IslandsInTheSky

The Long Fall Home 197 1 FOREWORD 'The Eagle has landed...' I wonder how many people heard those words, spoken by Neil Armstrong across a distance of a quarter of a million miles? Certainly it was a moment never to be forgotten; Man had reached the Moon at last. The impossible had been achieved. Hindsight is always easy, and there are many people today who claim that they 'always knew it would happen'. Well, I am sorry - but the fact is that as recently as the end of Hitler's war, very few people thought it would happen before the end of the century, if at all. I claim to be one of the minority; but my time-scale was considerably in error, and I was working in terms of a lunar landing some time around 1990. I should have listened more carefully to Arthur Clarke... When I first met Arthur Clarke we were not actually in short trousers, but we were not very far away from them in time. During the war we were both in the RAF, but in different sections of it, and our orbits intersected only occasionally, at meetings of the British Astronomical Association on the rare 8 coincidences of our leaves. Yet even then Arthur had made a considerable reputa......