A Kid Again

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It's nearly time for my birthday. I'm an old lady. But over the past weekend, I was a kid again. I grew up in the 60s, the time of America's space exploration. The astronauts were heroes. We cried collectively over the tragedy of Apollo 1. We cheered when Apollo 8 circled the moon, and then again when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and an American walked on the moon. Things were so commonplace by 1970 that the notion of a problem was nowhere near our thoughts. Then came my tenth birthday, when we again celebrated: instead of a disaster, Apollo 13 safely returned to earth following a major problem. (You can watch the movie all you want, but living through that event was harrowing.) Going back to the moon rejuvenated the kid in me and those memories of the Apollo launches. Those were major news items then: all three (there were only three channels then) networks covered the launches, so you picked if you wanted Uncle Walter or Chet and David (Huntley and Brinkley) to talk about it. (We always went with Cronkite.) The excitement of the launch, the trip around the moon, and the concerns about re-entry into the earth's atmosphere and the splashdown brought it all back. It's good to be a kid again. God bless our astronauts. The NASA coverage of the Artemis II return (the entire thing):