Celebration & Mourning
This is the day to commemorate 2 of the most important things in my life.
1st, it's the birthday of my dear husband stevemb . Happy birthday, sweetheart. I love you.
2nd, it's the 40th anniversary of the single greatest achievement of the human race, the Apollo 11 moon landing. It's hard to believe now how quickly it was followed by the abandonment of our hard-won dreams.
That tragedy was so complete a mere 10 years later that this sonnet appeared in the July 1979 issue of Analog magazine. My copy is long since a casualty of a moldy self-storage cube and to my shame, I cannot recall the author's name. (The only link Google could find is defunct.) But the words will be with me forever:
July 20, 1969
They made it -- we all made it, just a bit
Lke Vikings leaving runes and little more
Taking the lesser light where God had placed it
To show ourselves just what a heaven's for
They loped like diving-suited kangaroos
Over that sterile world of one night stands
Driving golf balls and moon buggies to amuse
The children, while the stars slipped through our hands
They're gone now to their shrinks and shrunken space
The praise is theirs; 'tis ours to wonder why
The world's still flat, and dreams are out of grace
So I, believing less each summer, pry open
That lost last year to see the bright
Earth-jewel, smooth and blue, in velvet night
Some years ago, my job took me to the office of a senior NASA executive. This poem, blown up from the magazine page to poster size, hung on her wall. Naturally, she turned out to be one of the clueful NASA people I dealt with. (If you really need to be depressed, I could tell you about some of the other kind. God save us all from middle managers.)
Don't think I'm knocking the space shuttle program. It too was a great accomplishment and has taught us much. However, I can't help believing that it has been a diversion and a detour from what we really should have been doing.
But the years of neglect may finally be ending. We need to leverage all the attention space is getting right now so that once the economy turns around, the campaign to again venture further than Earth orbit can begin. And the return on investment will be immense.
2 things happened in the early 1990s: we finally exhausted the technical and economic benefits of the Apollo program, and we entered a serious recession. This was not a coincidence. The unforseeable scientific and technological discoveries and spinoffs that a new space program will yield will more than repay any cost. And the benefits to our national psyche could be even greater.
To help remember how those glory days 40 years ago felt, here are 2 music videos:
Fire in the Sky
Hope Eyrie
It's time once more to boldly go.