History:Not that I remember it, but on July 20th, 1969, I was whisked out of my cot and popped down uncomprehendingly in front of the television to watch a piece of history. Quite what I made of Neil Armstrong taking his "small step" is anyone's guess, but I have always been curiously glad that I saw the first man set foot on the moon. I was hardly alone.
One billion people around the world watched the landing on live television - the biggest audience in TV history. President Nixon went so far as to declare the occasion "the greatest week in history since the beginning of the world, the creation". Only the evangelist Billy Graham spoiled the party by upbraiding the president with the tart observation that the birth of Jesus, the crucifixion and the first Easter might rank higher on the scale of world events.
Being first meant that Neil Armstrong's words were the ones everyone would remember. But coming out of Apollo 11 behind him was Buzz Aldrin, whose stark assessment on setting foot on the moon seems more apposite. "Magnificent desolation", he said simply. That phrase might also have been the title for Gerard DeGroot's enjoyable history of the moon project. He captures the thrill of the adventure, but offers a telling indictment of "all that sublime effort devoted towards a stunt".
DeGroot tells the story of the American lunar mission with verve and elegance. (We are lucky that his words paint a vivid picture, as, bizarrely, his publisher decided not to include any photographs of this most photogenic of subjects). Behind the idealistic veneer of space as the final frontier, Dark Side of the Moon is the story of a vicious political battle for money and legitimacy.
The project began with the Nazis, who wanted to build a rocket to destroy London. ("What I want is annihilation," Hitler instructed his scientists.) When the war was over, the US launched Operation Overcast to manage the wholesale relocation of German expertise to the US. The most prominent of these ex-Nazis was the reptilian Werner von Braun. He had enthusiastically used slave labour to man his rocket projects in Germany. Although he went through the formalities of denazification after the war, US government officials well understood that his change of heart was cosmetic. Yet President Truman signed off on his leading role in the government's space programme on the grounds that von Braun's know-how was simply too valuable to lose.
"Nazism no longer should be a serious consideration from a viewpoint of national security," said a Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency report, "when the far greater threat of Communism is now jeopardizing the entire world."
ONE OF THE intriguing points that emerges in DeGroot's analysis is that working with these unpleasant characters seems to have been less of a problem for Democrats than Republicans. Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson were all enthusiastic about the space project (although Kennedy in the last year of his life began to have doubts). Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, on the other hand, remained unconvinced that the project was worth the money, and were repelled by many of the scientists and administrators who ran the project. If Dark Side of the Moon has a prophet, it is Eisenhower. He reluctantly created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in response to the Russians putting a satellite - Sputnik - into space, but was deeply sceptical about its merit. One day, he feared, historians would judge that "here was where the US, like Rome, went wrong - here at the peak of its power and prosperity when it forgot those ideals which made it great".
DeGroot concurs with Eisenhower - "The moon voyage was the ultimate ego trip" - but draws a blank as to why moon landings continue to exert such a pull on our collective imagination. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is already taking bookings for flights to the moon in 2009. NASA, 35 years after the last moon landing, has recently attempted to restore its battered reputation with plans for a permanent camp on the moon by 2020.
There has even been talk that the first lunar baby might be born within 20 years. Quite what the psychological consequences of a billion people watching your birth on live TV would be is another question. Less President Truman, more Truman Show perhaps.
Richard Aldous is head of history and archives at UCD. His most recent book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone Vs. Disraeli, was published by Hutchinson last year