Russia’s recent disaster of a moon landing has prompted some curiously divided feelings in me.
On the one hand, I’m super excited by the recent surge of moon missions. I was a young child in the mid-70s, when the Apollo moon landings were still ringing like a cultural bell; our elementary-school library was stocked with books about space and NASA’s moon landing, which I read and reread until the pages damn near fell out. I was thus a hardcore space nerd early on.
Some kids dreamed of going to the stars; I, being claustrophobic and terrified of flying even in a terrestrial plane, did not. But the idea of humanity reaching out to the inky void held a deep romance for me. When the Voyager probes began sending back the first ever close-up images of Jupiter, I stared with a wild surmise for hours at the pictures in National Geographic, wondering about the eldritch forces that roiled that planet’s banded clouds.