🎼The Eagle has landed, tell your children when
Time won’t drive us down to dust again!

For years I sang along to those words and felt them as they were intended: I believed that of all humanity’s ephemeral accomplishments, at least one would last. In one sense it’s still true. We did this thing, made a mark on another world that will almost surely outlast any monument on our own. Reached beyond our home to touch something outside the warm, nurturing blanket of atmosphere. Took our first tottering steps as a spacefaring species. Not once, but several times, to show it was no fluke.

“We” is not metaphorical, by the way. I was a baby on July 20, 1969, but my father was hard at work making it happen, one of hundreds of thousands. I grew up in a house full of space memorabilia. It is, in every sense, in my blood.

And then, the long retreat. From far beyond the blanket to barely past its outer edge. Not a collapse but a slow steady grinding down, an ill-maintained machine juddering toward its inevitable halt. The world in those brightly colored pamphlets and posters slipping from our grasp. Promises that always took too long or cost too much. Science and exploration transmuted, by a kind of reverse alchemy, to rich madmen’s ego games.

It’s been a long time since I believed that hopeful future was inevitable, and now I seriously wonder if it’s even possible. Scientifically possible, technically possible, economically possible—oh yes, it’s still all of those. Politically possible, there’s the rub. Socially possible. Possible by imagination and courage and will. Maybe not. Maybe 1969-1972 was a unique high point, one of those shining moments that will never come again. We all have those in our lives, and we learn to live with them.

The footprints are still there. Still I can look up at the sky and hope I’ll live long enough to see someone return.