Editor's letter: The pull of outer space

last updated 8 January 2015

Amid all our earthly concerns, people still long for outer space. A consortium of techheads wealthy enough to indulge that yearning this week announced long-range plans to use robots to prospect for precious metals on near-Earth asteroids (Business: News at a glance). But as Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in The last word, NASA has pretty much abandoned manned spaceflight, and it’s manned spaceflight that most helps the human race “commune with the cosmos.” His lament called to mind my own boyhood fascination with the first moon landing, sparked by a family connection. For months before Apollo 11’s launch, my father, an engineer, had been telling us about his work on electroluminescence, making flat sheets of thin-film semiconductors light up with an eerie glow. The only reason he was talking about it, and the only reason my brothers and I were listening, is that electroluminescent panels were going to illuminate the Lunar Module’s instrument panel. Enthralled, I felt a visceral tie to mankind’s greatest act of exploration.

When landing day arrived on July 20, 1969, we were on our annual camping vacation, deep in the Appalachians, but we’d brought along our portable black-and-white television set. We found a plug for it in a campground men’s room made of cinder blocks, and hoisted the set up under the building’s open eaves to improve reception. It didn’t help much; we imagined more than saw the ghostly shapes of Aldrin and Armstrong bounding across the surface of the moon, with “our” Lunar Module in the background. But that was enough to awaken a sense of wonder and cosmic communion that still brings me up short when I remember it. When will we feel that way again?