Some of us are going to have an extremely difficult time believing it, but it was FIFTY years ago today, on 20 July 1969, that a human being first walked on the moon!

“That’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind,” said Neil Armstrong as he touched toe upon the lunar landscape. Watching this on television at our neighbors’ house, despite the noisy static — which makes the quote possibly a slight slip-up: if the “a” is not spoken, it’s a bit off — it was clear that the quote was intended to be a famous and inspiring legacy. The conquest of space was not simply an act American bravado, but a development that all human beings could share in.

At the time, the broadcast of the event gained the largest world-wide audience ever recorded. For a short while, hundreds of millions of people around the globe were united in watching and celebrating an achievement of the most dramatic sort: new heights had been reached, and in a peaceful enterprise (albeit one that certainly had potential military implications.) If you were old enough to have watched this momentous event, do you recall where you were at that time?

My sisters were at a camp in the Colorado Rockies, the chance to watch television was an unheard-of and special exception to business-as-usual. A friend was in Vermont, staying at the Middlebury Inn, and watched in the inn’s common room. And older work colleague of mine recalled having listened to the broadcast on an ancient, unreliable tube radio in an otherwise unmemorable bar in Talkeetna, Alaska. No matter where or how, the event remains vivid for most everyone who watched. For a brief point in time, the medium of television perhaps truly reached its great potential.

I recall watching the event on a large Television at the house of our next-door neighbor. They had a pool in their back yard and decided to make the occasion a festive and holiday sort of event rather like Independence Day: a large grill was used to cook large quantity of hamburgers and albacore-patty “burgers” and a multitude of neighborhood kids splashed and played in the pool. After the both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had ventured onto the surface of the moon, the television coverage became a bit less exciting for us kids, so back to the pool we went. But I do remember, once full night had settled, looking up at the moon in the night sky and asking my Mom if she though we would one day plant colonies in outer space. “Yes,” she said, “but not in my lifetime.”

I cannot help but reflect, that five hundred years ago Spain landed in Mexico in 1519, and within thirty-two years had founded a university in the thriving metropolis of Ciudad Mexico; likewise Spain landed in Peru in 1531 and within twenty years had established a university in the thriving metropolis of Lima. Now, to be fair, Spain – for all that the age was technologically primitive by today’s standards – did not have to deal with the challenges of blasting away from earth’s atmosphere and existing on an atmosphere-free rock in space. But, even so, the speed with which the New World was integrated into the Old was astonishing. It is also true that the integration was neither mutually beneficial nor benign. The peoples present at the arrival of Spain suffered mightily from the contact and conquest. Nevertheless, questing humans had reached a new and utterly foreign world and made that world integral to their own within a generation. Yet fifty years after “One small step for a man …” Space remains almost wholly the stuff of science fiction.

Certainly the race for the moon was an outgrowth of the Soviet/American Cold War, and the technological achievement served to impress the Soviets with how much a committed United States could achieve in an amazingly short time, but it was and is more than that. Mankind is a questing species. New horizons have always beckoned. To paraphrase a quote from a television show that predates the moon landing, “Space is the final frontier.” It remains to be seen if we ever return.

Jamie Rawson
Flower Mound, Texas

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

— Seneca