After thrilling to live television coverage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin leaving boot tracks in moon dust, I set up a telescope in the backyard and focused on the Sea of Tranquility, the vast plain where the Lunar Excursion Module "Eagle" was parked.
Did the moon look different after human arrival? It did. Luna seemed more "real," less science-fictional — a truly possible destination, like a distant mountain peak or an island on the horizon.
Apollo created a sense of national community; many were similarly touched. Given the relatively narrow range of national news media in the 1960s, particularly with only three major TV networks, we all saw the same stories at the same time. We were linked by a shared experience and a common store of information.
That summer I worked at an A&W drive-in, and the owner treated the staff to free burgers and malts in celebration of the lunar landing. Such gestures were typical and expected. In six decades we'd soared from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility, and also attained the goal set by John F. Kennedy, the murdered president of Camelot, who'd committed the nation in 1961 "to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."
The following year JFK had asserted that we'd undertake this challenge and other space missions "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Apollo 11 became the gold standard for human achievement. How many times have you heard (or uttered) the lamentation: "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't [insert unsolved problem here]?"
But was the moonshot a long shot, really?
The science, engineering and fortitude that propelled Apollo were magnificent. But in the context of human nature and history, it was easy to meet JFK's challenge because the manned space program tapped into one of the strongest of homo sapiens' traits, tribalism, and into one of our most refined skills, warfare. The "race" to the moon was as much a part of the conflict with the USSR as were the Korean and Vietnam wars — one more surrogate for the nuclear altercation that couldn't happen.
When the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite in October 1957, it was close kin to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and probably a greater threat. Space, said JFK, was a challenge "we intend to win."