To go where no blogger has ever gone before…
I just have to chime in on this awesome 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I’m of the age where this so totally captured my imagination forever… (Talk about a personal Paradigm Shift!)
See, The Paradigm Shift.
My brother Steve and I were absolutely glued to the TV on this one. We were of the generation totally inspired by the words of president John F. Kennedy in his 1962 speech: “We choose to go to the Moon…”
My folks bought a new refrigerator around 1960. Steve and I hauled the box it came in up to our bedroom and made a (Gemini) space capsule out of it. We had all kinds of gizmos we created with buttons, toggle switches and lots of small lights you could turn on and off with kits we had put together (intended for other purposes, of course). We could play in that box for hours and days on end. Our imaginations traveled the planets and beyond.
(Kennedy speech excerpt)…
“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”…
Another hero past… I remember seeing the landing and especially Walter Cronkite reading the words on the plate attached to the base of the Lunar Landing Module, “We came in peace for all mankind.”
NASA and the vision of space travel gave us limitless benefit. It inspired so much of the technology we now use every day. My only sadness is that it lost momentum and it became wrapped in bureacracy and politics. We created a lot of reasons why not to do something. Not that we couldn’t do it. We simply choose not to follow the dream.
We were in tumultous times in the late 1960’s that were in some ways not so different than today… Yet, we saw hope, something bigger than us, a vision of humanity to aspire to that was way beyond the mess we were in at the time. I can’t wait to hear the speech, “we choose to go to Mars.” Not because it’s easy, it’s not. What about our problems here? We’ll fix them to. And, the goal will serve all mankind.
“That’s one small step for Man. One giant leap for Mankind.”
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin
2 years ago