'We choose to go to the moon .... and that's the way it is'

It is a confluence of events that is ironic and bittersweet and unique -- this 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the death of Walter Cronkite. Sad that he's not here to commemorate the occasion, one that literally left him speechless.

Cronkite's reaction 40 years ago tonight as the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility was simultaneously the most and least eloquent of his esteemed career ... something along the lines of "Hoo, boy." And you have to love the way he then asked astronaut Wally Schirra, who was co-anchoring with him, to chime in and save his ass.

"You say something, Wally, I'm speechless."

I wish I'd been around to see it. If I could, I'd rearrange the threads of history so I'd have been born in 1952 instead of 1972. That way I'd have been 8 when Bill Mazeroski's homer beat the unbeatable Yankees in the 1960 World Series. And I've have been 17 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Of course, that also would have meant that I'd have graduated high school in 1970, right in time to get shipped off to Vietnam. But I do wish I'd been around to see the first lunar landing, to experience that summer of 1969 -- to be there when a truly simple world was transformed into one in which we could go to the moon.

The other day a co-worker told me he wasn't that impressed with the Apollo missions -- that it was all just a matter of mathematics -- that all you have to do is make the right calculations and point the spacecraft in the right direction. OK, but it's not really that simple. And it's especially not that simple when you're doing it with technology conceived 40 and 50 years ago. The average cell phone has more computing power than what NASA had at its disposal. They were still doing those calculations my co-worker was talking about with sliderules because there weren't any electronic devices smart enough to do them.

In 1961, when President Kennedy set the goal of reaching the moon by the end of 1969, NASA had just about 15 minutes of manned space flight to its credit. Yes, it was all a matter of mathematics and making the right calculations, but nobody really knew what the conditions would be like once we shot a spacecraft out there. We thought we knew, but we didn't know. Nobody knew that we could rendezvous and dock in space. We thought we could do it, but we didn't know. And nobody knew how to create a landing craft that would get the job done, that wouldn't weigh too much, that wouldn't get stuck up there and leave two men stranded on the moon for eternity.

In less than 10 years, we got it all figured out. We tested and tried and failed. We lost Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on the launch pad during a test that required them to do nothing more than lay on their backs in the command module for a few hours. But we didn't give up. We completed the mission. And it is the greatest achievement in human history.

If there is to be a lasting legacy from Apollo, this is it: This country can achieve whatever it wants if we put our minds and our efforts and our resources into it and we refuse to give up. The men who walked on the moon would have us use such resolve to go back there or to Mars, which apparently Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins talked to President Obama about today. As idealistic and romantic a notion as that is on this 40th anniversary of "one small step for man," there are far more pressing issues for us to address.

What if we put an Apollo-like level of resolve into ending the era of internal combustion engines? What if we decided to get off petroleum-based fuel in 10 years? What if we decided we were going to fix our dilapidated electrical grid and its endless miles of wires that can shut off power to the entire Eastern seaboard if the trees are overgrown in the wrong place in Ohio? What if we decided that everyone deserves to have health care without worrying about how much they're going to have to pay for it? What if we decided that in the wealthiest nation on earth it was no longer going to be acceptable for people to live on the streets? What if we decided -- as Rob Lowe's character Sam Seaborn in The West Wing once argued -- that "schools should be palaces?"

What if we could muster an Apollo program for even one of those things? How much better would our country be? The agonizing thing is that we know we can. Apollo taught us that. It took nearly a decade and an army of 400,000 people working in NASA and various private-sector firms across the country. But it happened. We did it once. Why can't we -- or won't we -- do it again? Yes, of course, this is rampant, childish idealism. But isn't that what Apollo was all about? And how can you avoid thinking that way when you look at the iconic images of that time -- two men standing on the moon, a quarter of a million miles away, the command module and the lunar module, floating in space, docking and flying home. We lived in a world where things had never been done. And then they were.

I just hope I'm around to see it when we decide to do something again.