Over the moon

Fifty years ago, the U.S. landed men on the moon. It was summer on Earth, and I was taking a physics class at Lowell High School’s summer session.

The previous semester, I had been introduced to chemistry by a fabulous teacher at George Washington High School (Mr. Jones), and I, a lifelong avid reader and writer who thought I might one day become a photojournalist or author of the Great American Novel, suddenly found myself loving science. So I was spending my summer studying physics when Neil Armstrong took mankind’s first steps on the moon’s surface.

I was in a baking phase back then, so of course I made a celebratory cake and brought it to my physics class: a sheet cake decorated with a silver origami ball on toothpicks (representing the lunar module).

I also sent a self-addressed, stamped envelope to an address that promised that the stamp would be canceled on the USS Hornet, which would recover the Apollo 11 astronauts, on the day of the splashdown.

And of course, the “First Man on the Moon” stamp issued in honor of the event became one of those pesky bits of clutter that I could never quite bring myself to throw out in subsequent years. (Now I look at it and my first thought is “TEN CENTS???”)

Fifty years later, I recall the moon landing with nostalgia. Sure, there were probably other pressing social needs that could have benefited from the money funneled to the Apollo program. And I did not, in the end, become a scientist. But back then, if we’d had Twitter, and 21st-century vernacular, I probably would’ve tweeted: “Apollo 11 stan!!!”

(Coda: The current administration is talking about going back to the moon. This time around, my reaction is quite the opposite. For this anti-science administration to be touting space exploration seems like hypocrisy in the extreme, a cheap (actually tremendously expensive) attempt to boost a vile, tanking presidency by plugging into the stellar accomplishments of a past (Democratic-led) nation — a time when American really WAS great, not because it was perfect, but because it was striving to move in the direction of more inclusive civil rights, women’s rights, and declaring a war on poverty). If this administration would shift the money going to building a border wall, decorating the offices of unqualified cabinet members with expensive furniture, and funding all the golf trips as well as the international first-class travel of the president’s grown “children,” to fund a new space program, I’d be more open to it. Even then, I’d be more inclined to direct the money toward saving this environment. Maybe the Trump administration has realized that we’d better colonize other planets soon, since their disregard for science and destruction of government agencies established to protect the environment have accelerated us along the path of global warming catastrophe.)