At the moment of this post’s publication, in 1969, human beings began walking on the surface of the moon, for the first time — and they came home safely. That’s a pretty damn remarkable achievement, and one still worth celebrating today.*
Recall that between the U.S. and Soviet space programs, eighteen people have died while on manned spaceflight missions. It takes cojones to strap yourself to a thirty-six story tall explosive device and ride it literally off the planet. It takes a lot of smarts, from a lot of people, to get you back home to tell your friends about what it was like.
Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, Charles Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt are the men who walked on the moon. But let’s send a special callout to Michael Collins, Richard Gordon Jr., Stuart Roosa, Alfred Worden, Thomas Mattingly II, and Ronald Evans, who risked their lives all the same as their colleagues, but stayed up in the modules while other guys got all the glory.
All receive this blog’s Big Brass Ones Award.
* But which we may not use as an excuse to rest upon those laurels. Today and tomorrow bring new challenges. Do we need to go back to the moon? Maybe not. But we do need to not turn our eyes and aspirations away from the heavens — the future is up there.
What about Tom Hanks? Hell he went to the moon twice, it’s just that neither mission landed.
Also, while his actual first name IS Thomas, he is generally known as Ken Mattingly, or Lt. Dan.