One Giant Leap

Neil Armstrong passed away this weekend. There are plenty of biographical articles and tributes to him out there in cyberspace. My purpose is not to add to that collection, but rather to make a few personal observations.

I'm old enough to remember where I was and what I was doing on that long-ago night of July 20, 1969. I had just graduated high school a few months earlier and was running wild in that magical summer between high school and college. A friend already had his own apartment, so we all headed there for a moon landing party. The drama of that moment was of enough magnitude to grab the attention of a bunch of beer-sodden teenagers. We all gathered around an old tiny black and white TV and watched spellbound as the magic unfolded.

To put it in context, a mere eight years earlier President John F. Kennedy had challenged the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. This came in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which at that point had the lead in the space race.

America responded. We roared past the Russians and had a succession of moon landings, at one point even playing a little golf up there.

That was back when we celebrated our achievements, not apologized for them.

Now, a short 40+ years later, under a different president, times have changed.

Walking on the moon is now something that people used to do, in the distant past, like macramé, decoupage and the Hustle. (A moonwalk is just another dance step now, and an old one at that.) Before very long, there will be no one left alive who's walked any ground but the Earth's, and eventually the adventure that was Apollo 11 will fade out of personal human memory. There will just be the pictures, then, as we saw them in the summer of '69, ghostly and blurry, colorless and incomprehensible, an infant's glimpse of a new world.

The United States has abandoned the notion of manned space flight and, in an ironic twist of fate, ceded that domain to the Russians.

The Wall Street Journal notes that the International Space Station now depends solely on Russia, the historic rival to the U.S. in the space race. The U.S. and European Space Agency will depend on Russia’s Soyuz for a lift. In other words, Russia has a monopoly on manned space flight.

Adding injury to insult, that presidential decision meant the loss of jobs and specialized space expertise.

And turning right back around and adding insult to injury, the same president added 'Muslim outreach' to NASA's priorities.

The head of the NASA has said Barack Obama told him to make "reaching out to the Muslim world" one of the space agency's top priorities.

What has happened to this country? In the span of my adult life we've gone from walking on the moon and winning the cold war to a divided, pessimistic, discouraged country that at least to me exhibits all the characteristics of a once-mighty empire sliding inexorably into the twilight of its existence. We've taken a giant leap, all right, but it's a giant leap backwards.

Much as I'd like to, I can't blame it all on obama. He damn sure isn't helping, but he's not the only one at fault here.

Wiser people than me have asked how this came to be. If there's an answer out there, I'd love to hear it.

(Side note: obama commemorated Armstrong's passing by releasing a photo of himself gazing wistfully into the night sky. Further research reveled that it wasn't even one taken for the occasion, but a stock photo taken several months ago. Stay classy, barry...)