50 years ago today began the culmination of the greatest adventure that has occurred in my lifetime. Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center on the first ever attempt to land men on the moon.
I still get emotional thinking about this and about the landing 4 days later. With my early years of growing up in the 1960s, the space program was a huge part of my young life. It flowed out into popular culture in TV shows and movies, and was part of our science education. While we have subsequently been so saturated with movies of space travel it seems fairly mundane, but then it was the stuff of fantasy and imagination. I remember as a kid, you could write to NASA and get free posters and pictures, and each step towards the attempt was extremely exciting. The entire atmosphere around the space program, and science and technology in general, played no small part in my eventually going into science and engineering, although by the time I finally got out of school the space program had settled into a much lower profile activity. I was recently talking to a younger friend of mine who was born much after the moon landing, and they can’t relate to what it was like.
I think there is no more beautiful rocket launching than the Saturn V. I don’t know if that’s just because of what it represented, but I think there is a beautiful aesthetic to the design and paint job, and the way it took off slowly was just amazing. As a kid I built and flew Estes rockets, and I still have my model Saturn V sitting on my dresser. A couple of years ago during a trip to Florida, I was able to visit Kennedy Space Center, and I when I got to the complex built around the Saturn V and the Apollo program, I found it very emotional to see, and I stayed there a long time.
The anniversary of the moon landing is just a few days off. It would be nice if something like that could capture the national psyche again.