It seemed like the future had truly arrived when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the surface of the Moon 40 years ago tonight.
Those of us now of a certain age remember watching, enthralled, as the historic events unfolded in blurry black-and-white images on our 14-inch TV screens.
We knew we were living at the dawn of a new age when space travel would become commonplace and mankind would expand its realm beyond its home planet. It was only a matter of time.
Would be it 10 years, we wondered, or maybe 20, before we were all zipping around in rocket cars, taking weekend jaunts to our moon and vacations to Jupiter’s?
Countless TV shows, books and movies put our dreams into words and images. We imagined space travel as adventurous ("Star Trek"), mind-blowing ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and terrifying ("Alien"). David Bowie sang of it as captivating ("I think my spaceship knows which way to go") and Elton John as mundane ("All this science, I don’t understand/it’s just my job five days a week").
What we could not imagine, back then, was that we’d remain Earthbound. Yet come December, we will mark 37 years since the last time humans ventured to the Moon, or anywhere beyond Earth orbit.
Faced with the enormous costs of human space flight, we have settled for half-measures; we go, but not boldly. U.S. Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz flights bring astronauts and scientists to the International Space Station for research programs that, however valuable scientifically, don’t inspire the public the way those Moon missions did.
NASA keeps the dreams alive: It has plans for new manned missions to the Moon by 2020, construction of a lunar outpost and research station, and then — someday — missions to Mars. Buzz Aldrin, the New Jersey native who stepped out on the Moon just after Armstrong, thinks we could get to the red planet in another 20 years if we put our minds and energy into it.
But there isn’t that kind of money in NASA’s budget, and at a time of economic recession when we're arguing over how to pay our medical bills, flights to Mars seem almost as fanciful now as they did pre-Apollo.
Meanwhile, technological advances — many of them spurred at least indirectly by the space program — have changed modern life in ways we did not imagine in 1969. We bounce signals off satellites in high orbit so a robot voice can tell us which street to turn on to get to the electronics store. There we can buy a hand-held device with more computing power than NASA mission control had for the Apollo missions.
Those black-and-white TV’s with antennas are now obsolete, replaced by digital high-definition screens on which we can watch . . . Well, a few of us saw last week’s lift off of Shuttle Endeavour, but we’re guessing a lot more people were watching SportsCenter.
The death of Walter Cronkite, for many of us the narrator of the lunar adventure -- which he later called "the most extraordinary story of our time" -- adds poignancy to today's anniversary.
Someday, assuredly, people will gaze at their LED screens (or whatever the latest version of television may be) and watch mankind take another giant leap into the future.
The question is whether it will happen in the lifetime of anyone who watched Armstrong’s one small step.
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