The Rock

 Pick up a rock. Take it to the edge of a lake. Toss it in. Bloop. The rock sinks to the bottom. Hypothesis confirmed. 

Fifty-five years ago next week, Apollo 11 blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was significant because it was the culmination of a pledge made by the late president for whom the launch facility was named. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." So hard, in fact, that three astronauts died in the run-up to the launch of July, 1969. The two years between the tragedy that was Apollo 1 and the eventual full-fledged attempt to land a man on the moon was a series of testing and calibration that let the stage for one of the hardest things man had attempted to do. 

On July 16, 1969 Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong left their home planet behind to do something no one had ever done before. On July 20, Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the surface of the moon. On July 21, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. For a very brief moment, the world was in awe. How could this be? If man were meant to fly, he would have wings. It wasn't long after this that conspiracy theories began to arise, primarily based on the brewing mistrust of all governmental agencies. If they could lie about the Vietnam War, why couldn't they lie about this? And who really believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed the guy for whom the launch facility for those so-called Moon Landings took off? 

For fifty years, the idea that the Eagle landing at Tranquility Base was all just a hoax has been a rumble heard not just here in America, but across the globe. A 2018 poll taken in Russia suggested that fifty-seven percent of those asked believed that the moon landings were fake. Note the use of the plural there: Landings. We got so good at landing on the moon that we did it six times. It would have been seven if Tom Hanks hadn't gotten it into his head to go. 

But that's the rub, isn't it? The film 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered a full year before Aldrin and Armstrong's feat, and it made all kinds of scientific sense but it was all done on soundstages and in miniature. Who's to say that Stanley Kubrick didn't just whip up a bunch of deleted scenes and pass them off to NASA to save a little money on the back end? And when Hollywood tried to give us yet another chance to get in on the conspiracy in 1977 with Capricorn One, we still weren't ready to buy the clue? 

Okay. Now back to the lake. 

This time, take a moment to pick up a very flat rock. Put it in the crook of your finger and fling it sidearm out across the surface of the lake. Watch gravity be defied as it skips across the water. It's all about the fling.