When America Led the World to the Moon Instead of Toward Chaos

One European child's view of Apollo 11 and the America we miss

Fifty-six years ago today, two Americans walked on the moon. I was not even five years old, and I honestly can't tell you if I watched it happen.

This bothers me more than it should. Did my parents wake me up to witness Neil Armstrong's first steps? Or did they let me sleep through history, figuring I needed rest more than grainy black-and-white television? I have a memory of being pulled from bed to see men walking on the lunar surface, but it could easily have been Apollo 17 in 1972, the last mission to land on the moon. With no one left to ask, I can't separate memory from imagination.

What I do remember clearly is the aftermath. The Apollo program was a presence that shaped childhood in the early 1970s. Every time my parents filled the car with gas, I collected stamps in a little book. Enough stamps earned me another one of those commemorative coins, etched with rockets and astronauts. I must still have them somewhere, forgotten in a box, that is in a container, somewhere in an industrial park storage site in the Netherlands, but never thrown away.

I also built plastic models, but that must have been some years later. I remember the lunar module with its delicate legs and gold foil was more complicated to glue together than the command module, where Michael Collins orbited alone while his crewmates made history below. I never had the complete Apollo rocket that one of my friends had built together with his father, but those two pieces were enough to fuel countless bedroom reenactments of humanity's greatest journey.

The Audacity of 1969

Even as a child, I knew they'd accomplished something extraordinary. Looking back now, their bravery seems almost impossible to comprehend. This was 1969, a world without microchips, no internet, computer memory measured in kilobytes that would make today's calculators laugh. Engineers worked with slide rules and paper, as seen in the movie Apollo 13, stitching together programs that dared to defy the impossible.

The Associated Press captured the moment as it happened: "Two Americans landed on the moon and explored its surface for some two hours Sunday, planting the first human footprints in its dusty soil." Millions watched as Armstrong shuffled carefully on the powdery surface, describing it as "fine and powdered, like powdered charcoal." Aldrin called the scene "a magnificent desolation."

And for the first time ever, there was humor on the moon. As Buzz Aldrin backed out of the lunar module, he quipped about "making sure not to lock it on the way out." Armstrong, already outside, laughed: "A pretty good thought." They still had to get home, after all.

Above them, nearly invisible and often forgotten, Michael Collins maintained his lonely orbit, waiting to ferry his crewmates back to Earth. Below, mission controllers celebrated when their laser beam successfully bounced off a mirror the astronauts had placed on the surface, though their first attempt missed by 50 miles.

President Nixon called from the Oval Office, declaring it "the most historic telephone call ever made." The entire world united in awe at what America had achieved.

Touching History

Years later, I stood in the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, staring at the capsule that brought Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins home. The scorched, battered cone looked impossibly small. This fragile shell had protected three men through the fire of reentry. Standing next to that piece of metal, I thought about touching the surface that had touched space but decided against it. But being so close made the whole impossible story real.

I met Buzz Aldrin once, briefly, in London in the late 1990s. Richard Branson was planning to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon and had invited diplomats to secure overflight permissions. Unlike airplanes, balloons drift wherever the winds take them, so he needed blanket permission from every country in the Northern Hemisphere. There stood Aldrin, a living piece of that miracle decade, with too many people around him who wanted to shake his hand. Unlike the capsule, I chose the touch of his handshake; I may never have walked on the moon, but I shook hands with a guy who did, making it the second-best option.

Michael Collins carried a terror that few understood. When he died a few years ago, I read in the newspapers how he'd described his deepest fear during those lonely orbits around the moon, that something would happen to Armstrong and Aldrin on the surface below, leaving him to return to Earth alone with the worst news in human history.

This morning, running through Vigeland Park in Oslo before the heat became unbearable, I thought about the America of the 1960s. The America that heard Kennedy's impossible promise: "before this decade is out, we will land a man on the moon", and somehow made it happen.

For those of us who grew up in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, America was the place where everything was better, more modern, bigger. Where movies were made, and you could visit Disneyland. America meant progress, inspiration, and the land that had liberated us from fascism. I grew up on President Kennedy Lane, a street name that captured how deeply the American Dream had become embedded in our collective imagination.

What We've Lost

That America gathered its best minds, its resources, and its collective will behind a single, world-changing goal. Scientists and engineers worked together, education was valued, expertise was trusted, and the most complex challenges were tackled by mobilizing the best American society had to offer.

And no, it wasn't a perfect society, far from it, segregation, Vietnam, the list is long. But when I look at America now, at the war on education, the hostility toward science, the political fractures that deepen every day, I doubt if that kind of leadership is even possible anymore. Presidential grand promises are still made, much more so than in Kennedy's days: "I will solve it on day one", but they sound hollow and hardly anyone still takes them seriously.

We now have technology that the Apollo engineers could never have imagined; computers in our pockets are more powerful than anything NASA possessed in 1969. Yet the United States has lost the collective courage to attempt anything nearly as ambitious.

Memory and Meaning

Perhaps it doesn't matter whether I watched Armstrong's first steps on television in a live broadcast. What matters is the enduring power of that achievement: proof that humans can accomplish the impossible when we work together toward something greater than ourselves.

I still get that same childhood thrill looking up at the moon, knowing that people have walked there. Not robots, not probes, but flesh-and-blood humans who risked everything to expand the boundaries of what we thought possible.

Fifty-six years later, we're still living off the inspiration of that moment. The question is whether we'll ever find the courage to create another one. We don't lack challenges: climate change, peace, democracy, or respect for human rights. The problems are more numerous, far larger, more urgent, and much closer to home than putting a man on the moon ever was.

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