I don’t remember the first moon landing, 40 years ago today, but I did watch it.
I was less than two years old at the time, and my mom woke me up well past my bedtime so I could see. I had no idea what was going on, of course, but she thought that in later years, I’d want to know I’d been awake for the landing. She was right. It still makes me happy that I was there.
I’m both one of the youngest people who was around for the first moon landing and one of the oldest people who doesn’t remember it. I’m probably also one of the oldest people who grew up taking humanity’s presence in space completely for granted.
I have a dim memory, from maybe a few years after Apollo 11, of watching two men walk in space on TV. But my first really clear memory of the space program was of Skylab crashing to earth. I remember the start of the space shuttle missions, too, but my memories of those early missions aren’t nearly as vivid as the memory of the Space Shuttle Challenger–also crashing to earth.
I’m less of the generation of humanity launching itself into space than of the generation in which we came crashing down out of it again. (Of course, not all the things that came crashing down in my childhood and early adulthood were tragedies–the Berlin Wall came down when I was in college, too.)
I do want to go back to the moon–and beyond it. I don’t think space exploration is the only thing worth doing, I don’t think we’re a failure as a society if we don’t go there–but even so, I think we should go there. The idea of breaking the grip of earth’s gravity remains amazing to me, and I think the places beyond earth’s atmosphere are ultimately places we belong.
I also think it’s worth keeping in mind that not everyone’s space program memories begin with the Apollo 11 landing. For many alive today Challenger, not Apollo 11, was the watershed event; for others, Challenger is history as well. I’m not sure what this means. I’m not sure how Skylab and Challenger have echoed through any lives but my own. But if there’s more ambivalence about going into space now overall, maybe it’s not because we’ve in some way fallen, or given up on the grand dream–maybe it’s because we’ve seen both sides of that dream now, and are in some way still coming to terms with that.
Maybe it will take the generation for which Apollo 11 and Challenger are both beyond memory–neither a defining event, both a part of the history that brought us here–to work out where we go next.