The successful American expedition to the Moon in 1969 with the Apollo project may have been an important event in the history of space travel, a catalyst for technological development of a kind previously only seen in phases of war, and of course a key date in the Cold War. But, first and foremost, it was the supreme television event. It also provided the basic model for all television events since then, so that changes in the variation, selection, and re-stabilization of television events in the time since could be measured and described in relation to the expedition to the Moon (Luhmann 1997, 413-594). After this event, nothing was ever the same again, as television established itself as a force of change rather than just a witness to it. Instead of putting itself at the service of the Moon project, it used the flight to the Moon to serve its own ends and turned it into its own agent.

In the following, I elaborate on the meaning and stakes of this claim in four movements, taking up topics that were already mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3 in a more systematic way. In the first movement, I explain the significance of the Apollo landing as a television event in greater detail. In the second movement, I argue that the flight to the Moon also marked an important turning point in the whole scopic regime of the modern era.