Fly me to the Moon

Been there. Done that.

That’s the way I look at the Artemis II moon orbit that the United States launched last week.

Oh, it’s exciting for the astronauts on the 10-day lunar fly-by mission, and for people younger than 60 years old. But for the Boomers like me, we’ve seen all this before. Six decades ago.

This Artemis adventure is a warmup to a lunar landing scheduled for 2028. But we already did this, almost 57 years ago. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to step foot on the moon with Armstrong’s famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The landing of Apollo 11 was fulfillment of the promise made by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 when he said America would send a man to the moon and return him safely within the decade. The U.S. made good on his promise. In fact, between 1969 and 1972, a dozen Americans walked on the moon in six different missions.

I remember that first moon landing well. It’s one of those dates in history etched in the memories of people who witnessed it. There was great excitement across the nation and the world when Apollo 11 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, with Armstrong, Aldrin and commander Michael Collins, who piloted the spacecraft while the others made history.

I was a 19-year-old projectionist at the Corral Drive-In Theatre on a warm Sunday evening, July 20, when the lunar module Eagle plopped down on the Sea of Tranquility. Almost every TV set in the nation was tuned to the grainy black and white images beamed from 238,855 miles away. But there were a few folks who came to the movies that night instead. Del Farrell, owner of the theatre, brought a little portable black and white TV to watch in the concession stand, and during the night the movie-goers would wander in to check on the progress. I ran in and out of the projection booth to follow the excitement on TV.

After completing the historic mission, Apollo 11 splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii on the following Friday, to the joy of people around the world. The Russians might not have been happy. They were engaged in a space race with us rival Americans, and seeing us beat them to the moon must have been a bitter pill for the Russians to swallow.

You think there are skeptics today? In 1969 there were more than a few people who thought the moon landing was a hoax, that it was staged in a Hollywood movie studio or out in the Arizona desert. These skeptics would have had a field day if they had Facebook and podcasts to push their crazy doubts.

We accomplished this feat with the aid of computers that would be considered crude by today’s standards. Today’s iPhone probably has exponentially more power than what was onboard that lunar spacecraft six decades ago.

We haven’t been back to the moon in 54 years. Some people wondered if what we gained was worth all the money we spent. And there were tragedies during the space program — notably Apollo 1 in 1967 and space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 where all aboard died — that dampened our thirst for outer space adventure. The Soviet Union also lost three cosmonauts in 1971.

All this attention on going back to the moon is prelude to a trip to Mars. It sounds noble, and if we didn’t have so many pressing problems here on Earth, I’d be all for it. But I’m not sure now is the right time. Today we can’t even sail an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. Until we can figure that out, blasting humans out 140 million miles seems a little beyond our reach.