To the Moon

I can't believe it's fifty years since Apollo 11 blasted off for the moon. I was a total NASA-junkie back in those days. I would watch every astronaut launch, even getting up early on a school day to watch the doings at Cape Canaveral/Kennedy. Great era.

I had spent sleepless nights worrying about the impending July 16, 1969, launch of Apollo 11. Would the weather cooperate? Would technology fail? Would the Soviets launch something to the moon a day or two before? I sat by the phone waiting for NASA to call if they needed any advice. I was living, at the time, in Downey, California, home to North American Aviation (later Rockwell) where much of the Apollo and Gemini spacecraft were built. The whole city was space crazy. I loved the space program. I still do, well, sort of. Let me explain.

But first, the moon landing. I recall that July 20; it must have been around noon in California. I was drifting on a rubber mattress in our pool. My father had wheeled-out the black-and-white TV set to the backyard so we could watch the landing. I remember vividly, a few hours after the landing, watching the grainy pictures of Neil Armstrong stepping out of the lunar lander and onto the moon's surface and later planting the US flag. I also remember my father, not generally a very emotional or expressive man, with tears streaming down his face, standing up and applauding, yelling in his immigrant accent, "America! America! America can do anything!" I also remember cheers going up from the neighbors' houses on either side. It seemed every house on the street suddenly sprouted an American flag. A great day.

The space program was one of those (few) things that the government did well. Sort of. That landing on the moon, and the subsequent ones, as well, I found immensely inspirational. To watch American astronauts driving a car on the moon was insane! Nobody else could have done it. NASA really was using the most extreme form of technology available; a lot of it was untried, experimental to the nth degree. Yet, overall, it worked, and there were some amazingly brave men who willingly staked their lives on that equipment, and had faith in the hundreds-of-thousands of fellow Americans who had worked to develop it.

After the thrill of the moon landings, it became sadly clear there was no second act. Not really.

We had beat the Russians to the moon. And that was it. There was no exciting second chapter. In later years, we messed around with the Space Shuttle with no clear idea of what it was we intended to do in space, well, at least, not with man in space. The Shuttle program gradually petered out, it having no third chapter,  and . . . the great void followed. The government and the public seemed to lose interest in manned space exploration.

I hope we get back into space in a bigly way. To Mars! It's needs an American flag . . . maybe a Betsy Ross flag?