A few weeks ago I got a chance to play with a friend's 150-500 mm zoom lens on my camera. To most mortals, that's gobbledygook. In English, it means it's a big honkin' lens - as long as my forearm and stronger than a decent set of binoculars.
It just happened to be a full moon, and one of the first things I did with it was clamp it down to my tripod and look for the man in the moon.
I was impressed. I finally figured out how TV shows like CSI Miami do the "big moon" effect. They use an even larger lens.
Even with this monstrous lens, there was one thing I was certain I could not see: there was no longer a man ON the moon. Nor had there been in my lifetime.
The passing of Neil Armstrong has been written or spoken about in pretty much every media known to man, from TV to Twitter. The big focus is it is the passing of an era, the end of the life of the media-shy test pilot who inspired millions when he set foot on the moon.
Many have noted how it was the passing of an era. But for me, that era had passed before I was even born 37 years ago. By 1975, NASA had long abandoned the Apollo program. They came, they saw, the left a few flags and batted a few golf balls. In the span of my entire life, they have not returned since.
And I'm not that young anymore, either.
Nor will they return any time soon, either. President George W. Bush alluded to it a while back, but that was quickly forgotten.
Perhaps the almost immediate disinterest in the Apollo program following the initial landing says something about our attention spans. Apollo couldn't compete in a three-TV network world. Now some people seem to think 140 characters is the height of human communication. A sound bite is too long, let alone something more serious like a moon landing.
It's been a weird reversal, really. Our attention spans are shorter, but aerospace innovation takes much longer. U.S. President John F. Kennedy spoke in 1961 about putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. They succeeded. The F-35 fighter plane, however, has been in development for two decades and still isn't operational. That plane will likely still be flying 35 years from now.
Coincidently, that's usually the time frame we hear about these days in relation to future space missions. It will take another 30 years to get to Mars. We've heard that one for 30 years, and we seem no closer.
We recently landed the aptly-named Curiosity rover on Mars. It's sending back some nice pictures. I'm just not sure that I can point to that bright light in the sky and say to my eight-year-old daughter or five year-old son, "See that? There's a rover on that!"
It doesn't have the same ring as "There's a man on that!"
At the current pace, my kids will be my age, or even much older, leaning over their kids looking through the telescope. Except by that time, it will be 70 years, or longer, since man has been on the moon, let alone Mars.
Armstrong, along with Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John W. Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt have set foot on the moon. The number is so few, I can name all of them and not even fill a paragraph.
I even met one at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Regina in 2011. Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, was on the last mission. He still wants us to go back and mine its resources.
I wish I could have introduced my kids to him, because it's unlikely in their lifetimes they will ever meet a man, or woman, who has walked on the moon ... or Mars. Those men are, quite literally a dying breed, and no one is going to be joining their ranks any time soon.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
