[FPSPACE] Remembering 40 years ago

[Keith Gottschalk]

    In South Africa the apartheid regime banned TV until 1976, & even
then only the state was allowed to broadcast TV until we became a
democracy in 1994. Similarly, it was a crime for anyone except the state
to have a radio broadcaster.

    So I and the other few astronautics fans eagerly grabbed the daily
newspapers. In Cape Town these were the morning Cape Times, & the
afternoon Cape Argus, & read them cover to cover.  Then a month or so
later would arrive the BIS Spaceflight, & the Sky & Telescope, for us to
read. Those who had radios which could hear the Voice of America through
the static (which I didn't) also listened to those.

     Even newspapers were banned for political prisoners, such as
Mandela. They only learnt about Apollo a few years later, when the next
batch of freedom fighters were captured & jailed. Each new political
prisoner on arrival  updated the jailed old hands on all the events in
the outside world since the oldest prisoners' incarceration started.

    Halfway in time from then to now, in 1985 I was detained without
trial in solitary confinement. In the whole of the Pollsmoor Prison
library, the sole nonfiction book (provided by the Provincial library
services) was Kenneth Gatland's 1964 vintage Encyclopedia of
Spaceflight! You can imagine how I eagerly devoured that, reading it
from cover to cover repeatedly.

   Let us all hope for the shortest possible time until the next men &
women land on the Moon 'THIS TIME TO STAY".

- Keith.