Missing the wonder.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Geez, FORTY YEARS?  Earlier this summer, I was just feeling middled-aged.  Now I just feel old.

If you’re around my age or older, you remember this moment.  It’s one of the defining historical moments of our generation.  It’s one of those “I remember where I was and who I was with” moments.  I remember following this one from launch to splashdown, and being up in the middle of the night with my whole family when Neil Armstrong stepped off the LEM onto the lunar surface.  And yes, we were watching Walter Cronkite (although we sued to flip back and forth between CBS and ABC, because we were all fans of Jules Bergman).

The thing is, I remember all of those missions.  I started following the space program very early on, from the time I became aware of what was going on in the world, I think.  I grew up on this stuff.  I built plastic models of every NASA spacecraft.  I had the G.I. Joe Mercury astronaust set.  I had Major Matt Mason toys (remember him?), because he was an astronaut, and only an astronaut.  My favorite family vacation was to Cape Kennedy (which is what they used to call it), even though there wasn’t a launch going on at the time.  The highlight of another family vacation was sitting in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant (I think it was: we stayed in them a lot) one morning in San Diego and watching an aircraft carrier sail out of the harbor on its way to pick up another splashed-down space mission. And I couldn’t wait for those magic moments in elementary school when the televisions were wheeled into the classrooms (with the rabbit ears on top) so the teacher could tune in to a launch or a splashdown.  I especially loved the splashdowns, because there was always that long suspenseful pause when the radio communications were blacked out, and then the TV cameras were searching across the open ocean, trying to spot those giant parachutes…

It was amazing.  For a kid like me, is was magic.

Our kids didn’t have that experience.  We did get to see a space shuttle launch a few years ago, from the pool at a Disney World water park, and that was cool, because the whole crowd there stopped their fun to turn and watch the thing go up, and then we all cheered and high-fived together.  But the space shuttle program gets almost no attention (except for the disasters) and has become pretty mundane.  Until recently, lauches and return flights weren’t even carried live on TV.

I understand that many people don’t get the point of the space program.  If the whole thing was scrapped tomorrow, I’ll bet the majority of the American public wouldn’t bat an eye.  They don’t see the point, they don’t get the benefit (unless they work in the program somehow), and they sure don’t understand the expense.

And that’s a shame.

I’m one of those corny old farts who believes in the wonder, especially the wonder of exploration.  I think human beings have an innate desire to know, to find out, to discover.  Yeah, I’m not naive enough not to realize that a lot of  “the space race” was about just that: beating the Soviets at something.  I get that.    But that doesn’t detract from the fact that the race to the moon gave us something exciting, something uniting, something amazing in our lives on a regular basis. 

I miss that.  I think we all do.

There was a time when human beings looked at the mountains in the distance and and wondered what was  “over there.”  Later they wondered what, if anything, was on the other edge of the ocean.

Today, some of us are still looking up at night, and we’re still wondering.