Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time, a long time ago, someone stood up and said we should go to the Moon. And we did. People laboured, invented, and cobbled together whole new technologies in order to patch them all together into a tin can that would convey three people to our satellite, and back again. Never had 'there and back again' meant so much.

Mathematicians calculated, and checked over and over again, the orbits, flight paths, speeds, and countless variables involved in shooting a projectile in the right direction, while remembering that the start and end points of that path were themselves also moving. Computer systems were pioneered, radio telescopes co-opted, new engineering ideas were brought from the blue sky into concrete reality. It was an immense endeavour.

It's hard to believe that we ever did it. It's hard to believe that an American president was ever brave and bold enough to establish such a project. It's hard to believe that anything so unprecedented could come to fruition. Despite failure after failure, and the assassination of the man who started it all, the people of the planet Earth watched people walk on the Moon.

I wonder if they were thinking at the time about what would be next. Did they imagine that Mars would be next, and the rest of the Solar System, as we headed off into the future so brightly depicted in 'Star Trek'? Into a galaxy filled with hope and opportunity, coupled with a hefty dose of danger and courage? Did they consider that it might all fizzle out to due to a dearth of leadership and aspiration? No, in 1969, they probably thought the future was at hand.

What must it have been like, to watch the television pictures of those two men cautiously stepping down the rungs of the landing module, on to a different world? Could it happen again? If humanity's timeline truly is one of exploration, then it should be inevitable. In fact, we could be thought of as being in the position of 'explore or bust!'. There are whole new worlds out there, and new things that we could learn in the going.

It has been said, by me and probably others, that the great mysteries of our existence are utterly unanswerable, but that everything we will learn will be done in trying to reach those impossible peaks. We won't go to do it just by sitting around, watching terrible movies and reading trashy novels, or being glued to smart phones which are designed to fall apart after a few days.

Someone is going to have to reach, just like that president did. Someone is going to have to reach out for the stars.

O.