We Came in Peace...

It's hard to believe that it's now 46 years since Apollo 11's Neil

Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed down the Eagle's ladder the first earthlings to set foot on the Moon. As NASA notes, that was only 8 years after after Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard were the first men in outer space. It was an exciting time to be a boy growing up, watching adventures like this live on (our black-and-white) TV. I remember, too, the almost-unbearably loud rumble of Saturn V engines being tested at the nearby Rocketdyne facility.

At a conference not long after returning home, Armstrong called it their flight "a beginning of a new age" and Michael Collins, who orbited the Moon by himself in Columbia as his crewmates walked on the lunar surface, spoke of future journeys to Mars. Well, folks, that was in 1969. Who would have believed that in 2015, one would be hoping that NASA might next send astronauts near (but not onto) the Moon within another 8 years.