I was one of millions of children who stayed up late on July 20, 1969, to see Neil Armstrong become the first man to walk on the moon. My family sat in our darkened apartment on a sofa and on the floor to watch the great moment on TV.
We felt we were part of history, which we were, and we recorded the “giant leap for mankind” by taking photos of the grainy black and white coverage on our small screen using a pre-digital camera loaded with film.
Seeing this epochal event as it happened was a thrill. But looking back from the vantage point of 2026 is also an elegiac experience. One feels the loss of what was carelessly thrown away five decades ago and has been missing ever since.
Only three years after the moon landing, we as a nation decided the thrill had gone from manned space flight, and the Apollo program was ended prematurely in 1972. America settled into the gloomy 1970s, began half a century of earthbound introspection, and embarked on decades of political carping and deprecation of our nation’s global leadership.
There have been many manifestations of national retreat and self-doubt. In space, it meant we contented ourselves with looking outward with telescopes and with sending unmanned probes into the distant darkness to beam back pictures. But we never again got up and went there.
Never, that is, until now. Suddenly, however, we can feel the uplifting wonder of space exploration again, and we are determined to undertake it. NASA’s Artemis II, named for the Greek goddess of the moon and of the hunt, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday, with four astronauts aboard.
They are now circling Earth in high orbit, readying themselves to be sent in a slingshot across a quarter of a million miles to the moon. They will not land there and tread footprints into the lunar dust — that will be for a mission three years hence — but will use the craft’s momentum to shoot past the moon farther than any human has ever been from Earth. Then they will be looped back by the moon’s gravitational pull for another slingshot journey across space to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego.
Much has changed since the halcyon days of Apollo. It will, for example, not be the Russians whom we race to the moon this time, but the Chinese. And the dead gray surface of the moon will not be the finish line. It will become merely a launch pad and a gas station where we can fuel up using hydrogen and oxygen unlocked from the moon’s polar icecaps. From there, future missions will take us onward.
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Farther planets and corners of space beckon us to venture out optimistically from the blue sphere that is the only home our species has known. For too long, we have become timidly risk-averse, guarding what we already have rather than seeking what is creative, fresh, and new. To do that again will be so good for our spirit. And it is about time.
This is what America should be doing. It is, indeed, what this nation is about. America once built its self-image on the frontier. It badly wants — that is to say, terribly needs — to do so again.