by Randy Wyles
At 10:56 p.m. EDT on July 20, 1969, the world watched in awe - Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface and into history with Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
 Like everyone else, I was glued to the TV. And, even though I was just a kid, I was fully aware that my uncle was fighting a war in Vietnam, that my dad was working to support a family while paying taxes so people who didn't work could eat - and that riots in the streets of America seemed to mark social changes that not everyone could agree on. But that night, watching a grainy picture and listening to choppy, static laden audio from the moon...the world was one. There was a feeling then, remember? A feeling that things were going to work out...that everyone was going to start getting along...that "better living through scientific advances" was no longer just a promise made at the futuristic HemisFair World's Fair we traveled to on a family vacation the previous summer. Instead, we were really on the verge of these things happening, because Neil Armstrong was on the moon. The world was speechless. I watched Walter Cronkite chuckle at himself when all he could say after Armstrong dropped onto the moon's surface was "Wow!" America had, once again, shown the world the way.
Suddenly everything was new, crisp and clear. The collection of NASA moon shot photos I bought on a class field trip to Houston during the following school year were bright, colorful (much better than that black and white blur from the moon on TV)...these were clear, crisp - the "high-def" of the day. And they featured real, smiling American heroes wearing spacesuits, seated in front of the flag. The "cool" pictures of those gray rocks were so vivid and they bhad come all the way from the moon.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anything that could, even remotely, be attached to the space program...was. The astronauts, who had always been childhood heroes to those of us who grew up in the 1960s, were now the "gold standard" for trading cards - the currency of kids at the time...and NO ONE gave up their "Neil Armstrong" photos.
 Years later, after I became a journalist, I interviewed some of the "moon walkers", though Armstrong pretty much kept to himself. I also had the privilege of sitting down on two different occasions to talk with Walter Cronkite; once, in a very small news conference setting in Austin with a few other journalists for a casual chat, the other for about half-an-hour when he was a guest on my talk show on KRLD Newsradio in Dallas. Then there were a few quick "Hey, how are you?" moments in the CBS News complex at several of the national political conventions.At the same time, I covered shuttle missions, sidebar spaceflight features and NASA events like a lot of other reporters...the hardest being January 1986 - the Challenger disaster.
It's forty-years later now and I see a different world entirely.
At 10:56 p.m. EDT on July 20, 2009, hardly anyone seemed to notice the 40th Anniversary of the first moon landing. Instead, CNN runs about 45-seconds of the footage of Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface, Fox News references a bad joke of Letterman's; how Obama wants to send a man back to the moon and he's thinking of making it Joe Biden, and CBS, the network most people were watching that night in 1969, is wrapping up an episode of CSI: Miami.
Meanwhile, the shuttle crew is working on a broken toilet...and the family of Walter Cronkite is planning his funeral for later in the week.
It's all such a pity; Cronkite, who really began disappointing me with his overt liberalism that started showing in the Vietnam era, is gone. For all of his faults as well as his skills as a journalist, "Uncle Walter" - as almost everyone in the business that knew him called him behind his back - was still the trusted voice of a nation - the conscience of the country. The space program, that we literally use to look up to as kids, has lost its way. Few people can even name an astronaut currently on active duty. In fact, the irony is that the most famous astronauts today might very well be Christa McAuliffe, a teacher turned astronaut and Lisa Nowak, an astronaut turned criminal.
I remember, some years back, chatting with a "moon walker" at a NASA event in Houston. He and I were standing off to the side, watching some of the younger shuttle astronauts giving impromptu media interviews during a "photo
 op". He swore me to secrecy with a chuckling "Don't tell anyone I said this", then told me, "You know, those are some bright young people there...sharp...ya' know what I mean? But they're just going round and round and round." He made several wide loops with his arm referring to the shuttle missions, then stopped as his finger pointed to a nearby picture of the moon, adding, "We went somewhere."I feel that way now. The country is just spinning in circles with no direction - certainly not from the White House or the Hill. They're all just going round and round and round...and the place we're all going ain't the moon.
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