One Small Step For Man: NASA Space Center, Houston
September 7th, 2021
Why do we look at the stars? Why are we universally gripped with wonder by specks on black? No difference occurs from age, gender, race, beliefs and background, or what moment in history we were destined to be born into. Lines of ancestors gazed with the same gaping mouths, at the same celestial mysteries, long before we could touch meteors and Mars rocks in the air-conditioned comfort of NASA’s space center. Long before we even knew the twinkling lights in the sky were stars.
But we did know something; and we know it now: we know in our hearts and souls and minds that there is more. There is something beyond our understanding, beyond our limited senses and knowledge. The men and women who gazed at the sky without telescopes to enhance their vision could feel it in their core that the stars were more than pretty spots to decorate the heavens. And they were right.
What else do we know? What else do we feel in our gut that the world claims is crazy? That science cannot back up—yet?
I believe we will see, in our lifetimes, the things we thought were science fiction stories. Our children will marvel at how we were alive when their present reality was not, just as I’ve wondered about our grandparents witnessing the first commercial airplane.
And what will they, my children and theirs, drop their jaws at? What will inspire them to awe and wonder? What will feel too incredible to be real as they look up at the stars and say, “How small am I!”
We are one speck, one star, in the unending span of human and cosmic history. A blip, powerful and forgotten and theorized about long after. And yet, each one of us, like a grain of sand from the vastness of the ocean’s floor, can create a pearl, can change the entire future of our species, can make one giant leap for mankind.
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