The death of Michael Collins leave just one of the Apollo 11 crew still with us, Buzz Aldrin. It also brings to mind a question: Where were you on July 20, 1969?
At the time of the landing, I was with a singing group at a Muscular Dystrophy camp in upstate New York. We had gone there from Staten Island to entertain the campers and staff. While we were there, the camp loudspeakers were broadcasting the radio coverage of the landing.
When the performance was over, we loaded onto our bus for the several-hour trip home. Arriving at about 11 PM, a group of us went to the home of a member who lived near the drop-off point to watch the TV coverage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually walking on the moon....because we didn't want to split up to our own homes and miss it all.
Those of you who weren't alive or who were too young to remember 1969 have no idea what this all meant to us. We were sure it was the beginning of a grand future of space exploration. After all, the original run of Star Trek had ended only weeks before and it predicted that by the 1990s, we would have colonies on the moon and Mars. But Vietnam, Watergate, and so many other things got in the way...public interest and support for the space program waned. We had beaten the Russians to the moon--wasn't that the whole point?
The final Apollo mission came just three years later...and our space program came to be about satellites and occasional manned missions like SpaceLab. Nobody wanted to spend time and money on putting men on another planet. Didn't we have enough problems right here?
We've now kept the International Space Station manned continuously for more than 20 years and, thanks to private companies like SpaceX, plans for a return to the moon are on track.
It took but 60 years to go from the Wright Brothers to Apollo 11. Let's hope the span between Apollo 11 and a permanent presence on the moon isn't any longer than that.
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