To the Moon

It is, of course, one of those life moments that you do not forget, the day when we landed men on the moon. I had graduated from high school the month before, happily free now to go on to USU and study art. My favorite TV show, Star Trek, had also ended the month before, but that didn’t seem to matter much, we were going out there into space for real. We didn’t have warp drive or talking supercomputers and communicators, but we had advanced from a suborbital flight in May of 1961 to the huge Saturn V rocket to take men to the moon in July of 1969, and that was an incredible thing to accomplish in so short of time.

I had watched nearly every launch of the space program from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, just as I had watched nearly every episode of Star Trek. The two seemed to be bound together in my mind, and when the Apollo program stumbled, Star Trek kept going and I kept the faith in space exploration. Now I was glued to the TV, anxiously waiting for every update on the moon landing, hardly daring to hope that it was really about to happen. And it did happen, and because of the incredible coolness of those pilots in the lunar lander that had the ‘right stuff,’ to achieve the near impossible.

After heading off to college in September, I tried to keep track of the Apollo program and the subsequent moon landings, but I was focused on other things and trying to survive my emersion in higher education. When the moon landings stopped, I hardly noticed and didn’t realize that we would not be going back to establish colonies or further explore our nearest neighbor. Now 50 years later, I am a little angry at the lack of motivation and nerve. To think what we could have accomplished in all that time, had we continued, is nothing short of heartbreaking. Of course, we explored the solar system and all of the planets with robotic probes, but we should have kept going ourselves. Yes, we had a lot of other problems to solve here on our planet, but we really haven’t done a very good job so far, and that is the sad realization and disappointment that I have. Let’s get going back out there, and this time, let’s not stop.

(Below, my idealized, painted version, of the first moon landing.)

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