pavlovsdog

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"

What an amazing accomplishment happened 40 years ago. I can't even begin to comprehend what it would have felt like to be that far from the earth. To be alone in the cold vacuum of space uncertain if this whole thing was going to work. Then the experience of being the first human to set foot on ground outside the Earth. I don't know how those astronauts kept their sanity. I'm sure they were given several tasks just to keep their minds off the sheer craziness of it all. I grew up in the shadow of this monumental achievement. It was a world where the impossible seemed everyday. After landing on the moon, what was there that humans couldn't do? I would lay out on summer nights and look up at the starry sky and the bright moon and wonder if I could see anything up there, or if who ever was up there could see me. I never realized they had left the moon a long time ago. As a kid I had dreams of being an astronaut. It fueled my interest in science, and technology, which I still have in some ways. I did manage to go Space Camp one summer. It wasn't as cool as the movie. We didn't get blasted off into space or even sit in a space shuttle. My week in the gated compound of Huntsville Alabama consisted mostly of clowning around with other campers, and learning the pangs of puppy love. Soon after that "teenage" happened to me. At that point outer space dreams were quickly replaced with increasingly more earthbound thoughts. By then the luster of the space program did not dazzle my eyes so strikingly as it once did. That coupled with the fact that I would have to go into the Air Force if I wanted to pursue that career, made me set aside those lofty dreams and peruse more grounded ones. Now that I'm older and am confronted with all the problems on Earth, I wonder if we need a return to the moon. We certainly have more important things to spend our money on, but no single event in the world could make us as a species regain that childlike wonder as an adventure outside our world. I will never get to the moon, or for that matter into space, but I hope we continue our innate human instinct to explore new worlds.