Apologies to the Beatles... ;)
It was 40 years ago today...at 9:32am EST...three humans set forth on a journey that would take them inconcieveably far from Mother Earth's cradle and land them on the moon....
Blasting, billowing, bursting forth
With the power of ten billion butterfly sneezes
Man with his flaming pyre
Has conquered the wayward breezes
Climbing to tranquility
Far above the cloud
Conceiving the heavens
Clear of misty shroud
Higher and higher
Now we've learned to play with fire
Go higher and higher and higher
Vast vision must improve our sight
Perhaps at last we'll see and end
To our homes endless blight
And the beginning of the free
Climb to tranquility
Finding its real worth
Conceiving the heavens
Florishing on earth
Higher and higher
Now we've learned to play with fire
Go higher and higher and higher
-Higher and Higher by the Moody Blues
Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin & Michael Collins - Apollo 11 crew
I was 10 and filled with awe and no small hope that in my lifetime, space flight would become a routine reality and not out of reach of the public. I'm not really sure where things went wrong and we (the world, not just the US) got off track, but I still hold out hope that we will eventually manage to lift ourselves free of the confines of earth and keep searching out new frontiers in space. I wish I could see that, but even if I don't live so long, I know others dream as I do and we will fly beyond this tiny blue marble into the depths of wonder and discovery.
And for a really cool, interactive "real time" log of the Apollo 11 mission, I highly recommend this site: http://wechoosethemoon.org/ It is currently running the entire mission from launch with the original CAPCOM recordings of all the ground and astronaut's communications playing out as the mission progresses.
KKat
Karma...a term that comprises the entire cycle of cause & effect... Kat...a supercilious quadrupedal pile of fur that doesn´t give a flying fig for Karma...
It sure seems like it was Yesterday Karma. I was 2 weeks away from being 7 years old and remember it like it was yesterday. I to thought we would have traveled much farther into the unknown by now but we seemed to have lost the dream and desire for space travel. I hope to live to see us travel to another planet but at the snails pace we are moving I'll be lucky to see us make it back to the moon. It's amazing how far we have advanced with technology over the last 40 years yet we have not made that jump in space travel to the farther planets that cirlce this Blue sphere we call our home "Planet Earth".
I wasn't born yet but I still have high respects to those involved and envy those who lived in those times. What it must have been like to wonder and attempt the unknown. Amazing isn't it? Depressing at the same time, it is like we got to the moon and gave up on the rest. Now we just send robots. What happened to the courage and the sense of adventure? We should be on Mars already and perhaps beyond. We have the technology and the people who want to go but nobody wants to send them, "It's too dangerous" they say. Well, so was going to the moon. So is crossing the street. O' well.
