I count myself fortunate to have been a young witness to one of humankind’s proudest achievements. Forty years ago I, like millions the world over, gazed in awe as the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle touched down at Tranquility Base.
A boy of seven, I was gathered with my brothers in our family living room along with our parents and grandparents. My father, a software engineer at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had played a role in the unmanned moon explorations that had paved the way for this historic event. As a kid, I was fascinated by the Surveyor satellite photos of the pocked lunar surface that he brought home after missions. Now he had splurged on a brand-new color TV to view the manned landing — only to learn that the broadcast of the lunar excursion would be limited to black and white.
No matter. In the heady excitement of seeing Neil Armstrong take his one small step for man, the lack of color was quickly forgotten.
No one else seemed to mind, either. You could hear the cheers erupting in neighboring living rooms all up and down our street.
StockXchng image.
They say when Apollo 11 transmitted pictures of our own Big Blue Marble as seen from the moon, we Earthlings finally realized how tiny our place was in the universe. Perhaps philosophers, pundits and jaded statesmen felt that way, but my generation certainly didn’t.
Quite the opposite, our world now felt a whole lot bigger. Children of the Cold War’s Space Race, and raised on a steady diet of campy science fiction, we younger Americans seemed to recognize instinctively that in a single night we had become heirs to a dream passed down since the dawn of civilization. Each generation has its defining moment, and young as we were, this felt like ours.
Suddenly, imagination had no boundaries, the stars held no limit, and anything and everything was possible.
