Forty years on the moon

We're just two weeks away from the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and tv, magazines, radio and newspapers are starting to capitalize on it.

Don't get me wrong, July 20 1969 is one of the most profound moments in human history. Not only did we send two men to lunar the lunar surface for the first time, but we did it live on tv with over 600 million people watching.

The promise of the Apollo program inspired a generation of engineers, scientists and explorers to push beyond, to push further. Millions of people looked at the moon and KNEW that the space age was coming.

But after Apollo 11, people got bored, started changing the channel and didn't care anymore because the Russians couldn't match the US trick. And after Apollo 17, with it's moon buggy and three days of scientific discovery on the Moon, the whole program was shut down.

Instead of pushing out for the territories, like uber-engineers Von Braun and Korolev craved, the manned missions stayed in the suburbs of low earth orbit. The Eastern and Western space consortium's abandoned any plans of humans getting back to the moon or going out to Mars.

We now send robots out to the frontier.

Is this wrong? I don't know. Sure, it's astounding that people were on the moon. I get emotional when I watch all of the moon landings, and whenever I tune in to the launch of a Soyuz capsule or a shuttle, I go a little numb. I still have one of the many maps of the moon I drew when I was thirteen, and to this day I recite the lunar oceans to myself when I catch a glimpse of Luna in the early evening skies.

And my only true piece of lunar memorabilia is an autographed picture of Astronaut Jim Irwin, lunar module pilot for Apollo 15. Yes, Jim came back to Earth and became a raving evangelical who tried to find Noah's Ark, but if he hadn't, my preacher grandfather would have never gotten me this picture.

But, manned missions are expensive, and with the last thirty years being dominated by that flying brick of a compromise, the space shuttle, it's easy to see why manned space went away. The best science has been gathered by the science robots - Viking, Voyager, Hubble, Cassini and the hero rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to name a few. And with every robotic mission, we learn how to build better automated explorers. The future of space is robotic.

Even with the new space ports being developed, Virgin Galactic getting ready to take off, and India, China and Japan stepping up their programs, it will be a long time until people are in space in a big way. NASA is scaling back even further, with Obama looking at a restructuring of the organization. And although Russia is now the premier launcher of people and product into space, Baikonur Cosmodrome is still a rough Cold War settlement in Kazakhstan.

Still, I hope every day that eventually we'll go to space for more than a few days on the lunar surface of a half-year lock-up on the space station. To homestead on a foreign surface or settle down in hard vacuum is still a dream. It could still happen.

Until then I'll hold on to my moon maps and astronaut signatures, and look up at the oceans of the moon.