The Urge to Explore

This article highlights that life, which crawled out of the sea eons ago, would now climb out of the white cloud-capped ocean of air, cling to a barren lunar rock, and then fall back to Earth. For one brief moment, we would be creatures of the cosmic ocean. The moon landing will be seen, a thousand years hence, as the signature of our century. It stands with the cathedrals and pyramids among those epic social feats that embody the spirit of an age. They are the dreams of the child in man. With all great leaps, there is something gained and something lost. The price of the telephone was a loss of privacy; the airplane diminished the sense of travel. Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age. Thus it is humans, not machines, who must finally go into space, to wander far worlds and meet once more the dread unknowns, the dry-mouthed fears of the old explorers.