Moonwalkers

Forty years ago tomorrow, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins rode an elevator to a tiny room about 400 feet in the air, resting on top of six million pounds of rocket fuel and a few hundred thousand pounds of rocket. At a little past 9:30 AM local time, five engines at the bottom of that rocket fired and kicked them up into the sky with about seven and a half million pounds of force.

For three days, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins headed towards our nearest neighbor in space, the moon. Forty years ago Sunday, Collins tapped on the brakes and eased the combined command and lunar modules into their parking space circling the moon. Forty years ago Monday, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into their lunar module and started down towards the surface. Just after 4 PM eastern time that afternoon they landed and, to borrow a phrase a guy writing about spaceships first used a few years earlier, went where no man had gone before. For the first time in human history, there were people living and breathing and about to walk around someplace other than Earth.

Aldrin, an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church in Webster, TX, took communion prepared for him by his pastor. Sunday, July 19, those worshiping at Webster Presbyterian can take communion using that chalice as they can every year on the Sunday that falls nearest July 20th. At about 11 PM eastern time, Neil Armstrong left the lunar module and put human footprints on a world where none had ever been, and where only eleven more to date have followed. Nine of this dozen still live; the youngest, Charles Duke of Apollo 16, is seventy-four. NASA's current plan has us back on the moon by 2020, at which time he will be 85 if still living. His fellow Apollo 16 crewmember John Young, the oldest surviving man who walked on the moon, will be 90. Eugene Cernan, who followed Harrison Schmitt up the ladder of Apollo 17 to become the "last" man on the moon, will be 86.

In Carrollton, MO, a four-year-old boy was awakened and watched the event with his parents and grandmother in her living room, on the small oval black-and-white screen set inside a huge cabinet. Although his current profession has been called "sky pilot" more than once, he remains merely a major space nerd and is not the astronaut he had at times said he would be. Armstong's step remains one of his earliest memories.

Aldrin followed Armstrong out the door a few minutes later. They spent several hours collecting samples and deploying experiments. The actual "moonwalk" they developed in the moon's one-sixth gravity is a kangaroo-like hop-skip and does not involve any backward motion.

After a seven-hour rest in their spacecraft, Aldrin and Armstrong fired their motor and returned to the orbiting ship piloted by Collins. Forty years ago a week from Friday -- July 24 -- the three splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Complaints about the cost of the Apollo program would begin worrying at it not long after. Those small of vision, who could never understand that the human horizon was not meant to be within arm's reach, would win and barely three and a half years after the first human walked on the moon, the last would.

A visit to the National Air and Space Museum to see the command module or to Cape Kennedy to see some of the Apollo-era equipment can make any modern techno-buff scratch his or her head in wonder. Today's laptops alone make the forty-year-old computers that sent humanity on its longest journey ever look like stone knives and bearskins. State-of-the-art machinery of the time is eclipsed by an old VHS machine gathering dust on a closet shelf, let alone what is available today. Advances in fuel technology, construction and a host of other fields mean smaller rockets do more work. Few of the designers of that time might have imagined the space technology used today by NASA itself or in general.

But they went. And we can't, or won't. I'm not sure which is worse.