireland. This episode includes an extract, not in his voice, from his 1951 BBC broadcast, Can Computers Think?

8: 16 Apr2024-Bernard Lovell (1913 – 2012) and Series Review
The fully steerable 75m Lovell Telescope (Jodrell Bank) has become an icon for the city of Manchester despite being located 30km away. The story of its construction in 1950’s Britain is fascinating by itself not to mention its role in the early days of the Space Race. But it is the story of Lovell himself, a scientist with a keen interest in building radio devices amid a World War that is particularly interesting.

In this episode, I only get to touch the surface of his many wartime contributions including in H2S based on the top secret device Cavity Magnetron and his many high-level contacts. I include clips from oral history recorded in 1987 by the Imperial War Museum.

Episode 113 – Rocket Pioneer Hermann Oberth

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Hermann Oberth around 1950s. Public Domain
Hermann Ober Around 1950s

The idea of using rockets for transport had been well-established before the first flights of heavier-than-air aeroplanes in 1903. When it comes to turning that idea into reality, three names are considered as fathers of rocketry: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth.

For this episode, I visited the Hermann Oberth Space Travel Museum in the German Town of Feucht, near Nurnberg and spoke with its director Karl-Heinz Rohrwild. A summary of the interview is below along with some pictures from the museum.

The museum is run entirely by volunteers in the interest of science. The exhibits on display are a tiny amount of the exhibits that exist. Museum expansion planned the for 100th of the publication of his second book in 1929. With plans to make lots of the documents available online.I found Karl-Heinz very helpful, opening the museum for my visit during a public holiday. He and his colleagues extend that welcome to anyone wishing to visit. Contact details here.

Listen here or click the three dots to download
Hermann Oberth Spaceflight Museum

Summary

  • His father had been a surgeon. He wanted Hermann to have a career in Medicine.
  • Brilliant at maths but likely he was autistic at some level.
  • Lost his brother Adolf in WW1 and became anit-war.
  • Considered using a massive bomb delivered by rocket to destroy the senior people who decided to start and maintain the war.
  • Wrote two key books in rocketry in the 1920s
  • Fritz Lang director of the early sci-fi Metropolis followed by Frau im Mond. Oberth worked on that film as an advisor.
  • 1929: Winner of the International Award for Astronautics (Robert Esnault-Pelterie-Hirsch-Award)
  • Envisaged the use of solar energy in orbit and designed the first gyroscopes.
  • Also envisaged a huge space-based mirror that would beam power down to Earth for terrestrial use.
  • 1927 A member of the first and most successful space/rocketry society – Verien for Rsumshifffhart (Society of Space Travel)
  • Oberth championed the use of rocket staging, liquid engine propulsion and the use of rocket engines in the near vicinity of space (not in the atmosphere)
  • The RAF bombing raid on August 26, 1943, nearly killed both Oberth and Wernher von Oberth were working there.
  • Post WW2 interrogated by Theodore von Karman and it was decided Oberth was not taken to the USA. In part, Oberth did not want to go.
  • 1951 lived through tough times. He was making his living in part as a farmer.

The day the Cosmonaut came to Manchester

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This piece was first published in Manchester Histories blog on 12 April 2023

Gagarin and British PM McMillan
Yuri Gagarin with the Prime Minister for the second time on 13th July 1961 (Courtesy RIA Novosti)

On Wednesday, 12th April 1961, a bright and sunny spring morning, an air force pilot of the USSR launched into space using a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. On his first trip outside the USSR,  Yuri Gagarin, aged 27 went -around the world in just 90 minutes. He broke the world altitude and speed records. He was the first to experience the realm and sensation of being in space. Exactly three months later, he came to Manchester.

He arrived at Ringway airport at around 10am on Wednesday, 12th July and travelled first to the Headquarters of his hosts, the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers (AUFW) in Old Trafford. It was a sunny day but peppered with occasional sharp showers typical in July. Thousands lined his route from Ringway to Old Trafford.  Travelling in an open-top Bently, he received a true Mancunian welcome. He was soaked. In the small union HQ, he was made an honorary member of the AUFW and President Fred Hollingsworth presented him with a medal engraved with the words “Together, moulding a better future”. 

His second stop was Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, a unique place in Machester’s history of the industrial revolution. By now, the rain had stopped but puddles hinted at the recent downpour. Stanely Nelson recalled shaking Gagarin’s hand near the foundry. He recalled the working conditions most foundry workers endured saying, “it was like a vision of hell. Smoke, fire and tiny thin men silhouetted against the foundry fire. No one was fat; they were all thin like Lowry’s match stick men”. Of all his time in Britain, it was this time surrounded by working men and women amongst the dirt and grime of a working foundry that Gagarin would later say he felt most at home.

He arrived at Manchester Town Hall for a formal civic reception hosted by the Lord Mayor. Albert Square and all the surrounding office windows and doorways were crammed with people waiting to see the only man with the experience of Earth orbit. The dignitaries who got to shake his hand included Bernard Lovell from Jodrell Bank and the mathematician Kathleen Ollerenshaw. At the Town Hall, Gagarin, speaking in Russian, expressed his wishes for future space missions saying, ”I would like naturally like to fly to the Moon then perhaps to Mars and Venus and even further if my abilities make it possible”. By 16:30, he was at Ringway on his flight back to London, where he had arrived the day before and would stay until his return flight to Moscow on Saturday, 15th July. 

His spaceflight was packed with risk. He had left his wife a letter saying that should he not return, a real possibility, she should not remain alone. He experienced problems at launch and another during re-entry. The service module separation did not go to plan. The mission and his life came close to a catastrophic end. Ejecting from his spacecraft and landing separately by parachute, he returned to Earth as a real-life superhero. It was a supreme technological triumph, fulfilling humanity’s age-old dream of leaving Earth. It was achieved by a nation championing the virtues of communism in the midst of the Cold War. This was his first visit to the heart of the democratic West to demonstrate the prowess of the communist way of life.

To avoid highlighting the USA’s failure (its ally) to “be the first”, the UK government could not offer Gagarin a formal invitation. The remarkable response on his first day in London on 11th July, the public turned out in their thousands lining the streets in London and inundating Earls Court, the venue of the Soviet Trade Fair. Before the day was out, he had received an invitation from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan and the Queen. His initial two-or-three-day UK visit was extended to five.

Following the global coverage of his flight in April, AUFW President Fred Hollingsworth discovered that Gagarin had trained as a Foundry Worker. It was the invitation the AUFW made in May of 1961 that brought Gagarin to Manchester.  Gagarin met the Prime Minister at the Admiralty and the Queen in Buckingham Palace, along with other visits to the Air Ministry, Mansion House and the Royal Society at Burlington House. In April 1962, the first anniversary of his flight, Gagarin sent a message to the people of Manchester saying, “And the firm handshakes of my fellow workers in the moulding shop were dearer to me than many awards”. For the many who saw or met Gagarin recalled his charm, good looks and his persistent smile.

Gagarin’s visit coincided with the heightened risk of another world war. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the end of the ban on nuclear weapons testing, the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was probably aware of the rising geopolitical tensions more than most. While in Manchester and London, Gagarin repeated his message of peace. Despite his extraordinary achievement, the people of Manchester saw an ordinary man with humble roots. For most, he was probably the only individual from the USSR they would ever meet.