And What It Stands For

This week marks the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the Moon. Accordingly, the Big Picture over at the Boston Globe has a wonderful image retrospective of the mission. Some of these images haven’t been seen for a long time.

Boy, do those pictures take me back!  It gives away my age to say that I was alive at that time and able to remember that launch and mission vividly. I had just entered high school and was looking forward to living on the Moon by the time I finished college.

The mission was amazing, not just because we landed on the Moon, but also because it lifted our national (and world) attention away from the everyday life joys and sorrows and focused our collective vision on a world beyond our own.  People around the world watched for a week as the three astronauts climbed into the rocket, took off, and then settled a lander onto the surface of our nearest neighbor in space.   That mission made many things seem much more possible — living and working in space, going to the Moon, visiting Mars — you name it.

It seems like that was only a short time ago — yet, I see by the calendar that it’s been 40 years since that mission.  A lot’s been learned and accomplished in that time — missions to Mars (not by humans, but by human-controlled robots and orbiters), missions to the outer planets as well as the inner ones.  A flock of satellites that tell us about everything from the tiniest burp from the solar surface to the flickerings of star birth back at the earliest epochs of cosmic time.

In terms of distances and travel time, a trip to the Moon seems like a quick jaunt compared to the distance that light from the first stars that we can study has traveled (more than 13 billion light-years).  Still, that first step for a man, as Neil Armstrong tried to say, was a big one in our understanding in what it takes to explore the cosmos and, indeed, to understand what we see in the distant reaches of space.  That step was not just a step onto another world — it became an inspiration for all the research and exploration done since then — sometimes done by humans in space, sometimes done at an office desk with a computer much like the one I’m writing this on.  It has been done by persons who were could have been inspired by Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins and their accomplishments. That inspiration is equally as important as the scientific and technological achievements of their mission.  Kids (like me) who were directly influenced by that mission have taken that inspiration and used it to excite new generations of scientists who are taking further steps to explore the cosmos.

Exploration by inspired people — that’s what the achievements of Apollo 11 and her crew stand for and always will.  So, go enjoy the pictures and marvel at what humans accomplished 40 years ago.  If they hadn’t done it, where would we be in our understanding of the Moon?  Our own planet?  The cosmos? Think about it!