A milestone worth celebrating no matter what

If we were to believe scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke, we would have sent a man to Mars eight years ago and we'd be just a year away from exploring the moons of Jupiter.

But our cultural imagination of the future is often so much more expansive, not to mention optimistic, than our vision.

So it is that we find the national attention on this 40th anniversary of the Eagle's landing on the moon rooted firmly on terrestrial matters - the state of the housing industry, the volatile stock market, the fight for a state budget, the politics of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan ...

Indeed, President Bush's proposal in 2004 that the nation embark on a manned Mars mission barely registered in our consciousness before slipping quietly to the bottom of our priority list.

That's not to say that we've forgotten our dreams of space exploration, though. To the contrary, one of the best lessons of watching those grainy black and white images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin so repeatedly in recent days is the extent to which we have taken space for granted. Cell phones. Television. GPS. Radio. We use them all today with no more thought of the satellites they rely on or the men and women who pioneered them than people in 1969 gave to Alexander Graham Bell when they used the telephone or to Thomas Edison when they switched on the bedroom lights.

Heck, we have people building a work station in outer space even as this is being written but unless those people are our neighbors - like Lombard's Dan Tani who spent several months last year working on the international space station - we're no more likely to know their names or the specifics of their mission than we are to know the names and activities of people who operate the local water treatment plant.

We have not, of course, even begun to conquer space, but we are figuring out how to make use of it. And Armstrong's famous "giant leap" onto the surface of the moon was perhaps the defining moment in the early days of the space revolution.

"At the time we did those things, we didn't know whether history would consider them momentous, or go on to something else," Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, whose family operates a Lake County restaurant, told the Daily Herald's Bob McCoppin for our story on the moon mission.

You could say we went on to "something else," but there's no denying that so much of our ho-hum technology of the present owes its existence to the excitement and confidence generated by the successful moon mission in July 1969.

No doubt, when the time is right, we will head back out into the farther reaches of space. If Apollo 11 taught us anything, it was that we could accomplish whatever we set our minds to in outer space and that the frontier is so unimaginably vast that there will be plenty of missions to capture our attention for eons to come.

That's a lesson worth celebrating, no matter what we choose to explore next.