Category Archives: apollo 11

apollo 11, Moon, moon missions

The Eagle Once Landed

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Geeking Out 41 Years Ago

The mission patch for Apollo 11. Courtesy NASA.

So, I know where I was 41 years ago this week: glued to the TV watching the Apollo 11 landings and first humans walking on the Moon.  It was a special time — a time when I honestly thought that maybe by the time I got out of high school or even college, that people would be regularly traveling to the Moon for vacations, commerce, exploration, and maybe even to live.

It’s a promise that humans have been unable to fulfill for a number of good and bad reasons. But, for me, the wonder of those days is still there.  I still get a little wistful when I see the pictures and videos and think about how we all were so excited in those times.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin sets out an experiment during the Apollo 11 mission. Courtesy NASA.

They were part of America’s great leap to space, and in most ways, our country has done a LOT of exploration. We have robot probes that have explored (and some still are exploring) the planets. We’ve learned to study our OWN planet, as pictures from NASA and NOAA and other space agencies attest.   But, we’ve never returned people to the Moon, and that’s disappointing.

Still, the dream is alive and the pictures remind us of what can be. It may be that people other than Americans will be the next to step on the Moon — just as people from other countries have taken up the cause of space exploration and made it part of their national outreach and honor, too.  That’s not a bad thing — space is becoming an international endeavor. I’m happy that we were the first to go to the Moon. I just hope we’re not the last.

apollo 11, Lunar exploration, lunar landing

It Was 40 Years Ago Today

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When the Astronauts Came Out to Play

The first astronauts on the Moon achieved something for more than the U.S. (which funded the mission); they took that giant leap for all people on Earth. From Apollo: through the eyes of the astronauts. (Click to embiggen.)
The first astronauts on the Moon achieved something for more than the U.S. (which funded the mission); they took that giant leap for all people on Earth. From "Apollo: through the eyes of the astronauts". (Click to embiggen.)

And what a grand play it was — not “play” in the sense of “fooling around getting nothing done”, but “play” as in making one of the biggest plays that humanity could achieve since the discovery that Earth is a planet, the Sun is a star, and we’re all part of a galaxy that wheels the cosmos with other galaxies.  That big. Maybe even bigger.

A lot of us who were watching the events unfolding on TV have a lot of happy remembrances of that time. It was a time to look forward to being in space, to establishing careers in space science or as astronauts, astronomers, engineers, and more.  Far more than a “plant the flag, pick up a few rocks, and head home” mission that short-sighted and ignorant Apollo detractors since then have sneered about, the mission was a symbolic and scientific first step off Earth to another world.  It told us that we can do this thing. And, the memory of that singular accomplishment lives on.

Does it still mean a lot today?  I suggest that it does. It reminds us that humans can do great things when we put our minds to it. We can focus on things that aren’t war and hate and bigotry and misogyny and ignorance and religious strife and all the other things that humans do to and think about one another.  This is a good day to remember that we are not ignorant savages living by our wits and controlled by fear and hate.  We are better than that.  If Apollo 11 and its sister missions (including the Soviet-era missions) don’t teach us anything else than this one lesson, they’ll have been worth all the work, expense, sacrifice, and exhiliration. Without any of the successes on the Moon, I seriously doubt that any of the world’s space programs would be what they are today–for they were, at least in part, inspired by the lunar explorations of the 1960s and 70s.