Posted by:
summer
(
)
Date: July 20, 2019 04:21PM
Fifty years ago today, I was an excited 12-year-old sitting in front of our family's black and white TV. Within less than a decade, we did what we said we were going to do. We put humans on the moon.
Today C-Span replayed the two and a half hour CBS coverage of the first moon walk. The famed Walter Cronkite was the announcer. A few things stuck out to me -- first, the *extremely* detailed directions that Neil Armstrong gave to Buzz Aldrin as he came down the ladder of the lunar module. Neil had somehow figured it out, but he wasn't taking any chances with his friend. Second, there was the extreme caution of the astronauts as they first started to move around, trying to find their center of gravity. Then, within a half hour, they were starting to gently bound around. Eventually they were bounding with the glee of children. Neil tried a kangaroo hop for good measure.
One of the astronauts gave a very detailed description of a space rock in the mid-distance. "It's about 15 inches long, and 6 inches high, angled up on its side." Never has a rather ordinary rock been described so lovingly. They struggled to describe the color of the soil, settling on "greyish cocoa." The flight surgeon in Houston noted that they amount of energy both astronauts were expending was in line with projections, reminding me that absolutely everything had been thought through ahead of time, and nothing had been left to chance.
As that entranced twelve year old, I remember looking up at the moon the next couple of nights, and thinking, humans are on the moon's surface right now. I never saw the moon in quite the same way again.
It was a glorious time. I tell my young students that they will see humans walking on Mars one day -- and that if they are so inclined, they might possibly be one of those humans. I hope that they embrace that journey with the same sense of wonder and zest that we did, fifty years ago.