Giant leaps backwards for the moon men

WHEN men talk about mankind, you know that's exactly what they mean. The moon landing, Test cricket and the Christian god are all what Mel Gibson describes in Lethal Weapon as 'kind of a guy thing'.

Mankind has been much on a girl's mind this month. We have been reminded of epochal events: it is a quarter of a century since mankind made a giant leap off his planet and put his foot on to another. Another giant step for mankind has been black men's admission to competitive cricket in South Africa and thus their country's restoration to hallowed ground at Lord's. As for Anglican Mankind - threatened with extinction - the Archdeacon of York has insisted God is 'irredeemably masculine', while the devil is a lady.

Mankind is always grandiose: it alludes to transcendental events, flight and fire, conquest and sport. It doesn't mean motherhood, making the tea, making peace, inventing the front-loading washing machine, or even - if you're a woman - discovering DNA. But the moon landings may offer a parable to the archdeacon: the dogma of grandiosity is doomed to disappointment.

Mankind's landing on the moon enjoyed the most extravagant rhetoric ever heard. Richard Nixon, then US president, said: 'It has been the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation'. It was the 'signature of our century', said Buzz Aldrin, the second man to touch the moon. The moon men were likened to the great colonial pirates whose landings (unlike those of the astronauts) did change the demography and economy of this planet. Sadly, there was nothing on the moon that mankind could relate to. She wasn't storing treasure and once he'd been there he really didn't want to know her. Nixon cut the space programme.

The moon men have been cheated out of their promised places as the greatest heroes in history because they were sent up there in bad faith: these earthlings were not dispatched as a test of stamina in space; Russian mankind (and Valentina Tereshkova, the first female astronaut to orbit the earth) did that. Nor was it to discover the moon and see whether she harboured moonlings. It was that WASPs just had to get there first.

The bad luck was that America sent three tongue-tied members of mankind; it didn't send a poet. The moon was 'pretty', they told us. Their tragedy was that they didn't know what to make of it. And afterwards their great adventure was exploited by the most grandiose interests in the world.

The discredited space programme enjoyed a new lease of life when Edward Teller, the creator of the nuclear bomb, the most destructive weapon the world has known, encouraged the US to invest not in space travel so much as space war. Star Wars, one of the truly terrifying fantasies of the Eighties, leaked into our consciousness again last week when mankind monitored the Shoemaker-Levy comet crashing into Jupiter. The comet, first spotted by Carolyn Shoemaker, reminded us of the combustible character of planetary traffic and recalled the notion of 'cosmic bombardment' - bombing asteroids - launched at the beginning of the Nineties by one of Mr Teller's proteges.

All sensible members of the species think Star Wars was mad, of course. But it helps us to understand the priorities of space travel and it also helps to explain our boredom with the whole business. Buzz Aldrin could never grasp this: 'For mankind it was a giant leap. We were creatures of the cosmic ocean.' And yet, he lamented, something terrible has happened: we have a 'withered capacity for wonder'. The moon landing has been followed by an 'eerie apathy'.

What was eerily amazing about the journey wasn't the moon. We were entranced by the moon because her mystique lay in the majesty of our fantasy, in her impossible proximity, in the way she sways our seas and sheds light in the dark. Yet the gift the visitors had given us wasn't actually that slow spasm, mankind's moonwalk, it was the moment when they saw the earth as our species had never seen it before. The Apollo 11 anthologies are packed with pictures of our glorious, green planet. The astronauts' rendezvous with earth, the moon's dancing partner, amazed them more than anything.

They don't know how to express that discovery yet - the moment that transformed the iconography of space and science. Eerie apathy engulfed the conquistadorial nationalism of Apollo 11. Mankind had to find a new modesty when he rejoined his species - maybe that's what the spacemen and the Church of England's refuseniks find so hard.

The point of the parable is that the moon men's legacy was entirely unexpected. The sight of our planet launched a green image and a movement that have become ubiquitous: it is not spacemen's mastery of the moon we see on ecology movement logos but the earth. Her image attached itself to an entirely new politics, not of conquest but co-operation and cosmic felicity.