Editorial: Lessons from our first step on the moon
"The moon is not a god but a great rock" ― Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, 450 B.C.
"I feel sure that the surface of the moon is not perfectly smooth, free from inequalities and exactly spherical … but that, on the contrary, it is full of inequalities, uneven, full of hollows and protuberances" - Galileo Galilei, 1610
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade" - President John F. Kennedy, 1962
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong, 1969
Armstrong delivered his famous statement at 9:56 p.m. Chicago time on July 20, a Sunday, as he became the first person in all of human history to set foot on terrain other than our Earth.
The remarkable convergence of scientific, creative and technological knowledge remains a touchstone today, inspiring for the bravery of the three Apollo 11 astronauts and those before them as well as for the sense of purpose and marshaling of resources that accomplished a goal dreamed of long before President Kennedy put it into words.
Those old enough to remember the event tend to know exactly where they were, glued to a shadowy black-and-white broadcast - from the moon! - in a way that seemingly united the world's people even as the landing itself proclaimed American dominance. If you ask them, and we did, people will recount stories of keeping their kids awake to watch, of watching on screens set up at Disneyland, at a scout jamboree, on Times Square.
Among other enduring achievements, humans cured smallpox, mapped the genome, found the Higgs boson. Space travel became routine enough that the average person doesn't know when we've got someone in orbit (two Americans are there now). These new astronauts are a diverse group of genders, ethnicities and nationalities, something Apollo couldn't claim.
But still Apollo 11 stands out, for its sheer audacity and imagination.
What did we learn? We can do things that we have no idea how to do, by building on our scientific knowledge. We can rally, as Americans, around a single objective. We can fail, and fail again, and still reach our goal. Three airborne lunar landing training vehicles crashed. The hatch blew off early from a Mercury capsule in the Atlantic Ocean, nearly drowning astronaut Gus Grissom. He died years later in 1967 along with Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee in an explosion during a prelaunch test of Apollo 1.
The author and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote that with an Apollo landing, "the moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers - will have been taken from us forever."
He died in 1963, leaving us to wonder if he truly would have seen the moon as more prosaic now that men's' footprints are upon it. For many of us, reliving the events of 50 years ago, our earth's natural satellite is more magical than ever.