ON THIS DAY – AT 11:22 A.M. ET:  On this day in 1969, a man walked on the Moon.  I recall putting our two-month-old daughter in front of our black-and-white TV just so she could say, later in life, that she'd seen the first Moon walk.

How blasé we've become about it all.  I don't hear the space program even referred to in American politics today.  No one seems to care.

In 1969, crowds would gather in Grand Central Terminal in New York to watch space events on a huge TV screen.  Today, I wonder if you'd get a foursome.  Young people don't seem aware that we even have a space program.  They certainly aren't aware of the vast technology that the space program developed, technology we use in our own lives.  Today's iPads have more computing power than the computers used in our 1960s space capsules.

Under Barack Obama, the head of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was told that "Muslim outreach" should be one of his main goals.  We depend today on Russian rockets to get us to the International Space Station.  Obama has not shown the slightest interest in the great spiritual adventure that defines the exploration of space.

We need to restore the dreams of the space program, to reignite the excitement we felt that day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon and announced a "giant leap for mankind."  We sometimes seem to have lost that spirit in this country, replaced by the heavy-handed lectures of pseudo-intellectuals.  I think that spirit is still there, waiting for a new leader to let it fly.

July 20, 2016