#Apollo50

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

Exactly fifty years ago, the first two men were walking on the lunar surface.

It's been hard to wrap my head around. On my real-name blog, I said that the best way I can think of it is that, when I was born, the Apollo missions were as far in the past as my birth is today. Even so, that's difficult to imagine.

Neil Armstrong always considered the LM touchdown more important than his setting foot on the surface. It's a typical engineer's answer, and of course completely correct. Still, the image of human beings walking around up there truly shook the world. It's been too long, I think, since we've had such a positive world-shaking moment. I don't think space exploration is the only way to do that, but it has a powerful capacity to break through our manufactured normalcy fields and let us see ourselves clearly: as ingenious apes who, against all odds, managed to understand reality, conquer our planet, and turn our gaze outward.

I think the world would be a lot better if all of us could see ourselves that way more often. Hopefully, we'll get a lot more of those moments in the next fifty years of human spaceflight. I'll certainly be trying to make that possible.