Giant Steps Are What You Take

Write your story from the perspective of a side character.

Giant Steps Are What You Take 

On July 20th 1968, When Commander Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Lunar Module Eagle and stepped onto the moon and said the iconic words – ‘one small step for man one giant leap for mankind’, the people on Earth held their breath’s because they could not quite believe that at last a human being had actually walked on the moon. 

J. Patrick Lewis, poem ‘First Men on the Moon’ celebrated the landing on the ‘Eagle’:

 These are the first three verses:

That afternoon in mid-July,

Two pilgrims watched from distant space

The moon ballooning in the sky.

They rose to meet it face-to-face.

Their spidery spaceship, Eagle, dropped

Down gently on the lunar sand.

And when the module's engines stopped,

Rapt silence fell across the land.

The first man down the ladder, Neil,

Spoke words that we remember now—

“One small step...” It made us feel

As if we were there too, somehow.

When Buzz Aldrin climbed out of the lunar module and joined Neil, this is the conversation they had:

Aldrin’s first words were, ‘Beautiful view’ and Neil Armstrong replied, ‘Isn’t that something? Magnificent sight out here’.  Buzz Aldrin replied, ‘Magnificent desolation’. 

They set about collecting the samples and carrying out tasks they were given to do and they took many photographs of the lunar surfaces. 

Neil and Buzz roamed around the strange territory in their white space suits which were made of non-flammable material. It was called beta cloth and it was a Teflon-coated fibreglass. They wore special gloves and gold-coated visors. 

There is a lot of folklore about the moon—for example that there is a man in the moon and that it is made of cheese. But by the time Apollo 11 was launched, it was unanimously accepted that there were no lifeforms on the moon—that was the stuff of fiction.

In his novel, The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells told the story of two men making a journey to the moon—Mr Bedford was a businessman and the scientist, was called Mr Cavor. The two men discover that in fact the moon is inhabited by extra-terrestrial creatures known as Selenites. 

In this amazing story, Cavor is held captive by the Selenites and Bedford returns to earth—Cavor teaches two of them English and tells them about life on Earth and how much war and violence defines human society. 

When Bedford returns to earth Bedford begins to question his identity and asks, ‘if I am not Bedford, what am I’? He then says:

Do you know I had an idea that really I was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole through which I looked at life.

Of course, Neil and Buzz never encountered any extra-terrestrial creatures when they were exploring the moon in July 1969. But what if there really were extra-terrestrials on the moon and if they were watching the two astronauts and were making notes and observing them?

What would they have thought of the two men and their cumbersome pressurised white suits and their big moon boots. It was a very stressful environment for the astronauts, because the temperature in the moon is over 200 Fahrenheit and the gravity is only only one sixth that of the earth.

What if one of them had written an account of what he witnessed and we on earth were able to read it. What if the account was written in the first person? Bertil Romberg, stresses the importance of the ‘I’ point of view as it ‘binds the reader more tightly to the fiction’.

It might read something like this:

My name is Maka and I am from the Mopasin tribe. Our people have lived on the moon for thousands of years. We are a peaceful community and we live on a plant which grows deep in the craters. We live quite a simple life. We are aware that there are other planets but we have never visited them or had any communication with them and and no one has communicated with us or has visited our planet, until this morning, and these two men climbed out of the lunar module and began walking around and exploring. They seemed to set up a fixed camera and were probably transmitting their discoveries back to their own planet. They were obviously on some kind of mission. 

I wondered what their planet was like and also why they had decided to explore the moon. Were they trying to colonise our planet? Were their intentions honourable? The two men planted a flag, with stars and stripes on it. I wondered what they looked like under those bulky suits.  

Maybe their planet was too overcrowded and they were hoping to give their inhabitants the opportunity on moving to the moon. But how would they survive and what would they eat?  The two men have brought their own oxygen and obviously the temperature is unbearable for them.  At the same time, I reckoned that the ingenuity and resourcefulness that brought them here meant that they must have very clever engineers who were able to develop very sophisticated space technologies. 

They might declare war on us- we are the only survivors of a war that nearly wiped us all out-and after that big war, the small number of us that survived vowed to destroy all our weapons and rebuild our ravaged world. Our tribe never really wanted war and I never really understood what caused the breakdown of our former peaceful society. 

The arrival of these These two men with their cameras has unsettled us. Our leader Gaka has met with the rest of the leaders, to decide whether or not we should try to communicate with them or just ignore them and hope they go away and never come back—they will probably only be able to spend unlimited time here because the atmosphere is so hostile to them-but the fact that they’ve been able to get here in the first place would suggest that there will be further journeys made to investigate our planet, to collect more samples, and to take more photographs.

After much deliberation, it was decided not to engage with the two explorers – they did not seem to be carrying firearms—so therefore we assumed it was a peaceful mission.

Maka’s account helps the reader to understand the moon landing from the perspective of an inhabitant and we find out what he is thinking and feeling. Whereas in the opening paragraphs, we witness the actions of the two astronauts, without really finding out what they are thinking and feeling.