One Small Step...

Reader, commenter, fellow Northeastbloggershoot participant and good friend brad_in_ma reminded me last night of the historic events of this day in 1969 when three astronauts left Earth's orbit on the Apollo 11 space mission to walk on the moon. Yes, forty years ago today the Apollo 11 mission started, blasting into space via a Saturn V rocket, bringing the American space program to its zenith.


I've always been fascinated with space and space travel, growing up as a child of the '70s and '80s. Star Wars, Star Trek; Asimov, Bradbury; Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun; science fiction and fact have always held a vice-like grip on my imagination. Watching the Challenger disaster on TV in 1986 did little to quell this love; if anything it made it even stronger - the inherent danger of what we had come to take for granted made it even more compelling.

There's always talk about the direction the space program should take. Some want to explore Mars; others can't see the value of spending billions of taxpayer dollars on exploration (the value of space exploration is not necessarily what we find out there, but what we come up with to help us get out there). A manned mission to Mars would be the next logical step for the space program - having man set foot on another planet would be quite the technological feat indeed.

In four days we'll celebrate the actual landing of the Eagle on the moon's surface; we'll be treated to "One small step" over and over again; we'll hear rhetoric about how we must revive the space program. Perhaps some will talk about how we haven't been back to the moon since the mid 1970s despite quantum advances in technology, computers, and propulsion. More forward thinkers might look to future advances and how they might affect space travel; near-light speed or perhaps even faster-than-light, the proverbial "warp" speed of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe.

In any case, it's a fascinating time to be alive.

That is all.