People ask: Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever interviewed? They’re sometimes disappointed when I answer: John Glenn.
Usher or Ronald Reagan would be sexier picks, I suppose, but hear me out. John Glenn, who went on to become a centrist U.S. senator from Ohio, was the first American astronaut to orbit Earth. It happened in 1962, when I was 4 – back when the space race was still a sprint.
For those of us in the middle ranks of the baby-boom generation, space travel is part of the narrative of our childhoods. To this day, one of my favorite books is Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” about the first American astronauts, and one of my favorite movies is “Apollo 13” starring Tom Hanks.
I was 11 years old when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. American pride was palpable in the summer of 1969. Anything seemed possible. (I’d love to interview Armstrong – as would almost every other journalist – but at some point he realized he was a museum piece and placed himself under glass.)
Sitting in the backseat of a limo with Glenn one day in 1983, as he pondered a run for the presidency, is still one of my favorite memories. I imagined him coiled into his tiny Mercury capsule gliding around the Earth as fragile as an egg yolk.
To me, interviewing Glenn is comparable to interviewing Ferdinand Magellan 500 years ago. Both, after all, are famous for circling the Earth in ways that seemed almost mystical at the time. That every schoolkid still learns about Magellan in 2010 tells you all you need to know about Glenn.
A few weeks ago, I helped my 9-year-old son work on a school project. His assignment was to create a board game based on questions about outer space. We pulled out several books on space from the reference shelf of his bookcase, sat on the couch and began to dig out trivia questions.
Our favorite (he giggled every time we rehearsed it):
What was the first satellite called?
A. Sputnik.
B. Slurpy.
C. Slappy.
I realized while we were working on the project together that space is no longer a topic that excites most children. Heck, there are 40-year-old Americans who were not alive when Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon in 1969.
As we were working together on his school project, my son asked the obvious question:
“Dad, how come nobody ever went back to the moon?”
Well, son, as a nation, we lost the focus and will to execute long-term goals. Plus, not many voters live in space.
It’s sad that for 41 years we’ve been using the same yardstick for the peak of human achievement: “If we can put men on the moon, why can’t we …”
Well, let me finish the sentence the way it should logically have been finished in 1969: “… why can’t we go to Mars?”
I told my older son, with fingers crossed behind my back, that I fully expected his generation to be the first to set foot on the red planet.
Wait, too political. Let’s mix red and blue and call it the Purple Planet.
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