40 years ago, on July 20, 1969 American astronaut Neil Armstrong, Commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft made a historic first human landing on the moon. As the world watched the dramatic landing on TV, Neil Armstrong uttered words which marked the triumph of the US space program in the race to land a man on the moon. As he took his first step on the moon surface, Neil Armstrong described his historic first step as “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Altogether NASA successfully landed 12 men on the moon from 6 Apollo missions – Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. No other nation has ever succeeded in landing man on the moon. Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon took place in December 1972. This means that nobody has been to the moon for the last 35 years. And NASA is now preparing to put another man on the moon by 2020.
Some people questioned whether this was just one big hoax, that actually nobody ever landed on the moon. If NASA did land 6 Apollo missions on the moon, why does it have to wait until 2020 to land another man there? But it seems far fetched to believe that the US Government had told lies to the whole world. So we have to accept that American astronauts did in fact land on the moon 35-40 years ago.
Why did US astronauts willingly risk their lives going to the moon? The whole journey from earth to the moon and back is fraught with dangers. A direct hit from a meteorite could destroy the spacecraft! A malfunction (hardware or software) onboard the spacecraft (like in Apollo 13) could have easily sent the spacecraft deep into outer space, never to return to earth.
Perhaps the astronauts believe that exploring the heavens is like reaching for the last frontier. Man has reached the most remote parts of the earth, climbed the highest mountains, and explore the deepest depth of the oceans. So the last frontier is outer space. And there is that determination to reach it, to successfully land man on the moon as a stepping stone to venturing further out, hopefully a preclude to landing man on another planet like Mars one day.
Think about it. To reach outerspace, one must first be able to break free of the gravititional pull of the earth. What is your last frontier? What do you need to break free of before you can conquer your last frontier? Would that be one small step for you, or would it be a giant leap?
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