"We choose to go to the moon"

I've always been a space nut. I love science fiction, cosmology, and everything in between. The very idea that it is 2009 and we have yet to send a manned mission to Mars is unfathomable to me. But that is where we stand with human space exploration today - still in our own orbit.

Ah, but there was a time. Forty years ago, the United States was being torn apart by an unpopular war, horrible race relations, political rebellion, and a string of assassinations which tore the life out the country. And yet - we went to the Moon amidst all that - honoring a dead president's pledge to do what seemed at the time to be all but impossible. The world stopped and watched in wonder as human beings walked on another world for the first time

We will return to manned space exploration. The period we are in - the period since 1972 when Apollo XVII left the Moon - will be seen as a pause in which our emphasis moved to more cost-effective, data-gathering rather than exploration. And we have accomplished wonders in that time - the most impressive being the Hubble Space Telescope which has taken us back - close to the beginning of time itself. But the time is nearing when it will no longer be enough to send cameras and robots - we will have to go ourselves once again.

Today, people in my age cohort will remember: the teacher wheeling the portable black and white television into the classroom during the Mercury and Gemini missions, the horrible explosion which destroyed Apollo I and killed three astronauts, and finally the ultimate triumph of the geeks with the short-sleeved white shirts, the skinny ties, and the Marlboros dangling from their lips as they hunched over their primitive computer terminals.

One cannot remember today without reflecting on the irony of Walter Cronkite's death at this time. That greatest of all television journalists was one of the space program's most steadfast advocates - and the eternal voice we hear in our minds as we recall the most significant technological achievement in the history of mankind.

So here's to all those who made that great event possible forty years ago. And here's to the day when we venture out again - as we surely must.