Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey23545
I grew up in the shadow of history, about 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, during the birth of the space program. I hung on every launch, every tiny step we took, as we clawed our way up and out of the cosmic gravity well that was the planet of our origin.
The day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided their spindly little craft down to the surface of the moon, I was overwhelmed with an emotion that to this day I still can't name. I was positive that it wouldn't be but another 10 or 20 years before I would go through the same feelings of awe and wonderment when another astronaut left another set of footprints on the surface of Mars.
I didn't realize at that time we would begin to turn our back on the universe to dwell on the fantasy of having utopia on earth before we could spend money on the ancient urge to explore. Fifty years and trillions of dollars later, we have the same percentage of poor as when we started, and our space program has learned to settle for playing in the same stagnant bathwater known as low earth orbit for decades.
And in those same decades I came to the realization that those first steps on the lunar surface that had left me so breathless was not man clawing his way up from his origins - it was man clawing his way back to them...
|
Jebus Mikey, this reads like poetry.
Wow, just fantastic.