The Nostalgic Trip Back to the Moon

We Baby Boomers had a childhood relationship with our orbiting neighbor

The news this month that a private company working with NASA had landed a craft on the moon for the first time in over fifty years created some interest and even a little excitement like back in the 1960s. Some of my most vivid memories of grade school were those days when our whole class was marched down to the “multi-purpose room” at Knickerbocker School in Watertown, New York to watch the Mercury astronauts blast off in their rockets for the first manned space flights by Americans. I remember the very first sub-orbital flight in 1961 when astronaut Alan Shepard was rocketed to the edge of space. We would watch on a black and white television set on a rolling cart. Often we would wait and then find out that the launch had been put on hold or even “scrubbed” for the day, to be tried again in the coming days.

Before long though we would hear the countdown, “T minus 10 seconds to blastoff” and the rockets roared and Shepard took off on Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961. Virgil “Gus” Grissom became the second American to go to the edge of space a few months later. It was even more exciting sixty two years ago this month, on February 20, 1962 when John Glenn became the first American to enter into earth orbit and circle the earth three times on that day in his Friendship 7 capsule. Americans were so euphoric that we heard on the local news that small towns like Glens Falls, New York changed their name to “Glenn’s Orbit” for the day. I remember hearing that residents in Perth, Australia kept their lights on so Glenn could see them as he approached Australia. Glenn went on to become a United States Senator from Ohio and in 1997 he returned on a spaceflight at age 77 to study the impact of space on an aging astronaut.

We would see many more launches in the Mercury program which was later followed by Gemini and Apollo by the time I was in high school. I was very excited about Apollo 8 which became the first spacecraft with astronauts to enter into a lunar orbit at Christmas time in 1968 as a test and prelude for Apollo 11 which landed with Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on July 20, 1969. It was an exciting moment that united the entire world watching on television sets in countries around the globe. Commentators wondered if the moon would still seem so romantic. They didn’t have to worry.

I was just 15 then. Now at 70 I am hoping to see another lunar landing in the next few years and maybe just live long enough to see humans land on Mars sometime by 2040 or sooner, almost 80 years since those days in grade school when it all began.