From there to here.

I guess it started with a 2009 email from the BBC. They were putting together a documentary on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission called ‘One Small Step: The Australian Story’.  It would focus on how important the Australian contribution was at places like Honeysuckle Creek. Stories like the ones captured in the movie The Dish.

Somebody had mentioned that a young Australian journalist had broadcast the launch live from Cape Kennedy. That journo was me. And I was interviewed for the documentary.

Earlier in the year I’d put a proposal to my boss at 3AW suggesting I go back to Cape Kennedy ( now again called Cape Canaveral) and do an anniversary broadcast from there and from Mission Control at Houston. For budgetary reasons, in the midst of the global economic crisis, permission was refused.

I had some good material in my files. The original broadcast from the Cape on that swelteringly hot Florida morning in 1969 had been included in an LP record called The Loneliest Journey. I’d lost my copy but last year a space buff, Colin Mackellar, sent me a resurrected tape of it.

I played it on 3AW and asked listeners to guess whose voice it was. They couldn’t. Neither could my wife, Chanel. She said I sounded ‘exactly like that British reporter when the Hindenburg caught fire and crashed’.

I also started rifling through the memory bank for anecdotes of a callow youth who had covered what was, and remains, one of the biggest news stories of a long career spanning fifty years.

Those memories and that broadcast led to this CD. Forty years on I remember it as if it were yesterday. Hearing it still gives me goose bumps and brings tears to my eyes. For those brave men out there in space, staking out mankind’s new frontier, and for those of us lucky enough to report on it first-hand, it was an unforgettable adventure.

 When the Apollo program ended with Apollo 17, man never went back. All that remains are moon rocks and memories. Fond memories, indelible memories, of an amazing voyage into space.  A voyage that started with the liftoff of Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy, Florida, on July 16, 1969.

Liftoff! © Narrated by Derryn Hinch

$14.95 + Packaging, postage & handling $5.00