This is about a trip three men made into space, on a voyage to the moon. Maybe it is about more, but that is up to you.
Where I grew up in North Carolina, baseball was big. Not major or minor league, but high school and American Legion baseball. Rowan County had some of the best teams in the state in the late sixties and early seventies and games were always well-attended by enthusiastic crowds who focused on every aspect of the game.
I remember one game which was different. A game where people kept gazing upward...
That night my high school team was playing its best. But my mind and my eyes kept wandering upwards, up to the moon in the evening sky. I noticed others in the crowd, glancing up and then away, then up again, lingering longer and longer. All over the world, people were looking up. Three men were up there, fighting to survive in their crippled spaceship. It was April 1970 and the ship was Apollo 13.
Apollo 13 had suffered a massive explosion in an oxygen tank. The crew was forced to shut down most of its systems and live in the LEM while Mission Control worked out a plan to safely return them to Earth. While the world watched and prayed that no death would come to the men in the sky, the white-shirted nerds at NASA worked out a plan. And then the CO2 started to rise.
In a scenario out of a Robert Heinlein juvie, the rocket scientists jury-rigged a CO2 scrubber Rube Goldberg would have loved.And it worked . And Apollo 13 returned to Earth and death did not come in the sky.
It came from Washington. In September 1970, the last two planned Apollo flights were cancelled. We had reached our goal. We had beaten the Russians to the moon.The last men on the moon left on December 14,1972.
Only twelve men walked on the moon. A dozen men who've walked through the dust of an alien world, leaving their footprints behind. Only 9 still live. Only 9, all old men. Will your children see the last of them die?
Much talk is made of man's return to the moon. In a time of extraordinary economic and environmental crisis we ask if other things shouldn't be given a higher priority. Shouldn't problems of starvation, increasing poverty and environmental degradation be dealt with first? Can one country alone even attempt it?
There is no doubt that a return to deep space would require the efforts and sacrifices of an entire world. People will die. People who've never heard of a space race will die because the money went elsewhere.
Perhaps as the song says
men weren't meant to ride with clouds between their knees
Perhaps the human species was meant to live its life at the bottom of Earth's gravity well, trapped upon its rim.
Or perhaps not. The footsteps are still there. And maybe someday we'll sing a silly song again on the plains of distant Selene
Sing on our way to the stars.