An early, but still vivid, formative memory of mine was watching the noisy, black & white video of the Apollo 11 mission. It was partly responsible for my enduring sense of awe and possibility, and probably the moment I knew I had to be a scientist or engineer.
Our world is going to hell in many ways, to be sure, but we're going to the moon again today, and I can't help but get excited about that.
The space program was inseparable from the cold war that gave birth to it, but it also transcended it. It was, by design or not, about far more than rockets or space. It was about inspiration and imagination.
For a generation of a certain kind of nerdy kid, there was *nothing* cooler than space, rockets, exploration. For many of us, the feeling stuck.
i remember the early apollo missions on TV and being blown away at the idea that someone so far from earth could send video/audio to my TV. surely getting from that to a star trek universe was doable, maybe even in my lifetime. after all, my grandparents had gone from the wright brothers to manned spaceflight in their lifetime.
NASA hasn't been perfect but there's still a bit of that science magic in space exploration.
Matt Blaze
Paul_IPv6
Norman Wilson