Thursday, July 24, 2025

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Only a few astronauts have actually walked on the moon. But our fictional heroes have traveled through space like no body’s business. Here’s Captain James T. Kirk from TV show, Star Trek. “Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” 

Quite different from what the real astronauts said when they walked on the surface of the moon on which no one had walked before. But each one of these utterances resonate with the same exhilaration for exploration.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” declared American astronaut Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969, when he put his left foot on the lunar surface. Stepping out of the Spaceship Apollo 11, he said, “(A) real moon’s surface outside our window… 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The landing was a very high risk. Walking, far less risky. Genuine exploration at a place where no other human had ever stepped before.”

Gene Cernan, on Apollo 17 in 1972 said, “Once I finally stepped on the moon, no matter what was to come of the next three days – or the rest of my life – nobody could take those steps from me. They will be there forever; however long forever is. The more nostalgic, perhaps, were the final steps. As I stepped on the ladder, I looked back at Earth in all its splendor – I call it sitting on God’s front porch, looking home – then down at my last footprint and realized, ‘Hey, I’m not coming this way again.’ It’s not like going to Grandma’s farm, like I did as a kid, and coming back next summer…”

Don’t these declarations give you goosebumps? They all had stepped out of their spaceships and just walked like we walk. But what was different was the place, the space, the ground on which they stepped. 

You too can travel to a place, a foreign country, where you have never been before and feel almost the same exhilaration as these astronauts did.