Star Lites by Bill Ellis
Thursday, July 24, 1969
Fantastic! That’s the best word we can come up with to describe our nation’s successful moon voyage of the past week.
Although the landing had been programmed for several months, and we, like most Americans probably were not as shocked as were residents of other places on the globe, it was still almost unbelievable.
The fact that you could sit at home and watch a television picture of the first step ever taken onto the moon was in itself quite a technological accomplishment.
In fact, as we have heard other people comment, we were about as impressed with the fact that they could sent television pictures and instant radio communication back to earth from the moon’s surface as we were with the tremendous accomplishment of landing on the moon, making the maneuvers and blasting off again.
And yet, we were not surprised that it would happen, either. From our early years in school when we studied about the moon and planets, we’ve thought it was a foregone conclusion that man would explore space.
Undoubtedly, Russia’s launching of the first Sputnik in 1957 hastened the events of the past week to a great extent. Had that not happened, the first moon landing probably would not have happened until the 1970s.
It is a big prestige booster for the United States, and proves that if the country had lagged behind Russia at all in regard to science, that the situation has been reversed, and that the USA is once again the world’s peer.
