What's that up there?

Last week’s Blood Moon, officially known as a partial lunar eclipse was pretty cool, which oddly is officially known as, pretty cool. There is synchronicity to that isn’t there? 

To put the Blood Moon in its place, there weren’t any earth ending events, no werewolves or vampires, not even much howling by the coyotes. It seems that it is simply what it was, a partial lunar eclipse.

What’s interesting, and sad in some aspects, is it’s been 43 years since Apollo 17 made the last manned lunar landing.  A lot of people around today weren’t even born the last time that happened. Kind of like LP albums, dial phones, slide rules, the internet, manners (oops, that was some kind of a psychological slip), which have all disappeared.

Growing up the entire space program was an incredible story to see unfold, being a kid at the time made it all the more exciting. In 1961 President Kennedy made the commitment to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I’m sure most people thought he was crazy, but by the next year we had our first flight.

July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon!  Eight years from a speech to reality.  Here’s how cool the entire deal was. That summer I was at Camp Betz, Michigan, for Boy Scout summer camp. Bill Steiner, (we called him Mr. Steiner), rigged up some car batteries and who knows what else, to power a portable black and white TV so that we could watch the landing live.

 

There was a thrill in frequency of flights. Astronauts returning home were treated to ticker tape parades; 600 million watched the live landing. There was the tragedy of Apollo 1, which nearly derailed the entire space program. In spite of it and partially because of it, the Apollo program became even safer and better.

Apollo 13 is a true story and accurate movie. These guys did the nearly impossible, took a spacecraft that had exploded and got the astronauts home safe.

Next time you look up at the moon take a moment, we’ve been there.