For The Things We Forgot To Remember, Michael Portillo asks if the Space Race was won and lost long before Neil Armstrong took his small step.

MUSIC: The Creation

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 11 moon landing
Okay all flight to colours, gonna go for landing, retro. Go. Light up. Go. Lights. Go. Control. Go. …go for landing. …Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed. Roger Tranquillity we got you on the ground…. Got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. So we’re breathing again, thanks a lot.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
It's always interesting to see how things are made, and that applies to history as much as any other manufacture. In the case of history stage one, of course, is that we live through great events. Stage two is that they become memories affected by the spin that gets applied to them. After that they may be moulded further by books that are written, or films that are made.

The fluidity of what we experience gradually solidifies. It becomes popular memory, an official history, and crystallises as one or two paragraphs in a text book. The history of how man got to the moon has not yet set hard. In this programme I'll be looking at the epic events, distant in that they occurred a quarter of a million miles from earth, but close in the sense that many of us remember them, to see how the great race in space is being shaped, or misshaped into History.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 11 moon landing
It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

YURI KARASH:
I believe that Apollo 11 and Apollo programme altogether was certainly the major technological achievement of mankind which has not been surpassed up to today.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
If you want an unbiased assessment of the Apollo 11 Moon landing then you could do worse than Yuri Karash, a Russian space policy analyst and a former Cosmonaut candidate.

YURI KARASH:
When I ask Americans who were the first men in space and they said that it was Neil Armstrong, actually I feel kind of sorry not only for Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and er John Glenn who were really first men in space, but actually I feel sorry that current generation apparently does care so little about the history of the major human technological achievement which is venturing into space.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space):
Patrick Moore: In some ways history is rather unfair. Everybody remembers Apollo 11. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are remembered as long as history lasts but that only a culmination of a whole series of experiments. Previously the Earth orbiter Apollo 7, Apollo 8 and other Apollo 9 and then of course Apollo 10, so all these are largely forgotten, and Apollo 8 particularly was, this was just one of the first and had Apollo 8 failed the entire course of space research would have been different.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Unmistakably the voice of moon-mapper and veteran television presenter Patrick Moore, and it's his assessment that provides the trajectory for this programme. We're no more likely to forget Neil Armstrong than we are Christopher Columbus, but Armstrong's steps on the moon were made possible by a sequence of extraordinary engineering feats and a number of space missions, each one of which required immense courage. And perhaps none was greater than Apollo 8, the first manned craft to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull and to orbit the Moon.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 8
…the moon rocket, the first journey made by man to the Moon and back again.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Many now claim it was that mission and not Armstrong’s that won the Space race for the Americans.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 8
… everybody here says ‘God speed’…

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
But if so why is that daring space voyage an event that many have forgotten to remember? We British were merely spectators at the race between the US and the Soviet Union, but some British scientists at least had a close view from the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire. A young astronomer recently arrived there in the 1960s was Ian Morrison.

IAN MORRISON:
At the time of the landings we were actually simultaneously observing the Apollo craft with one of our smaller telescopes, but the giant Lovell telescope here was actually tracking the Russian probes.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Ian’s now chief Operations Officer and was my guide on a tour of the sight, which included a journey up the tower to the mid-point of the massive Lovell telescope, which back then was trained on the moon.

IAN MORRISON:
At the time of Apollo 11 the, the first American craft to land, the Eagle, in fact the Russians were attempting to soft land a craft, to scoop some soil up and bring it back to Earth and perhaps actually beat the Americans in doing so. Sadly it crashed in the Sea of Crisis. So it was really quite exciting and quite tense. We were actually observing both of these things simultaneously and trying to see who might win that particular race.

MUSIC: Katyusha

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