One small step for man...
So sad to hear about Neil Armstrong's passing. The world seems a little smaller today, a little more lost in space. A little bit further away from the stars.
As a child I always loved the idea of space. I wanted to be an astronaut for a while, until I found out you needed to be good at science. There went those career plans. But the idea of it always stayed with me - to be out there in the immensities of space, among the stars, to look back at our world and see how small it is, how small we are, and from such a distance all the petty things that divide us really don't matter.
I find it so sad that we're coming up on fifty years since a man walked on the Moon, and what have we done since? Where have we gone?
I'm always reminded by a quote from a West Wing episode:
There are a lot of hungry people in the world, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.
And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?
Yes. 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.
Somewhere along the way I think people started to take for granted the immensity of what Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts did. We went to the Moon. We looked at it and wanted to go and we did. That's incredible. And that people can question if it's worth it, if we gained anything, if the money was better spent elsewhere...
A man walked on the Moon. And we are all a little better because of that.
As a child I always loved the idea of space. I wanted to be an astronaut for a while, until I found out you needed to be good at science. There went those career plans. But the idea of it always stayed with me - to be out there in the immensities of space, among the stars, to look back at our world and see how small it is, how small we are, and from such a distance all the petty things that divide us really don't matter.
I find it so sad that we're coming up on fifty years since a man walked on the Moon, and what have we done since? Where have we gone?
I'm always reminded by a quote from a West Wing episode:
There are a lot of hungry people in the world, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.
And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?
Yes. 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.
Somewhere along the way I think people started to take for granted the immensity of what Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts did. We went to the Moon. We looked at it and wanted to go and we did. That's incredible. And that people can question if it's worth it, if we gained anything, if the money was better spent elsewhere...
A man walked on the Moon. And we are all a little better because of that.