THE SALIENT TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT OF HUMAN HISTORY

by Bob Walsh

Fifty years ago the United States put three men into a container the size of a small mini-van, hooked it to the top of a big-ass roman candle and shot them to the moon. They got there. Two guys went down to the surface in an even smaller vehicle, took some selfies, picked up some souviners, and went back up to the mini-van. They then flew back to earth and made it back to more or less where they intended to land, alive. They did all this with the navigational assistance of a computer with less oomph than the one in my 2000 Saturn.

I remember it best in a sort-of round-about manner. I was talking with my dad's mother about it a month or so after the fact and she waxed poetic a bit. She remembered when the Indian wars were still a topic of casual conversation by first-person participants. She knew civil war veterans. She remembered the arrival of the first motor car in Omaha. She remembered all of the talk about the Wright Brothers first flight and how the general consensus of opinion at the time was that it was a hoax. She remembered the Great War (and the Spanish Flu that accompanied it) and Armistice Day. She remembered Pearl Harbor, the Atom Bomb and V. J. Day. She remembered the start of commercial radio broadcasting, followed by talking movies and still later by television. And she lived to see men walk on the moon. She considered herself to be very, very lucky. I think she was probably right.