Would you believe I forgot the time I drove the British built office car from Auckland, New Zealand , to the Moon, years before Apollo 11's Eagle made its historic landing ? I suddenly remembered my rare voyage while I was seated in a lounge room recliner, protectively wrapped up like an astronaut in blankets because of the chilly North Queensland weather, while watching an SBS documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.
By Peter Simon
While working as a reporter on the Sunday News in Auckland , I heard about a man in the volcanic centre of the North Island who was deeply interested in the Moon at a time when there was growing interest in the space race between America and Russia .
Off I went in the nifty office sports car to where steam and heat from the bowels of the earth is used to generate electricity . There I met a technician for the Wairakei geo-thermal project who believed the pock marked surface of the Moon was mainly due to volcanic eruptions , not meteorite strikes.
To back up his theory , he had attached a Heath Robinson like test chamber to an exploration pipe channeling steam out of the ground . It was like a small box with a glass side , a container of aluminium powder underneath with a tube leading up into the chamber, which , he said, represented the lunar surface. Throwing a lever to create a vacuum in the chamber would , in theory, create a vacuum and the aluminium powder would be sucked up like magma in a volcano and fall in a circular pattern like those on the moon .
Bent over in front of the glass viewing panel , looking at the simulated lunar surface , I waited with great expectations . The lever turned, there was a roar of vented steam and the lunar landscape was completely obliterated in what was like a dust storm ;the experiment had failed .
Years later, I inspected a Moon button collection at Sydney's Australian Museum-small circular objects said to be solidified molten pieces from outer space , perhaps even from the Moon , collected in the outback . Such a button was bought by me at a garage sale in South Australia . Our nearest space neighbour is said to have circled Earth for four billion years and part of its geology could have been made from lightweight material blasted off the planet.
