To the Moon
I am excited to think that today is the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's landing on the moon, while command-module pilot Michael Collins orbited the moon in the Apollo 11 command module. I am, perhaps, less excited that its been forty years since I was 12 years old!
The photograph is of one of Aldrin's bootprints on the moon (NASA source). At the time Aldrin and Armstrong were walking on the moon, I was watching it on television in the living room of our townhouse in NCO's quarters at Fort Carson, Colorado. The Vietnam War was at its height and so many troops were away from Ft. Carson that my father's battalion of National Guardsmen (he was a Command Sergeant Major) was mobilized and moved for a year from Kansas City, Kansas to Fort Carson to keep the place staffed.
I enjoyed my year living there. Colorado was interesting,* the mountains near the Fort unlike anything we had in eastern Kansas. I was in seventh grade and, shy though I was, I met fun kids and had a good time. I think it was also the first time I fell in love, although I didn't realize it until later. If memory serves, his name was Rob; if memory doesn't serve, that name will serve as well as any other. However, that's really a story for another time.
Being 12 and being in a different and exciting place, and being there when humans reached the moon made everything seem filled with possibilities. From this distance it seemed an almost magical time. Sometimes I wish I could recover the innocence that made it happen; other times, of course, I know better than to wish that and chalk it up to the creeping nostalgia of middle age.
I probably was a child of the Sputnik age, of the American sense of somehow falling "behind" our cold-war rivals. My math and science education was accelerated, such as it was in those days. (Remember, I was precocious and technological because I took a typing course–on an actual upright, manual Remington typewriter–in high school, when learning how to type was treated as a dying art best left to die.) I enjoyed math and physics in college and, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I went to graduate school in physics and became a rocket scientist.
I like space. I like space exploration. We learn more, and more economically, from unmanned missions into the solar system, but human exploration is still the great adventure and, I can believe, growing beyond our planet still the future of the human race. Yes, I read a lot of science fiction in my youth and it was the inspiration of a lifetime, apparently.
We need to keep exploring space. The benefits that accrue to our culture are largely intangible despite all those years of marketers touting Tang and Teflon as worthwhile spin-offs. But intangible does not imply useless. Exploration, discovery, and learning are all a vita part of the growth of human civilization, just as art and music are. Who does not marvel at the glimpses of the edges of the galaxy that we get from the Hubble Space Telescope?
We are returning to the moon. There was a recent lunar orbiter, the Japanese KAGUYA spacecraft, which returned amazing HDTV videos of the lunar surface (and this spectacular earthrise). NASA's lunar reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently made it to the moon. Expectations were that it would be able to see remnants of the earlier Apollo missions–and it can. That arrow in the photograph points to the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) of the Apollo 11 mission. (More pictures of Apollo landing sites.)
This anniversary of the first moon landing seems a good time to reflect on what has, and hasn't, happened since then, and to move on into the future. I hope I can help rekindle some of that spirit and enthusiasm for discovery and learning so that we can find a new age of exploration.
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* At least in those years before Colorado Springs was infiltrated by Christian supremacists. The last time I was there the city seemed dingy and lackluster and Ft. Carson still had all of its world-war-two era "temporary" buildings.
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on Monday, 20 July 2009 at 18.03
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I watched the men walking on the moon on the television set in the dining room of a pensione in Florence. It was breakfast time there. In front of me was the television set; behind me, out the windows, was the campanile of the duomo. An impressive contrast of ancient and modern, past and future, to say the least. I was 24, and spending a summer in London doing research on the PhD project I never completed. One day I was walking past a Thomas Cook agency, and saw advertised a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to Florence for a ridiculously low price. So I went. I would not recommend going to Florence for two weeks in July! The heat and humidity of the Arno valley was pretty fierce. One day I escaped to the beach at Via Reggio, only to find that it was even worse. Another contrast I suppose: the heat of Florence and the cosmic cold of the lunar landscape.