{"id":10587,"date":"2019-07-20T06:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-07-20T10:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=10587"},"modified":"2019-07-20T04:10:43","modified_gmt":"2019-07-20T08:10:43","slug":"the-eagle-has-landed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=10587","title":{"rendered":"“The Eagle has landed”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The air will be thick today with I-remember-where-I-was reminisces, so I’ll just get mine out of the way up front: I was in the backseat of my grandparents’ car, parked on the side of the road next to a cornfield somewhere near Gladwin, Michigan, listening to the landing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

CapComm<\/strong>: We copy you down, Eagle. <\/p>\n

Armstrong<\/strong>: Houston, Tranquility Base here. <\/p>\n

Armstrong<\/strong>: The Eagle has landed. <\/p>\n

CapComm<\/strong>: Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot. <\/p>\n

Armstrong<\/strong>: Thank you. <\/p>\n

CapComm<\/strong>: You’re looking good here. <\/p>\n

Armstrong<\/strong>: Okay. We’re going to be busy for a minute. <\/p>\n

Aldrin<\/strong>: Master arm, on. Take care of the [static] I’ll get this [static] <\/p>\n

Aldrin<\/strong>: Very smooth touchdown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of my very earliest memories is space-related: Much of the neighborhood went outside and stood on a street-corner, looking skyward for a glimpse of Sputnik<\/em> as it transited overhead. One of the adult men bellowed something along the line of “If those Russians try anything, we’ll kick their ass,” and his wife shushed him.<\/p>\n

Dwight Eisenhower dismissed Sputnik<\/em> as a “football” and was unimpressed, but Americans didn’t like the thought of an insolently beeping football they could do nothing about passing overhead, and Eisenhower was forced to establish a space program; he wisely put it under civilian, not military, control. Just a couple of years later, of course, President Kennedy launched the race to the moon.<\/p>\n

I was part of the Sputnik<\/em> generation of schoolchildren, educated with a strong bias toward what, today, is called STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. I am grateful for that, though I no longer practice engineering; analytical habits of thought transfer easily to, and enrich, other interests.<\/p>\n

The challenge of going to the moon was vested with both romance and existential urgency, and meeting it was a triumph of science, engineering, logistics, and politics. That we are unable, today, even to dismiss a cheap demagogue and proto-fascist like The Donald is a pretty good indicator of how much America has changed in the last half-century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The air will be thick today with I-remember-where-I-was reminisces, so I’ll just get mine out of the way up front: I was in the backseat of my grandparents’ car, parked on the side of the road next to a cornfield … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10587"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10587"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10595,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10587\/revisions\/10595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}