Forty years ago, America and the world held its breath as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, strapped into their seats aboard the lunar lander Eagle, descended to the surface of the Moon.
The Eagle safely touched down a little after 4 p.m. EDT, and Armstrong and Aldrin began their preparations for eventually stepping out on the surface of the Moon. It was at 10:56 p.m. EDT when Armstrong set foot on the Moon and uttered the now-famous line, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Man had finally burst the bonds of this planet and ventured out into the universe, beginning the ultimate journey of exploration.
Or so we thought.
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There were six more Apollo missions to the Moon, ending with Apollo 17 in 1972. Oh, there was Skylab, the joint flights with the Soviet Union as part of detente, the shuttle missions, the unmanned flights to Mars and the soon-to-be finished construction of the International Space Station.
But nothing that would capture the public’s imagination as much as the missions to the Moon.
Today, NASA and America’s space program languish in Washington, tied down by a lack of vision on the part of this country’s leaders. Yes, health care reform, the economy and energy are important tasks facing them, but they’ll be addressed ... and solved sooner or later.
We need to reinvigorate America’s space program. It was former President George W. Bush who set NASA and the nation on a return to the Moon and eventually a manned mission to Mars; lately that charge has been forgotten about in a capital wrestling with more mundane, terrestrial problems.
And that’s too bad.
Man is naturally a curious creature, always wanting to know what’s around the corner, what’s beyond the horizon, what’s at the top of the higest peak or at the bottom of the lowest ocean trench. And what’s out there in the heavens.
It has been our innate curiousity that has propelled mankind to all of our greatest leaps forward in history: the harnessing of fire; the spread of homo sapiens across the globe from our origins in a far corner of Africa; the flowering of humanism in 14th-century Florence, Italy, that gave birth to the modern world ... and our push into outer space.
We know we can do it; it’s only a matter of resolve.
Mankind belongs at the cutting edge of innovation and discovery. It’s who we are ... it defines us ... it propels us to the next level of existence.
Just do it.
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