Video Link: Youtube
David Gilmour of Pink Floyd was recently asked by The Guardian what he was doing 40 years ago during Apollo 11’s flight to the Moon. Mr. Gilmour explained that the band was part of the BBC’s live coverage of the event:
"We were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23."
The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead — it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.
A post on Mr. Gilmour’s blog identifies the YouTube video above — apparently made by a fan using a bootleg recording of the original song and television images of astronauts from a later lunar mission — as the song.
The television images used in the video appear to be from the Apollo 17 mission, which landed on the Moon in December 1972. A Web site devoted to the history of NASA has hundreds of high-quality photographs taken during the Apollo 17 mission by Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, who are currently the last men to have walked on the Moon.
On Saturday, in an interview on CNN, Mr. Schmitt, who later served one term as a Republican senator from New Mexico, told Wolf Blitzer that he sees it as “vital to the future of liberty” for the United States to be the dominant spacefaring nation. Mr. Schmitt said:
Other regimes, particularly the Chinese, seem to be intent on moving forward, to be dominant in space. I think having a nondemocratic regime dominant in space would be disastrous for human liberty here on earth.
