…I was a kid, one who desperately followed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs from the Redstone to the Saturn V. I snuck someone’s single-speed bicycle (I wasn’t allowed to have one of my own) and rode it across town and up the Queen Street Hill so I could get to a Gulf station and pick up some paper punch-out-and-fold LEMs. I mourned the crew of Apollo I when most of my friends couldn’t care less.

My family was vacationing at a campground in Lancaster County, and it rained for a few days (”those damned moon shots, that’s what messing up the weather!”), and there was a thirteen-year-old desperately begging to find a television, so my father decided to drive home and come back later to pick up the gear. We drove the hour or so with me hanging on every word coming out of the radio, silently willing the men so many miles away to hang on and wait until I got home.

They did. I watched, along with the rest of the world, as man touched another world. I marveled at the accomplishment of one man standing on the shoulders of thousands of others, and being lifted by the souls of three more. That evening, everything was possible. Even the race riots, which brought my city to the front page next to the flight of Apollo 11, stopped that night, the fires dying down, as the black-and-white video of two men hopping on truly foreign soil burned itself into our collective memory.

Over the next few years, I watched the imaginationless bureaucrats decide that our future really did have limits. I watched the possibilities of the 1960s turn into the destruction of the 1970s, and the soulless greed of the 1980s. Not since that night thirty-five years ago has everything been possible…not since that night has the human spirit been completely free.

For those who weren’t alive then, those who didn’t experience the limitless future of that magic night…I almost envy you. You don’t know the dissapointment of believing everything is possible, and then being shown it isn’t.