Neil Armstrong

Reading through the outpouring of memories online as people reacted to the news of Armstrong's death yesterday, I was struck by how every story was basically the same except for a few details: a family, co-workers, a group of strangers, all huddling around a black and white television, watching history together.

Even my eccentric family managed to follow the pattern. I watched the coverage of the landing by myself; I remember clearly how excited I was to hear "The Eagle has landed" and ran to tell my mother the astronauts were on the moon. But a few hours later, when Armstrong crawled out of the lunar module and took that astonishing first step on the moon, we were all there in the living room in San Francisco, watching history in black and white.

There are so many reasons it couldn't happen that way anymore. It wasn't just that most families only had one television then and so of course we all watched it together, and now most Americans have access to multiple screens much bigger and much smaller than anything we could have imagined in 1969. But sometimes I forget how impermanent television itself was then. If you missed seeing a show or a special event, you might have lost the opportunity forever. (Or so we thought; I'm not sure anyone's imagination extended to YouTube or the boxed DVD set then.) You might see a 15 second snippet of a real-life event on the evening news if it was important enough, but if you missed seeing the sitcom episode that everyone at school was talking about the next day you were just out of luck.

I'm not especially nostalgic about any of that. I tend to be more interested in books than in television but I would hate to give up the instant access to information I've grown accustomed to. I love the Internet. I love Amazon and Netflix. I love my Kindle and my MacBook.

But I do find myself a little sad at the thought that probably no human will return to the moon in my lifetime, and that although Curiosity is busy crawling around Mars even as I write this, there won't be any astronauts following in its wake. Reaching for the stars is too expensive when we've got wars and tax breaks we can waste money on here on Earth (and plenty of people said the moon program was a waste of money in 1969 as well). And I live in a country so suspicious of science that every single candidate for the Republican presidential nomination claimed not to believe in evolution. There won't be any programs on the scale of Apollo any time soon, maybe never again.

But the next time there's a full moon, find the Sea of Tranquillity -- it's the bottom half of what looks like a pair of sunglasses in the lower right quadrant -- and remember that there is still a flag there, bleached white by decades of sun, and footprints that no wind has blown away, and a plaque that says, Here Men From the Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.