For Apollo 8--the first flight to orbit the moon--I was in Spain. My father was lecturing for a week in England, and took us along; after the week in England, we spent another week driving through Spain and Portugal for vacation. I would have rather been at home, sitting in front of the television, so I could catch every instant of news. Instead, I was puzzling out Spanish headlines in 48 point type and getting a foreigner's eye of the space program: the Spanish, at least, were very enthusiastic. In 1968, my room at home was wallpapered with newspaper cuttings; every day I poured over the newspaper to find even the smallest filler article even vaguely related to space, to clip it out and tape it to my wall. For 1968, at least, some of these were in Spanish.
For Apollo 9 and 10, at least, I was home. I remember watching Apollo 10's transmission of television pictures from lunar orbit in the early hours of the morning, sitting on the floor two feet from the television as the surface of the moon glided by in silence, with the occasional burst of static-filled transmission from the astronauts. The moon had suddenly become a place, rugged and enigmatic, with harsh and unforgiving sunlight lighting an endless expanse of cratered plain.
I was just about to enter high-school. My family had just moved, six months back, and the few tentative friends I'd made were slotted off to a different high-school. Instead of friends, I was reading about a book a day of science fiction, indiscriminately, and in my attic workshop I was building model rockets. That spring I'd just finished a large model of the Saturn 1B, which I lost to a tree on its first flight, now I was working on a design for a rocket-boosted glider.
Apollo 11 I spent at the television, trying to memorize every detail of the mission, flipping to another channel every time there was a commercial. There was, oddly, no drama to it: I had memorized every operation; could picture the astronauts struggling and contorting as they put on space-suits in the tiny cabin of the Lunar Module, knew exactly how much space there was between the hatch and the backpack of the space-suit (about three inches) as Neil Armstrong backed out through the opening and into the vacuum, knew how far he would have to jump from the end of the ladder down to the footpad, knew how the camera was attached to the panel on the descent stage and was ready to stand on my head to watch, because the first pictures would be upside-down.
I thought it would change everything. I never thought that Nixon would cancel the space program, that Spiro T. Agnew would propose a flight to Mars and be denied, that after the first few Apollo flights to the moon that Americans would become bored with watching what was, after all, no more than two men bundled up in bulky overalls bouncing awkwardly across an uninteresting gray landscape. The last three Apollo missions were canceled, the already-built Saturn-V rockets left to rust outside the visitor's centers in Houston and Florida. The Apollo Applications Project became Skylab, the first step toward a space station, and then the space station that was to fly after it, in the early 1970's, was itself canceled.
In retrospect, I suppose it was obvious.
I went on to MIT, which had huge wind-tunnels and a model-rocket society; I majored in model rockets, minored in science fiction, and with what time remained between the one and the other, studied physics and electrical engineering. The space program went on to learn the lesson that success inevitably leads to budget cuts. When I got out there was an energy crisis, and the space program had redefined itself to being a program to build infrastructure, instead of to accomplish goals.
Apollo was history, and history belongs to the past.
But the moon has changed. It will never again be just a dappled light in the sky, but a place. Nothing will change that. We can go there; we did it once, and we have not forgotten. It waits for us, silent, empty; a hostile and forbidding place, perhaps, but a place. We know that, now, and our horizons have changed. Nothing will be the same.