Is there a final frontier?

Going to the edge

The cliches and banalities pouring out over Neil Armstrong's death have been quite amusing.  Very few of us think of what it really means to be an explorer.  What hope and fear did Columbus nurse in his breast as he stood on the bridge of the Santa Maria 520 years ago this month?  What shout of exhilaration did "Stout Cortez" unloose as he gazed upon the Pacific with his eagle eyes while his men looked at each other with "wild surmise"? What kept Lewis and Clark going as they forged westward into unfamiliar territory across a vast continent? Our planet would not have been as it is now, peopled and thriving across every latitude, if men of great courage had not taken their lives in their hands and stepped across the divide into new worlds.  All of us have been reminded repeatedly about Armstrong's first words as he set foot on the Moon's surface on July 20, 1969, but he never really let on how he felt, a 38-year-old test pilot who learned to fly before he learned to drive, when he calmly took over the controls of the moon-landing craft from Apollo 11 and steered it to a soft landing in a boulder-strewn landscape with just 25 seconds of fuel left in its tanks.  That was real courage, and that is what gets our chests puffed up as we share in the unspeakable elation of discovery.  Never mind, as I was reminded when I went around the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian, that the entire space race had been a rather silly and very expensive ego contest spawned by the Cold War.  What mattered was the wonderment that we could go where no man had gone before.  We need heroes very badly in the 21st Century, and we are sorely short of them.

Meanwhile, if you want to read a good obituary on Armstrong I recommend the Economist at http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/08/obituary.

Let me leave you with the first beautiful shot of Earthrise shot by William Anders from Apollo 8.  It shows how fragile our home is.