From the Earth to the Moon

Scott Hardie | July 20, 2009
Today marks forty years since we first stepped foot on the Moon. What does the event mean to you?

Scott Hardie | July 21, 2009
I read a poll today that asked what humanity's greatest invention was. After a week of news commemorating the moon landing, not one person mentioned the space program. Some people said airplanes or computers. Others said fire or tools. Me, I say civilization. The moon landing is a pinnacle of human achievement, but it's the product of a much greater system that got us there.

We all daydream of wealth or power or talent (or sex), but the most profoundly gripping fantasy I have is to travel the cosmos. There are such incredible sights, and we have only begun to glimpse what's out there. If I could, I would write some kind of Google Earth-like program that let me soar to distant worlds and zoom in close on their surfaces, the closest I could get to taking the trip myself. But what would be the point of making it up? I may as well put Star Trek on if I want to see made-up worlds. I want so much to see what's really out there in the galaxy and beyond, and I want us to take that journey as a people. We talk about how much money is wasted on the space program that could be spent on education or health care or tax cuts, but do we ever actually spend it on those things when we slash the space program? Millenia from now, the United States will have long since ceased to exist, but Armstrong and Aldrin planting the American flag will be remembered.

Steve West | July 21, 2009
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth -
Put out my hand and touched the Face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.'s poem still stirs me as it did when I first heard it as a child. I watched the moon landing when I was a boy and it was the single moment in my life that inspired me to attempt great things. I'm not sure how much I actually accomplished but the memory of that moment still echoes.