One Small Step for Man

I meant to take a minute this week and blog on the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, but this week has been crazy busy. I am taking a break from the project that has kept me so busy and I’ll take a minute now and put my thoughts down for posterity.

If you weren’t cognizant in the 1960’s (I was for the last few years) you cannot fathom the effect of the moon landing on the nation. It was, quite literally, a different nation then. A large segment of the population had been born before the Wright Brothers first flight. A larger percentage had been born before Lindberg’s flight. A majority had been born before jet aircraft, and a vast majority had been born before man first slipped the surly bonds of earth and entered outer space.

And yet, here we were; walking on the moon. Even to the eight year old me, it was surreal.

I don’t remember the lift-off of Apollo 11. I probably saw it, but rocketry was becoming fairly commonplace, and the lift off didn’t stick. But the moon landing; that stuck.

I was a hot July night, and I remember sitting on our front porch with my Dad. We had the black and white portable TV up on the wide brick porch rail and we sharing his porch lounger. And probably one of his beers. We used to watch TV on the porch a lot in the summer. I also remember watching Pete Rose knock Bob Fosse into the first row of seats at Riverfront Stadium on the same TV, on that same porch the next summer, just as we had watched the Democratic and Republican Conventions there the year before. But, I digress.

It still seems unreal, 40 years later, that we were watching a man step onto the surface of the moon. On LIVE TV. The idea that we could harness the industrial and scientific might of our country so that in less than a decade we could go from regularly having misfires on the launch pad to actual human space travel was mind boggling.

The United States has mobilized before, when we had to. The economy became a war machine pretty quickly in 1942. But this was for a peaceful purpose. And the moon race didn’t disrupt the entire economy. We still fought the war in Vietnam, still produced new cars and still consumed our normal production goods. And put a man on the moon.

40 years later my kids don’t seem as excited about space travel; probably because they will actually get to travel in space one day, and expect to. They’re all young, and they are starting to schedule space flights now for commercial travelers. In 20 years going into outer space for a vacation may be as common as a visit to Disneyland.

But 40 years ago, space was as unattainable as Heaven itself. Until Neil Armstrong took that one small step for man.

In later years we would drive cars and golf balls on the moon, and moon shots and space travel became routine. Instead of wall to wall coverage we had highlights at 6 o’clock. The first few space shuttle launches were special events, but by the time of the Challenger explosion they had become highlights on the news. On the slow news days.

But there was a time, 40 years ago, when the whole world watched as one man planted and saluted a flag. On the surface of the moon.