Thread by @Beregond

50 years ago a few minutes from now we first landed on the moon. I was four weeks shy of my 15th birthday. To my parents it was a miracle. But unless we make an effort to learn, history always begins when we are born. I hadn't really learned yet, so I expected the moon landing.

The night before my maternal grandfather died he and my dad took me outside to see "the American Sputnik." We didn't have a commonly-used word for satellites yet, so we had adopted the name of the first one. I suspect that may have worried some who understood the power of words.

Anyway, I was about three and a half, and it (and grandpa dying the next night) are among my earliest clear memories. So to me, we had ALWAYS been in space. The moon was the next step.

Well, in retrospect it wasn't the logical next step, it was the proverbial "giant leap." Because we leapt right over the logical step, a permanent space station that would serve as a construction and launch site for further exploration. But I didn't learn this till later.

I was 8 years old when I heard JFK's moon speech. I never doubted that it would happen. After all, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES said we were going to do it. If THE PRESIDENT said it, it must be so.
(Yeah, I learned better about stuff like that later too.)

In our elementary classroom we had a giant progress chart that we updated each week to show how close to Mars the Mariner mission had gotten. And my personal space fever got hotter once I discovered science fiction.

So while I watched our actual progress, my mind wandered a universe where we had long ago succeeded and mankind faced unimaginable wonders, horrors, and dangers that they had to improvise solutions to fix.

(As a side note, Apollo 13 would have made GREAT Space Opera. Well, almost- It needed a female astronette with a chest that strained at her space suit, but reality doesn't always live up to our teenage fantasies.)

One of my prized possessions was a GAF View Master. It had slides taken from a slightly different view that, when you inserted the reel into the View Master, gave a 3D image.

And my most prized set was 3 reels that GAF had made using models showing the entire lunar mission. So I had not only been told by THE PRESIDENT that we were going to the moon, I had SEEN it already.

Once we actually DID land on the moon that set made with models pretty much vanished from circulation, because there was now a set using actual pictures from the moon.

So we (yes, there were actual people, but in our imaginations we were there too) spent 22 hours on the moon. We could hardly go to the bathroom without being called back to the TV by my excited parents. "Look, Tommy! TV FROM THE MOON!!"

So the heroes returned, and news of what we had learned almost stopped because nobody knew if there was some alien space bug that had been waiting a million years for us to land on the moon so it could come to earth and kill us all.

Eventually, the quarantine ended and the really interesting stuff about the samples started coming out. Mostly you had to search for it, because science is slow and not nearly as dramatic as TV FROM THE MOON.

There was a price for making the moon landing as a Giant Leap. Once we'd done it a few times it seemed ordinary, and coverage dwindled. The Luddites and the Useful Idiots started in on their chant about "All that money for a few rocks." The final missions were cancelled.

As the late G. Harry Stine (who wrote about technology as well as science fiction) noted more than once, once you're in low earth orbit you're halfway to anywhere. The hard part is getting out of the gravity well.

So we'd been to the moon, and there was no obvious next step, as Mars was beyond our reach without a stepping stone. Yeah, we had Skylab, but it was just that, a laboratory, not a real home in space, or a construction shack.

Eventually we sent up the ISS, which some (including me) called the Incredibly Shrinking Station (I THINK Jerry Pournelle coined that but I'm not sure) because plans kept being downsized and farmed out to other nations.

But as far as manned exploration, we just STOPPED. I don't think anyone saw that coming. I grew up expecting to retire to a lunar colony where the lower gravity would take less of a toll on my aging bones and weakening heart. It ain't gonna happen.

I'll die a groundhog. And if we put all of our eggs in the NASA basket it won't happen for later generations either. The Space Launch System (called the "Never Launch System" by cynics) has kept experiencing delays. It's a NASA jobs project.

NASA is so desperate to keep the SLS and Orion Crew Module jobs that they'll do ANYTHING - Even promise to send a woman to the moon - to keep it going.

I'm convinced that the future lies in private space ventures. The challenges that they solve will have unimaginable spinoffs that nobody can predict, just as nobody expected that going to the moon would give us non-stick cookware.

I could go on with the rant, but I'm not here to pee on the celebration. We did something great fifty years ago, even if we did it the wrong way for the wrong reasons. The Dream is still alive. /end