FOR ALL MANKIND

Milestones in space aren't what they used to be.

There are 13 people on the space station today, the most folks in Earth orbit at one time ever. A new milestone in space.

But 40 years ago two humans walked on the moon.

I watched the TV coverage that summer day, a full day of talking heads leading up to the actual landing.

My girlfriend and I visited her grandmother, who was transfixed by the TV. It was a great show, she said. But of course it isn't true because the moon is only this big, she said, holding her hands a basketball's width apart.

At one point Walter Cronkite was interviewing Arthur C. Clarke in Florida, and they brought in Robert A. Heinlein by satellite from California. Cronkite gradually dropped out of the conversation as these two great science fiction authors talked to each other. I don't remember what they talked about. The miracle was just that they were there, talking, on this amazing day.

Clarke had predicted communications satellites. And Heinlein wrote about the first men on the moon. And they each wrote about a future of space colonies on Mars and Ganymede, and humans who would take spaceships to the stars, even if it took several generations to get there.

The future isn't what it used to be. The average person alive today was nine years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounced around the moon. And a surprising percentage of Americans don't believe we really went there in the first place. After all, it's impossible. The moon is only this big.

What happened to my space colonies and starships? What happened to the Walt Disneys, Willey Lays and Werner Von Brauns who popularised the dream of human space travel? What happened to the science fiction greats who inspired us and the Communists who challenged us?

Today the science fiction genre has gone from hard science to sword and sorcery, outright fantasy and impossible space operas.

Today we have Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who promise to draw us together in ways we can't now imagine. We are turning inward. The new frontier is the human soul. We are gazing at our navels.
And today 13 people are orbiting our planet, a new milestone in space. But come on, they're 215 miles from Earth. That's the distance from Tulsa to Kansas City.

So maybe we're like the Vikings who discovered the New World and never followed up on it, leaving behind only bits of rotted ships and fading runes.

And maybe some future humans will populate the universe, and find on the moon a spidery bit of disintegrating spaceship and a plaque with runes that read, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July, 1969, A.D. We came in peace far all mankind."