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Elsewhere in another article in this edition of Focus On Jesus, I mentioned my very early years when my dad - Alton Thompson - would teach me some things about the night sky, the moon, the stars, the universe, and our God. While thinking about that, something I'd entirely forgotten came to my mind.
I feel honored to share those memories with you.
A Splash Of Moon Dust
Just Remembering . . . Alton Thompson
Art Thompson
I was so fascinated when I learned that our solar system is a part of the Milky Way galaxy.
I remember when I was just a little guy, often, my dad would lie on the ground looking up into the vast, dark, night sky. I loved to lie beside him when I'd see him doing that, because he'd always point out things to me. Things I'd strain to see.
That man in the moon.
He'd point and point, making sweeping arcs in the air with his finger, then stabbing at some place I could never see in the sky.
"See, there're the man's eyes. Here's his nose, and under that, his smile."
I'd strain and strain, and look and look.
I never did see a man there.
Then he'd say, "OK. If you look at it another way, you can see the faces of a man and a woman. They're kissing."
Now, I've never heard that in any scientific theory. I never did see the man and woman kissing, either.
Then, he'd tell me about God. How God created it all, just by speaking!
(My dad had finished only the sixth grade - at about 12 years old - when he had to drop out of school to help his family work their way through the Great Depression. He didn't have much formal education at all - but he educated himself in the things which mattered most.)
Then, quite suddenly, it would be bedtime.
In the quiet house, from somewhere in the darkness, I'd hear dad's voice.
"Good night, son. Sleep tight."
Years later, when I also was a dad and had children of my own, God granted me one of life's greatest treasures and a pleasure I'll always remember.
I was an aerospace news reporter at Cape Canaveral. The early days of space exploration brought a number of disappointing failures. They were so frequent they were expected.
But, our country was reaching for the moon! Reaching out to anything in space that we could reach. Manned flight to the moon was still a distant dream - less distant than it once had been, but still a faraway dream.
NASA - the national space agency - was about to launch a rocket toward the moon carrying a scientific payload. It would measure the faint gravity of the moon as it approached, sniff to see if it could detect any atmosphere, try to feel for any magnetic field surrounding it, take a few fleeting black and white television pictures, and after those few precious seconds, crash onto the moon's surface while transmitting back to earth anything it could detect. Including how hard the moon's surface really was.
The thrilling thing about this mission was that my dad and mother made a rare trip from Texas to visit us in Florida. Though dad was there in town, I wasn't allowed to take him with me out onto Cape Canaveral for the launch. Security was still really tight in those days of the space race with the Soviet Union.
However, there was something really special planned for this unmanned moon landing. NASA had arranged for a famous astronomer (Whose name I'm sorry that I don't recall - it's probably in my old files somewhere.) who had invented a powerful telescope at Boston University, to bring that telescope to Patrick Air Force Base near Cocoa Beach and the Cape, in an attempt to watch the tiny space probe crash land on the moon.
I got special permission and clearance to take my dad to the NASA Public Information room, where television monitors were set up, capturing every grainy second while the BU Scope (as it was called) strained to watch the moon.
I had to do my reporting, and was tied down with a camera crew and microphones, but I watched my dad as he inched closer and closer to the black and white TV monitor, showing what the BU scope could see.
The final minutes flashed by. All eyes in the room strained to see any glimpse of the tiny spacecraft as it crossed in front of the man in the moon, and across the cheeks of the man and woman kissing.
The picture was, what we called, "noisy". That is, it was not clear and sharp as we would have liked for it to have been. One factor was that the BU scope was peering through a warm summer semi-tropical sky. There were heat waves that made the image "wavy". Then there were occasional "little sparkley things" that just appeared and disappeared in the picture.
Through a closed circuit loudspeaker from Mission Control, the familiar voice of NASA Public Information Officer, Jack King, counted down the final seconds before the crash landing. Dad inched still closer to the TV.
"8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . ." Dad got even closer. " . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . ."
Dad looked around, afraid he might have been blocking the view of someone. He wasn't.
"2 . . . 1 . . . we have impact! Impact on the face of the moon."
The look on dad's face is one I'll always remember. He looked straight at me with a look I can only describe as one of great discovery. He didn't say anything, but he started moving through the crowd of reporters over to where I was broadcasting.
When I had signed off - "This is Art Thompson, Cape Canaveral" - and when the microphones and cameras were also off, dad came up close to me. He was the most excited I had ever seen him. Dad just didn't show his emotions very much ever at all.
His eyes were literally sparkling when he said, "I saw it! I saw dust
kick up when that thing hit the moon."
I doubted that, but I didn't say so. Instead, I just asked him to describe more of what he saw.
He had seen dust.
Dad said it was kinda like a puff of some kind of powder that kicked up when the spacecraft splatted onto the surface and it's radio transmission suddenly stopped. I just didn't have the heart to tell him that I was sure he didn't see that. He was totally convinced that he had.
He went home and told mother and the rest of the family. Then, for the rest of his life he had a thrilling story to tell all his friends back in east Texas.
They believed him. His barber. The folks at church. The man at the service station, and everyone at the grocery store.
They believed he had seen dust kicked up by an unmanned spacecraft as it crash landed on the moon.
I didn't believe that he had seen anything but television interference at the time. But I never told anyone that. And, I'm so very glad I didn't.
Many thought the surface of the moon would be fairly solid and hard. Some even theorized it might be a shiny, relatively smooth surface. Still others theorized that the moon might just be covered with a layer of fine dust. They speculated about how deep and soft it might be. Was the dust so deep that future astronauts might sink completely out of sight into a powdery death?
Meanwhile, back on the moon . . .
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first baby steps from a spidery-legged spacecraft onto the moon, they left footprints.
They left their footprints in a fine powdery dust. Just the kind of dust that would make a gigantic "puff" when an Explorer spacecraft crashed into it. With no atmosphere, it wouldn't hang around in the air as a small dust storm might do on earth.
No.
It would just splash up, then immediately and quite quickly fall back down again. It would splash up, then fall back. That dust cloud would rise and fall so quickly that probably no one would even notice.
That is, no one - except my dad.
You were right, dad. Oh, you were so right about so many things - even beyond your ability to have known.
Good night, dad. Sleep tight.
