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One Giant Leap

This is a documentary I saw last night on TV about the successful Apollo Moon Landing program in the Sixties. As someone who lived through that decade just at the start  of his adult live and career, the film brought back living history. That decade  was turbulent not at allpeaceful. In the US alone, there were tragedies of racial violence and murder;Presidential assassination; triumphs  of civil rights and immigration  legislation; and the Vietnam war. But one shining example was the commitment of  President Kennedy who on 5/28/1961 challenged the nation to landing a man on  the moon and bringing him safely home before 12/31/1969. At that time he and everyone else really did not know whether or not this feat can be done. But he did it as a part of the Cold War with the USSR who at that timewas leading in the space race.

I still remember on the evening of July 20, 1969, at 20:18 (46 years ago) waking up my sonand daughter to watch the historical moment when Armstrong first set his feeton the moon surface. That surely was one shining moment for the US in that turbulent decade. Years later when in a conversation with Dr. Song Jian, the then science advisor to the Chinese government, he told me that he was in a remote base in XingJiang being protected from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution  then raging in China.While there was no relationship whatsoever between the US and China at thattime, even he heard that the US has just landed a person on the moon. It certainlywas a historical moment for human civilization.