Moon walk

It dawned on me a few weeks ago that the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and the moon walk was coming up. I hadn’t really heard anything in the media mentioning it at the time so I’m not quite sure what triggered the thought. At the time my main thought was, “Wow!”

In the weeks since, I’ve thought about it more and noticed the media was drawing attention to it. On the 16th I was watching and reading about the launch of that mission.  It became quite clear that while this was a momentous world event, it was also something of a milestone in my life. I was only four in 1969 and it’s quite possible this is my earliest memory now. I would be lying if I said I remember it clearly but I do remember the night. Our family, like many around the world, was in front of the television that night. We watched events as they took place on tv and we also went out into our backyard to look at the moon.

I think that is what stands out for me that night…looking at the moon and realising that there were humans from earth walking there. I do have  a strong memory of the sense of wonder on that night. This was really the first major event of my life. Sure, there were plenty of major world events occurring in the late sixties. But this was the first that my four year old self was able to grasp in any way.  Even to my 44 year old self, it’s pretty astounding.

My thoughts have wandered over the past few days to the continuing sense of wonder about the space program through my early years. At school, we would learn about NASA and its space program pretty much yearly right through my primary school years. I used to know quite a bit of detail about those early American spaceships.  In the reading book I had one year was a speculative sort of story or article about a base on the moon. I think there were predictions of having some sort of settlement there by the turn of the century. There was a sort of romaticism about it for those of us growing up at the time. In our family, it was my younger brother who was especially enamored of all things related to space.

Obviously NASA’s space program didn’t continue in that direction and before we knew it, space shuttles were the choice craft for space flight. I probably remember far more detail of  the launch of the first space shuttle but I can’t say it captivated me in the same way.  Any time an Apollo mission was launched, the nation and the world watched. But aside from the first few space shuttle missions (and those that have gone horribly wrong), they are so commonplace today as to garner only brief mention, if any, in the news these days.