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Back to the Moon

India is preparing a moon launch, once a staple of western news, albeit for a brief period. Chandrayaan-1 is currently on the rocket pad and ready to go. The irony is that I learned this through the New York Times.

You can look at the Indian Space Research Organisation's pictures of their trip, upon which NASA is piggybacking, here. One of India's former Presidents, APJ Abdul Kalam, can lay claim to the provenance of one of the devices, being as he is 'The Missile Man of India' as well as 'the People's President'.

China, of course, has already been--last year. Both new powers want to map and to mine the moon. There is a palpable sense of the west passing away at the moment, which is, I suppose, constant to a certain sort of Catholic mind. We preen ourselves on the way Holy Mother Church takes us out of time, and then return to find change and decay all around--and we've been doing that since before the Hellenistic soup in which Catholicism was prefigured.

Still, I can't help recalling tonight how vaulting Kennedy was in his dash to get to Earth's companion first--and how the Americas speak English, not Castilian, or Dutch, or Russian, as once they might have done. When the madcap scheme of a lunar base is eventually realised, will anyone know who Shakespeare--or Kennedy--was? In what accent will they say the names?

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