Remembering the space race with two words: Time flies

Time can play tricks on a person.
Anyone old enough to remember being excited about the United States sending men to the moon will be able to see what we mean.
A week ago in Beverly Hills, Calif., at the estate of a wealthy space enthusiast, some of the men who got to go to the moon gathered to mark an anniversary. It has been 30 years since the last U.S. lunar landing.
Thirty years seems like a long time.
Consider this: The entire era of lunar landings lasted just over a 10th of that time. Between June 1969 and December of 1972, Apollo missions 11 through 17 were launched and brought home. Apollo 13 had its trip cut short by an explosion on the way out, but just getting the three-man crew home safe was one of the most inspiring efforts NASA ever mounted.
All that was more than 30 years ago.
Further, consider this: Just 10 years elapsed from the day President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would be the first country to send a man to the moon to the last day of the last flight.
During a speech Sept. 12, 1962 at Rice University, Kennedy declared, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
Reasonable doubt
It was a bold prediction, and one that most of the world had reason to doubt. The Soviet Union had been the first nation to launch an artificial satellite, the first to put a man into space, the first to orbit the earth with a manned craft. In 1962, the best the United States could do in each of those space races was play catch-up. Russian cosmonauts had spent far more time in space than American astronauts.
Yet, though Kennedy did not live to see it, the United States did reach the moon before the decade ended. American astronauts landed with the words of Neil Armstrong: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." And the left three years later with the parting remarks of Gene Cernan: "We now leave as we once came, and God willing we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind."
We were never to return. And there are those who would argue that we left behind a golden age, a relatively brief moment in time when talent, focus, daring and optimism combined to give this nation a sense that it could do anything.
And speaking of how time flies, try to remember the last time you heard someone say: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we ..."