One Small Step

It feels like it was in another lifetime, not even mine but someone else’s. I can remember this kid with sandy blond hair that turned white in the summer sun. It was long before the drunken college parties, waking up in frat house that smelled of stale beer, urine and vomit. It was far removed from the miserable first marriage that should have driven him to drink but instead drove him to make and then lose a small fortune. It was long before the victories, defeats and compromises that he would call his life. He was a small kid sitting on the floor much too close to the TV. "That radiation will make you sterile if you’re not careful."

The kid is home from school sick, though his mother knew better. He's transfixed by what he’s seeing and hearing. Walter Cronkite is talking and nervously rubbing his hands. An Atlas rocket sits on the launch pad its silver skin frosted over white from the super-cold liquid oxygen inside it waiting to mix with kerosene. The kid’s seen this thing go up in a ball of flames on the news. A lot of our rockets did that then. The countdown moves along and then come the holds. Is this going to be like the last time? Then it starts up again this time reaching zero. Bright flame appears at the base of the rocket as its three engines ignite. And then it moves. Frost and ice fall off of the rocket as the Atlas with a small Mercury spacecraft perched atop moves upward ever faster. Spacecraft not capsule. It wasn’t until years later that the kid would learn why test pilots detested the word capsule. All the kid knew was this was a spacecraft. It was going up there. Up into the place only visited in his imagination. And then the word came. John Glenn was in orbit traveling at a speed beyond the comprehension of the kid’s grandfather. Friendship 7 was in the realm which had only ever been populated by science fiction spacemen. And the Russians.

Back then the world seemed so full of possibilities. Nuclear power would be the source of almost limitless energy. A giant wheeled space station would be the stepping off point to exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond. It all seemed to be so close to his grasp. His generation would be a spacefaring generation.

He’d seen his heroes risk death in launch after launch. He’d watched Werner Von Braun explain to Walt Disney the hardware we’d use to reach for the stars. The space stations, reusable space planes and powerful booster rockets that would make the Russian launchers look puny. He really believed that he would one day buy a ticket and walk on the Moon himself, looking back at that small blue orb a quarter million miles away.Now, like so much else, it feels like it was all just a cheat.

Thirty-five years ago today men first walked on the Moon. One small step for man. Since then mankind’s footsteps have been in retreat. We’ve been stuck in low earth orbit like a slow moving car in the passing lane with its left turn signal forever blinking. Not really going anyplace and not doing anything.

It will take about a billion dollars to get the three remaining space shuttles in shape to complete the construction of a space station that has been so scaled back from its original design that you have to wonder what it will do that we couldn’t do with Skylab 31 years ago.

Now a new vision is proposed that will send men outward into the solar system. All of this is supposed to take place at the same time that Social Security and Medicare will be ready to implode under the sheer weight of his generation, the baby boomers. Costs will be underestimated, programs will be underfunded, and the scale of the endeavor will be cut back piece by piece until we’re again left with nothing but a handful of empty promises and questions about what we’re doing there in the first place.

The kid, now middle aged, sits and wonders why 2001 wasn’t anything like 2001. But still, he has inside him that one singular shinning moment when he and all his generation stood and did look back, if only in spirit, on that little blue ball a quarter of a million miles away.

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