Happy New Year

Christmas Eve, 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders became the first men in history to orbit the moon. They saw the first “earth rise” from space and they read the  Biblical story of creation from Genesis, closing with Borman saying, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth."

Next year, July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, with the uttering the legendary, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." President Kennedy’s goal of landing men on the moon and bringing them home safely by the end of the decade had been achieved. I saw this live at Boy Scout Summer Camp, Camp Betz, on a portable black and white TV that our Scoutmaster had somehow ingeniously rigged up.

As a kid in those years I was fascinated with the space program, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Gathering around the color, yes color television to watch launches and splashdowns was an event to look forward to.

The bedroom that I shared with my brother had the moon maps and missions on the walls. I bought model kits of the different rockets, painstakingly and diligently painting and gluing them together. I must admit though, I wasn’t great at any type of model kits, except one.

 One year for either my birthday or Christmas someone gave me a model of the USS Constitution, complete with rigging. I’m not sure how it happened, but slowly and surely over quite a period of time I painted and completed it, and it was a work of art. Oddly in our move from Chicago to Phoenix it was one of the only things that got broken. Weird, isn’t it.

Being a fan of the space program also got me into flying model rockets, Estes model rockets. I’m pretty sure this had my parents a bit nervous, probably pretty much an equivalent to, “you’ll shoot your eye out kid.”

Estes rockets came in kits of different levels. You had to order the kit and specify what type of engine you wanted and of course there was the cool, electronically controlled launch pad. Those things would take off, well, like a rocket! A drawback was they went so high and fast it was pretty hard to actually follow them. A charge in the engine would blast the nosecone off and deploy the parachute, most of the time. Some rockets drifted gently back to earth, some nosedived and some, well I don’t know where they went, Dark side of the Moon?

I was reading the other day that China landed a rover on the far side of the moon. NASA shut down the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Currently Russia now has the only space program capable of manned space flight.

My grandmother and I were watching a space flight on television sometime back in the ‘60’s. I remember asking her what she thought about it, she looked over at me and said, “When I was a little girl we didn’t even have airplanes and I’m watching men on the moon.”

I’d like to see some men on the moon again.