<
If it is possible to be both 55 and a little kid all over again, NASA has achieved that miracle in me over the past week. The two enjoyable things I remember most vividly from my childhood are the desire to serve the Lord and wanting to be an astronaut. Most of my young library in those days was either books I got at church, or books about the Apollo missions to space and the moon.
As I got a bit older, I devoured the coverage of every shuttle mission. I cheered over the triumphs, and I wept bitterly over the Challenger disaster. But through it all, I was convinced that this program would continue to grow and progress and produce manned cities on the moon and beyond.
Of course, I also was certain that we would all be in flying cars by now, and look how that turned out.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, it would not take me much to believe that all of the moon landings were fake, designed to scare our enemies with our technological superiority. After all, a person would have to be a devout daily consumer of paint chips to actually trust the government, no matter which party is in charge at any given moment, and the 50-year gap of time is truly weird.