"One small step for man...."

38 years ago today we put a man on the moon. Probably one of the single greatest achievements in the history of the planet. I only wish I'd been old enough to see and appreciate what was happening at the time. I can't imagine what it must have been like watching those grainy black and white images and knowing they were coming from the surface of another planet.

Being a nut for the whole space race era (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and From the Earth to the Moon are in regular rotation here), it's heartbreaking to see how NASA planned to have a permanent base on the moon by the late 70s and to land on Mars some time in the 80s. And then it all got pissed away over politics. Yes, the program cost a ton of money, but there's something to be said for striving to achieve great things, and as technically challenging a feat as it is, launching umpteen space shuttles into orbit just doesn't have the same mind-capturing grandeur as three men drifting through the void to land on another world.
Now they say we're ten years away from going back to the moon. We went from never having put a human into space to landing on the moon in less time than that.

I think the exploration of space is vitally important to the survival of the species, and not just in the sense of exploring other planets -- look at all the technological advances the space program brought into every day life. But there's also the sense of hope, the sense of wonder, the sense of striving for something greater. Billions of people watched the moon landing across the globe, and while yes, it "won" the space race for the USA, in that moment, it wasn't about two Americans on the moon, it was about two humans on the moon.

In the "1968" episode of From the Earth to the Moon, the Apollo 8 flight is contrasted with what a generally shitty year 1968 was. And then the crew made their famous Christmas Eve reading of Genesis from orbit around the moon, and the episode so perfectly captures the effect it had -- as the crew is being read congratulatory telegraphs from various dignitaries around the world, they're read one by a little old lady who simply says, "Thank you. You saved 1968." And that scene never fails to tear me up. I really wish this country was capable of something like that again.

So if you're able to spot the moon any time today, take a moment to look up there and remember -- we've been there.

Actually, he planned to say "one small step for a man," but in the moment he forget the "a". Listen to the audio -- there's no audible gap between "for" and "man", nowhere where the audio dropped out, nowhere for that "a" to have been.

I'm reading A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin, which was the inspiration for the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. What amazes me is how fucking on NASA was. You watch the movie Apollo 13 and you think "Damn, those guys were sharp to come up with this stuff at the last minute," then you read this book and realize most of the plans during 13 had been developed months earlier as emergency contingencies. And the astronauts keep talking about how anticlimactic the missions seemed sometimes, since everything had been simulated and planned and designed to such a precise degree, all they had to do was follow the flight plan. Not to diminish the risk and effort of the actual astronauts, but the engineers and flight control people deserve a hell of a lot of credit too.

The only thing that worries me is that we might one day see Mountain Dew Extreme Moonwalk.

I have a friend who worked for Lockheed Martin, so we got to out there about five years ago and watch an Atlas launch from the visitors area. It was amazing, and I can only imagine what it's like to see a shuttle or Saturn launch that close. Haven't visited the space center in a while, although as a kid my family went during the Bicentennial and it was spectacular -- they let you walk around inside the Vehicle Assembly Building and let you get closer to the secure areas than ever before, or since. And they had a Saturn rocket laid on its side and it seemed like it took forever to walk around the thing. Just awesome. I did go years later and got to see one of the shuttles on the pad before a launch, that was quite the site too.

When I was a kid we lived out in Bithlo, which is about halfway between the Cape and downtown Orlando. And we could feel the ground shake there when the Saturns launched for the later Apollo missions. And even today, people still go outside to watch the shuttle launches. I remember last year when they had the 4th of July launch, I was working at Universal and guest and employees came streaming out of nowhere to watch it. Space still holds some magic, we just need to be doing something more than just sending up shuttle after shuttle.