One small step for a man ...

After a giant leap on July 20, 1969, mankind has mostly stood pretty still, looking around and even backtracking.

(And yes, Neil Armstrong actually did say "one small step for a man," which makes vastly more sense in context. Armstrong is a pragmatic, in some ways enigmatic fellow, but he's no dummy, and fully appreciated the significance of the moment. Modern voice-analysis software has confirmed that his "a" was indeed spoken, although inaudible over the moon-to-earth radio link.)

The space shuttle has certainly added lots to our scientific knowledge. The space station was a great idea that's been only poorly realized for the most part. But even the most enthusiastic supporters of those programs must concede that nothing has remotely matched the drama and excitement and enthusiasm that attended the first moon landing.

I was about to start the sixth grade, and I can remember that day vividly. As I watched on television with my family, I was surrounded by plastic scale models of the Eagle and the Columbia and the Saturn V, and I could describe for you in detail every stage of the Apollo 11 mission. Those men, and their predecessors in the space program, were the heroes of my childhood. I was a Sputnik baby, born a month after the space race began in 1957, and I could name every Mercury astronaut, and every Gemini astronaut too.

I cried for days over Apollo One. I was in the midst of a jury trial when the Challenger blew up on January 28, 1986. I heard about it over my lunch break, as I was eating a stale tuna-fish sandwich at the courthouse while preparing my closing argument, and wondered if I could manage to hold down that lunch and get through the day. And I was blogging on the morning of February 1, 2003, when the shuttle Columbia was destroyed during re-entry. Each of those setbacks hurt. But it never once seemed to me that they were good reasons, or any reasons at all, to give up on manned exploration of space.

My own four kids, by contrast, have only the vaguest of appreciation for our astronauts of today — notwithstanding having grown up in "Space City USA," home of NASA and Mission Control, the city whose name was the first word spoken from the surface of the moon, the city where John Kennedy first announced (in a speech that still reads awfully well today) that we would go to the moon in that decade, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. My kids read a fair amount of science fiction. But to them, it's little different from reading fantasy. Dragons, trolls, faster-than-light spaceships — all sort of alike in the category of speculative fiction, something entertaining but not something to which they directly relate. My kids have never tediously assembled plastic models of the shuttle or the space station, not because they lack imagination, but because our society hasn't sufficiently challenged and tantalized their imagination with tangible, current adventures in space.

Sure, there are lots of other things for governments, including ours, to spend money on. There always will be. But what kind of penny-pinching, short-sighted fool has such a limited imagination that he can't see the opportunities, the destiny here? I have no patience with such people, and I cannot identify with them at all.

So I'm pretty gung-ho about the newly announced NASA plans for a permanent moon colony and its eventual role as a way-station to Mars and beyond. In my "topics" choice for this post, I've included "politics" along with "current affairs" — but this ain't about politics, and it's really not even about what's current. I don't have a category set up for blog posts about "really important stuff connected with the destiny of our race," but this is all about the future, and it's really, really important — not so much for me or my own kids, but for theirs and their grandkids and their grandkids' grandkids.