Posted 4:58 PM by Gene

One must almost fake excitement at the thought of a new moon landing, or a voyage to Mars. The whole purpose of space exploration, some voice tells us, is to further man's grasp, but the notion of homo sapiens on the forever ascendant was pretty well shot to pieces long before Apollo, and the first moon landing, coming during The Great National Nervous Breakdown, smacked of anti-climax. I can recall watching it but did not find myself giddily screaming out of my skin like MOST TRUSTED. It should have been obvious even then that moon exploration was good for men hopping around aimlessly in spacesuits and playing golf in near-zero-G. We are told the moon is rich in energy in its soil, but then we are told there's a reason we must travel to Mars, at untold human and financial cost, and not just lives lost but possible virtual mental wards in tin cans. Some far distant future the race must explore the cosmos if it is to preserve itself, and then it may be little more than a galaxy-spanning energy pipeline, with vast fleets primed in the intergalactic art of self-preservation. God knows what kind of race will so propagate itself -- most likely an untenable combination of machine, electronics, fake flesh, and whatever is left of real human flesh, assuming what has become of the race doesn't immolate itself first. To say we can use space flight to dream is fatuous, as we can dream on earth, too, and it doesn't cost so much. I am no technoparanoiac but the mobocracy of the Web and whatever this thing is people will not call a depression are among the pernicious indirect results of the hypertechnology brought on by the space program. And yet, if nothing else, Apollo has a place for all time by making us realize the uniqueness of our experience, and the beauty of the orb we inhabit, in the glowing earthrise captured on Apollo 8 and the words of Frank Borman that all the idiots screamed in despair over. A footprint is mundane even on moon soil, but the Bible does begin with a beginning, and in this picture we see if ever we can see that not any old force created life, and the heavens.