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Friday, July 17, 2009

We Choose The Moon

I can hardly believe that it's been 40 years since my parents called us into the living room to huddle around the black and white console television to watch Neil Armstrong step on the lunar surface. I had just turned 8 years old and was not thrilled about watching anything on TV that wasn't cartoons but now I'm glad Mom forced me. I remember Mom and Dad being awestruck and saying things like, "Wow..." and "Hard to believe..." as the fuzzy events unfolded on the screen. Kids today would never sit through the poor reception and garbled audio that recorded this historic event ("Does that come in HD??") but considering the fact that these moving pictures came from THE FREAKING MOON - 240,000 miles away - it was pretty amazing. But those were amazing times here in Space City when space travel became so commonplace that only 5% of the population cared and very few people watched the events leading up to putting man on the moon. Since my uncle worked for NASA as an aeronautics engineer, our family followed closely the folks who were my uncle's neighbors, co-workers and friends. Mom dutifully collected mission patches, stamps, first-day covers and other paraphernalia associated with the lunar missions. Later, I would go to Hawaii with my uncle as he worked on Apollo 15 and I even boarded the USS Okinawa, the aircraft carrier which recovered the actual command module after it splashed down in the Pacific. Today, kids (under age 40) don't seem to care much about the risks these people took with very limited technology, by our standards, in order to broaden human knowledge. They take it for granted that cell phones can reach out to a person on the other side of the planet in less time than it takes to write down their name on paper. Technology has definitely spoiled us. Sadly, it's also numbed us to the wonders of things never before seen by human eyes. Is it possible for kids to be amazed anymore by anything? For those of you who still remember what it's like to say, "Wow..." and "Hard to believe..." go to We Choose The Moon to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Lunar Landing and experience a really cool interactive site. It "launched" July 16, the realtime anniversary of Apollo 11's launch and follows the mission hour by hour exactly as it happened. You can listen to audio from astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as they communicate with mission control in Houston and also visit a link to hear President John F. Kennedy's famous speech (made at Rice University here in Houston in 1962) about why we chose to go to the moon (paraphrased), "...not because it's easy but because it's hard." I wonder if kids can relate to that sentiment nowadays.

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