On July 20th, 1969, the United States' Apollo 11 became the first Human crewed craft to land on the surface of the Earth's Moon.
I was born on February 12th, 1969.
I was 6 months old when Neil Armstrong made his 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Held by my Mother, we watched the event on television. From the very beginning, space travel has been a part of me.
The fact that we, the flawed and all too often foolish Human race managed to travel from our birth world to it's natural satellite is nothing short of amazing. It is the culmination of the pioneering spirit that came before it and the inspiration that fueled all the intrepid journeys that came after it.
Happy 50th Anniversary to Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and all those who made the dream possible.
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Barking Alien
We can now look forward to the 13th and subsequent men on the Moon. And maybe women too. The day is coming soon.
ReplyDeleteThank you Scott for being the rare positive voice. I too think we are on the verge of the next step.
DeleteThere are obstacles but there remain pioneers.
I’m very hopeful about our future in the stars. The engineering challenges to get to the moon and Mars and likely the Galilean moons have largely been overcome. Now the barriers are financial and psychological.
DeleteThe biggest barrier to men in the solar system will be safety. How risky is too risky? People in our country don’t want to send, say, the first black lesbian to Mars if there’s a chance she will die.
You were doing so well...
DeleteNot exactly sure why that particular example or point had to be presented here.
Did you mean 'people'? There's a chance people will die? 'Cause we here on Earth are all people. Our genders, orientations, colors, religions, and other factors have nothing to do with our ability to travel through space or land on other planets.
It does matter. It shouldn’t, but it does. Intersectionality is a thing. While it would be sad if a white man died, losing someone with a lot of intersectionality points would stall us in space for a long time.
DeleteHOWEVER let me repeat that I am very very hopeful. We will go to the planets and we will go to the stars.
It matters because we persist in the identifying of people as one thing or another and not as people. We note the problems of having this person or that person doing a thing or being themselves instead of remembering we are all people, all Human, all sharing the same world.
DeleteI too am hopeful we will reach the stars someday, but I don't think we can until we stop seeing everyone else as them and start seeing everyone as us.
Two things amaze me about it. One, it is one of the great feats of Mankind, yet it was done for all the wrong reasons. Two, half a century later, we are in no position to reliably repeat it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, pretty amazing what was accomplished...four years before I was born!...and yet we're still so largely Earthbound, 50 years later.
ReplyDeleteJuly 16th, 1969 was my 13th birthday. My present was that we, that is, humans, went to the moon. Four days later, they landed. I think my head didn't come down to earth until they got back.
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