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Once Upon a Time Man Walked Upon the Moon

July 21st - Forty-two years ago today Man first walked on the Moon, July 21, 1969. Possibly the most amazing human feat of the 20th century. It was the culmination of America's early space program, the Cold War era "space race", and fulfillment of the late President Kennedy's promise to "land a man on the moon by the end of the decade" and just 10 years after the space race began.

It was a giddy time. A time when people awakened in the dark early morning hours to watch live TV coverage of the rocket launches. They tuned-in to news reports to listen and see fuzzy updates from the astronauts beamed down from space. People marveled at the courage of the astronauts and the feats of engineering that launched them into space and eventually landed them on the moon.

A nation, and much of the world, had watched in amazement the day before, with the media repeating the words in headlines - "The Eagle has landed!" - as the Lunar Module settled onto the moon's surface with Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong and LM pilot Buzz Aldrin aboard. The next day, July 21st, the world held its breath as first Armstrong, and then Aldrin, climbed down the ladder from the Lunar Module and stepped onto the surface of the moon. Armstrong would proclaim - "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Armstrong and Aldrin would spend less than a day on the moon - 21 hours and 36 minutes total. During their stay they walked on the lunar surface (only within about 100 meters from the LM), performed experiments, and Armstrong teed-off with a golf ball and club he'd smuggled onboard. The two astronauts also left on the moon commemorative medallions bearing the names of the three Apollo 1 astronauts who lost their lives in a launch pad fire, and two Soviet cosmonauts who also died in accidents. They also left a 1 1/2 inch silicon disk containing micro miniaturized goodwill messages from 73 countries to whoever, or whatever, from outerspace might find it and read them.

More men would follow in later Apollo missions and walk, jump, and drive on the moon. The men on the moon had cool toys - their space suits and the golden glowing bubbles of their helmets, the backpacks and space booties. The Lunar Module was the coolest "camper trailer" ever, and of course the pièce de résistance - the Lunar Rover - was the absolute ultimate dune buggy!

This era of space exploration also brought many new materials and products to the public through its research and engineering such as smoke detectors, cordless power tools, many innovations that would spawn personal computing and the internet, and the hand-held video camera used by Armstrong and Aldrin to film their time on the moon.

While the parents of this era's kids had grown up with fictional space exploits like War of the Worlds and Buck Rogers, children now had real "spacemen" as hero's and idols. And in truth, the men, and later women, that were carefully selected and trained to become American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts did make excellent role models.

But as the rocket launches became common place and the moon landings ended, a bit of the excitement of the space program began to erode. The first shuttle launches, and their gliding landings, sparked renewed attention for a while. Unfortunately in 1986, one of the most anticipated shuttle launches was devastating for the crew, the nation, and cast a pall over the whole space program for several years. This launch of the Shuttle Challenger carried one of the first civilian crew members and teacher - Christa McAuliffe - the Challenger launch was watched with great expectations by millions of school children, only to see the shuttle careen wildly in the sky and break apart just a little over a minute after leaving the launchpad, resulting in the deaths of the entire crew.

The space program would ultimately recover from the Challenger disaster and resume shuttle flights almost three years later. However in 2003, 17 years after Challenger, the Shuttle Columbia would burn and disintegrate in the skies over Texas during its re-entry into earth's atmosphere due to damage sustained to its heat insulating tiles during launch. The past eight years of shuttle flights have slipped somewhat quietly past us with few spectacular events, none tragic, and with little media fanfare until the last couple flights.

Jump to July 21, 2011 - America's manned space program almost seems to be headed for retirement. On July 8th, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center launch pad to begin the shuttle program's 135th and final mission. Today on the 42nd anniversary of the first moon walk, according to NASA's website   the crew of Shuttle Atlantis is preparing for their re-entry and final landing back on earth. Closing this chapter in American space exploration. Atlantis' final launch was a success, and hopefully its landing today will be nothing short of a safe last glide down the landing strip for its crew.

NASA UPDATE : Space shuttle Atlantis touched down on the Shuttle Landing Facility's Runway 15 at 5:57 a.m. EDT on July 21. After 200 orbits around Earth and a journey of 5,284,862 miles, the landing at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida brought to a close 30 years of space shuttle flights.

Humans will still be in space, even some American astronauts, spending time at the International Space Station orbiting high above the earth. But for the foreseeable future, crew flights to the ISS will be solely upon Russian Soyez rockets and the supply flights will be unmanned, mostly upon the new Russian Progress space vehicle. While NASA and the US are not completely abandoning space, there will be significantly fewer American astronauts in space until 2015 at the earliest when NASA's 3rd party contracted services began taking astronauts to the space station.

By the way, "astronaut" means Star Sailor. Derived from the Greek words "astron" for star and "naute" for sailor. Similarly, a cosmonaut (spelled - kosmonavt in Latinized Russian) is a Cosmos or Universe Sailor from the Greek word "cosmos" for universe. Here's hoping that our astronauts will continue to sail through the stars and journey to other moons and planets.

Photos by: NASA