Thirty-nine years ago last Sunday America went to the moon, and nothing on Earth was supposed to be the same after that.
Last Sunday was a sunny day around here, and people were talking about gas prices and whether they could afford to drive maybe 400 miles to get the family on vacation this year. They were not – at least not anyone I heard – talking about getting to the moon.
Some guy on TV, as a kicker to a news feature on oil, mentioned with a shrug that next year, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon shot, there will probably be “a lot of remembrance going on.”
Probably. And they may even drag in Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin to help them remember – if those guys are still around. Right now all three original moon men are in their late seventies and the firm jawlines of 1969 have long gone to flesh.
I saw Buzz Aldrin a year or so ago standing in line at Midway Airport in Chicago to get on a plane. Yes, standing in line. He, who had played touch football on the moon 39 years ago, had written a book about his subsequent lapse into alcoholism and depression. A few people at the airport may have recognized him.
Collins is a retired NASA consultant, Armstrong is a cattle farmer. No human has stood on the moon since astronaut Eugene Cernan in 1972.
We are talking more about Mars now – which is a six-to-nine month flight from Earth. And although we have hit it with a spectacular robot probe carrying cameras, and we have managed to get a new toilet to the orbiting Space Station, NASA is running low on funds. Nobody really believed George Bush in early 2004 when he announced his new space exploration program. It was a two-day news cycle, with graphics. Cost estimate to get back to the moon and then Mars, roughly $120 billion. NASA’s current annual budget is $15 billion.
It was grand, though, wasn’t it? Reaching the moon.
I remember the final “space team” press conference before launch in the steamy heat of July at Cape Canaveral, which was Cape Kennedy in 1969. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin were safely tucked away in their germ-free quarters waiting for their early morning, germ-free van ride to the launch pad where the Saturn 5 rocket stood with Apollo 11 on top, like a 36-story skyscraper from Futureland.
The astronauts had given brief media interviews in which they finally passed beyond technobabble to express themselves as truly unafraid. This, after all, was what we needed to know from these jut-jawed young men who were so strenuously outward bound.
The final briefing was given by the technical team, the men wearing spectacles who ran things and seemed so marvelously schooled in the language of their “data” but at the same time so helpless to relate their knowledge to human experience.
In the midst of them sat Wernher von Braun, the dread miracle rocket-maker of Peenemunda, who knew how to relate things to human experience.
An earnest young man from the Reader’s Digest with the proper amount of soul for 36 million circulation asked, “What experience of mankind would you equate with this?”
Von Braun hardly hesitated. This was a man who had made himself familiar with apocalypse.
“I equate it with the first sign of aquatic life on Earth, crawling out on land from the sea,” he said.
It did not seem at the time too wild a surmise.
Anyone under 45 will have trouble understanding that vision. To them, the moon must seem a place where men may go, but nobody much does because the airfare is expensive and actually it’s rather dull. The Mars probe turned up on the evening news as an insert between coverage of the presidential campaign and dismay at the mortgage fall-out.
We have turned inward. Even the “greens”, whose impetus in the 70’s may well have come from the pictures the astronauts brought back of the vulnerable, green Earth as seen from the moon, are against spending more for exploring space.
And then there was Challenger. And then Columbia. Afterward even the journalists who yearned to take a space ride (I was one) felt a growing ambivalence toward the manned space program.
And somewhere in the lunar dust, undisturbed by wind or weather, is that first footprint. A reminder, if future generations should chance by, of the commitment to the universe made by a more believing race.

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Dorothy Storck is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer