July 20

Thirty-eight years ago, my father and I sat up well into the night watching a grainy black-and-white television picture. We wouldn't normally do that, but the picture was coming from the surface of the Moon, and it showed two men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on that surface, kicking up dust and walking oddly in the light lunar gravity. A big chunk of humanity held its breath at the landing a few hours before, and watched those first steps with us. Dad and I went to bed when Armstrong and Aldrin were "safely" back in the lunar module.

Given the power of the event and the power of mass communications in 1969, it's probably fair to say that for a few minutes that July 20, mankind was united in a way that no conqueror, no monarch, no prophet ever achieved. The promise of Apollo was not built upon, however. For various reasons, the American manned space program has been restricted to low Earth orbit for decades.

That situation might be about to change. The generation that stayed up into the night with its parents watching Neil and Buzz may be able to spend retirement following the construction of the first lunar base with its grandchildren. Many in that generation had dreamed of more, but establishing a sound foundation for future space projects, both public and private, would be quite a legacy.