Ted writes:

> > Kevin writes:

> > I was 4, and I remember it.  I remember looking around and seeing all of
>  > the faces of my family looking so intensely at the TV screen.  That
>  > struck me, and I remember thinking that this was something that I was
>  > going to remember for a long time.  Little did I know the real
>  > importance of the event.... hey, at 4, anything is possible, so why not
>  > land on the moon?
>
>  :-).  Funny thing, I don't remember it at all, being but a few months old
at
>  the time.  What was that someone was saying about the HP3000 community
>  being "greying"?

Give it time, son :-).

I was 24 at the time of Apollo 11's launch -- and was nearly 100% certain
that I personally was going to make it to the Moon.

I believed then that I was exactly the right age for the next round of trips
to the Moon. The next set of trips weren't going to the test pilot-type
trips. They were going to be the scientific exploration of the Moon, in the
same manner as was being done in Antarctica, then and now, and they were
going to use a lot of scientist-types.

Both Valerie, my wife, and I applied to be astronauts in 1976, after we had
both finished graduate school. I made the first round selection, but was
eliminated on the second. However, that wasn't uncommon. Many of the people
who eventually became astronauts had to apply several times.

We applied in the same group as Shannon Lucid, the gray-haired lady
biochemist (and grandmother) who now holds the American record for time in
space after her recent stay on Mir. Valerie knew Shannon from previous
contacts at biochemistry meetings, but she was a lot younger then :-).

By 1978, when the second round of selections were being made, it had become
clear how much the space program had collapsed. We never applied again. It
seemed time to go on and do something else. If I remember correctly, Shannon
waited nearly 20 years to fly. Actually, I'm pleased that we didn't pursue it
after the first round.

As Eugene Cernan likes to say often nowadays, he could never have imagined in
his wildest dreams that he would have been the Last Man on the Moon. Almost
no one in the late 1960's/early 1970's, when we were going to the Moon every
six months, could have imagined the rapid and near total collapse of the
space program.

And now it appears that it's going to be another 20 years at least before we
go back to the Moon -- and I'm more than certain now that I'll never make it.

Wirt Atmar