Apollo 11

It's one of those moments: if you were there, you'll never forget where you were. Forty years ago two American astronauts landed on the moon.

I was 18, not quite two months out of high school. I had to leave for work at 5:30 on Monday morning, but my parents and sister and I stayed glued to the TV in our living room, watching the final approach on Sunday afternoon, the landing and finally Neil Armstrong's first steps a little after 11:00 pm. I stayed up until well after midnight Sunday night, watching Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounce around on the moon. In those days there was a lot of empty time to fill (it was a nearly seven hours after the landing before Armstrong came out of the lander) and reporters like Walter Cronkite kept us up to date and entertained and informed.

I followed the space program from the beginning. When I was in the second grade, I watched - on a tiny black and white TV - the launch of Alan Shepherd's tiny Mercury capsule ("you didn't so much get into it as you put it on") for a little 15-minute hop. Then we waited while the Navy searched for his capsule, a teeny speck floating in the Atlantic, and then pulled him safely on board a helicopter.

I was home sick the day NASA launched John Glenn into orbit. If I hadn't been sick, I might have missed that launch. As it turned out, I saw every manned launch through Mercury, Gemini and the Apollo program. Yes, I saw the launch of Apollo 13. I was in college then. We only had a few TV's on campus (no cable TV in every dorm room, in fact no cable TV at all!) and it was harder to keep up. But we did. We waited with the rest of the world for the astronauts return.

The space program was in a way a diversion, a distraction, from the horrors - on both sides of the Pacific [how ironic is that] of the Vietnam war. But at the same time it was a reminder of the awesome power of the human spirit, of what we can accomplish when we work together. It was a reminder of our apparently insatiable need to explore, to find out what's out there, to go there, even if the motivation is as simple as greed (money is why Columbus sailed west after all).

For those of you too young to have seen the Apollo 11 landing, you'll have your unforgettable moments. I'm glad this is one of mine.