A remarkable piece of history died

I wasn’t even born and my husband was almost four years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969. It was an amazing achievement by a group of people who had an entire country’s support, urged on by a President, John F. Kennedy, who set the goal in his famous speech 8 years before.

Living in the days of Curiosity landing on Mars, instantly sending back pictures from the Martian surface, we can hardly imagine what it was like in the days of analog technology. Our bicycles contain more science than their capsule.

As we learned last Winter at Cape Canaveral, there was less computing power in the Apollo 11 landing craft than we have in today’s digital calculators. But they made it work nonetheless.

I sincerely hope we don’t turn our back on this kind of achievement by cutting technology budgets and scaling back our dreams. There needs to be room for a next generation of people like Neil who are the first to step foot on Mars or other things we can’t even imagine yet.

A remarkable piece of history died with Neil Armstrong today. We should put his memorial plaque on a distant planet.