July 18, 2022
A Small Step for a Man, but Mankind Failed To Follow
Originally published August 26, 2012
image from NASA
In July 1969 I had just arrived back in the USA from two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya and 8 months of bumming around Africa, the Near East and Europe. At a friend's house in New Jersey I watched the launch of Apollo 11 and then while Neil, Buzz and Mike travelled to the Moon I boarded a Greyhound bus and rode up to Boston to visit another friend, Clark Chapman. Clark and I laid on his graduate student apartment floor and watched a small TV show the landing on the Moon and later the first human steps onto the lunar surface. Anyone more than about 50 years old probably remembers where they were on that historic day. That was a great day for America and a great day for the human race, but no human has been back there in 40 years. Our living connection with humanity's first and only exploration of another world was reduced by one on Saturday when Neil Armstrong died. I don't feel sorry for him - he had a unique experience in human history, his name has become immortal and his feat was perhaps the most audacious ever - the first person to step onto another world. I am sorry for his species and his nation that they could not follow in his courageous bootsteps in time for Neil to see that his efforts were not a deadend.
Chuck Wood
Request
As a surprise related to Apollo 17 there is a need for a picture of the Moon taken from Earth during the time Apollo 17 was there. If you have or know of such an image please contact Rick Kline - rick.kline@cornell.edu
Yesterday's LPOD: Orange And Blue Moon
Tomorrow's LPOD: As Time Marches On
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