The legacy of that ‘giant leap’

Forty years ago this week, National Guardsmen patrolled the riotous streets of South Side Youngstown. The Vietnam War was at its zenith, as was divisive and sometimes violent opposition to it across America.

Amid such division, despair and discombobulation, Ohioan Neil Armstrong’s “small step for man and giant leap for mankind” onto the lunar surface July 20 united Americans with a sense of awe, pride and achievement. To this day, the Apollo 11 remains among the most monumental adventures of exploration in world history.

Today, 40 years later, Americans unite anew to proudly remember the Eagle’s landing and Armstrong’s first footsteps on the lunar surface. The landing climaxed the dream of President John F. Kennedy, who on May 25, 1961, challenged the nation’s greatest minds to land an American on the moon before the end of the decade.

America did it and won the fierce space race against the Soviet Union. With its success and the much less ballyhooed successes of manned spaceflights afterward, NASA has enriched our culture with a variety of innovations — everything from technology for personal computers to products such as wireless headsets, freeze-dried food, cordless vacuum cleaners and bicycle helmets.

Then and now

Flash forward: Today, like July 1969, America is a nation divided over a wealth of issues ranging from our war on terrorism to our game plan for battling economic recession. Amid such down-to-earth controversies, some argue that a return to the moon would represent a waste of critical resources.

Even Apollo 11 crew member Buzz Aldrin concedes an exclusively U.S. trek to the moon is a dead end: “The moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things. And replaying the glory days of Apollo will not advance the cause of American space leadership or inspire the support and enthusiasm of the public and the next generation of space explorers.”

Instead he urges international collaboration on 21st century moon flights and setting an American goal of establishing a colony on Mars.

Clearly debates will continue over the propriety and direction for the future of the U.S. space program. As they do, a more lasting lesson from the ’60s space race lingers: The value of harnessing the American can-do spirit to set clear unified, even lofty, goals, and then working aggressively and intelligently toward reaching them.

The ingredients that propelled America’s achievement in space can be used to conquer a whole new set of earthly issues. As in the ’60s, we need only marshal a collective will to do so. Therein lies perhaps the largest legacy of that historic mission to the Sea of Tranquility.