“You can’t grow tomatoes there.”
“Zaragoza held its breath early on Monday morning.. Thousands of Zaragoza residents, thousands of men and women, were worried about luck, about the great moment of Apollo Armstrong’s flight to the Moon on July 20, 1969. The pages of HERALDO reported that, overall, Time was of no importance, nor was the sequence of the postponements.Joy, excitement and pride were some of the feelings they conveyed 55 years ago.
The next day, the newspaper gathered six residents of Zaragoza to ask their opinion: professor, priest, waiter, shoe shine boy, municipal security guard and bank agent. The reaction to the “spacewalk,” as it was called, was published a few days later.
“I think that astronauts are a transcendental human category”
Olegario Ortiz Manchado, a professor of general pathology at the University of Zaragoza, got up to watch television with his children. He thought the news would be between “the first events of a person’s life”“a jump into space.” He, too, was optimistic, believing that such a feat would unite all men. “I also believe that astronauts are in the category of people who transcend limitations,” Ortiz Manchado said. “As a physician, I admire their fortitude. They are people who have embraced death.”
Victor Casorran had to get up early on Monday, so he didn’t watch TV that evening. This bank agent compared it to the theory of relativity and the atomic bomb.“I don’t think the discovery of America was as significant as the Apollo XI voyage, they were inside the planet,” Casorran commented.
From the chronicles of those days it is extracted that many city dwellers did not see the landing on the moon due to the time – around four in the morning – but he still took off from the Earth, as was the case with Santiago Perez. The shoe-shine boy from Zaragoza put down his brush to answer questions from a journalist from this newspaper. “They must have a special value. Those were different times, but the story of Plus Ultra also moved me very much,” Perez recalls. In your opinion, It was unfair to use such a sum of money: “You can’t plant potatoes and tomatoes there.”.
“It touched my soul, it’s something very big and complex”
In the midst of traffic control, municipal security guard Luis de la Orden believed that This event became the second most important in history.who was behind Columbus’ discovery of America. “Of course, it touched my soul, it is something very big and difficult,” added the street watchman.
“On a scientific level, this is a first for humanity. The world is round and it was possible to predict that they would arrive, but during the journey of Apollo XI, everything was dark,” said Bernardo González of the parish office of the Church of Santa Engracia. “It was completely unknown what awaited us there.”– he emphasized.
Neil Armstrong’s adventure has been compared to Christopher Columbus’s, as well as Jesus’s.“I think that after Christ nothing could compare to this fact,” said waiter Ricardo Barrio, serving a soft drink.
Economic costs
The aforementioned economic costs have also been in the news. “Do you think it is fair to spend so much money on experiments and space travel?”HERALDO addressed the heroes of this information. “Thanks to these projects, those in need are abandoned. I think they are also forgotten when we go to football or to the cinema,” commented Professor Ortiz Manchado. “In my opinion, there are more pressing problems here on Earth,” criticized Casorran. “Once they are solved, we can think about those up there.”
On the other hand, Santa Engracia parish priest Bernardo Gonzalez suggested that it could be future reward“Imagine that economic compensation is achieved through mineral resources, etc.,” the priest concluded.