"What were you doing on the day

they landed on the moon?"
Ms W asked me this yesterday. She is a post millennium child and, as her father pointed out, "even I was not around when that happened". 
I was of course. So was the Senior Cat. My siblings were all around as well.
The Senior Cat had something going on at school...there had been a "space race" of some sort. All the classes had been involved. The students in the secondary section of the school had made a telescope (not powerful enough to see them land) and the younger students were tearing around in pretend space suits. There had been "space maths" and "space physics" and poems about space and the moon and much more.
Now a space craft blasts off to the International Space Station and it doesn't even make the news service.
I was at teacher training college. Someone had managed to set up a television set in one of the "temporary pre-fabs" we were housed in and students were dashing in and out between lectures to see what was going on.  I can remember one of the staff saying to me,
     "Come and have a look Cat."
There were the grainy black and white pictures. It all looked so terribly unlikely and uncomfortable and dangerous. I knew it was supposed to be some sort of momentous event but I just hoped they would land on Earth safely. 
The contrast between their tiny space craft and our college buildings, dreadful though they were, could not have been greater. My paternal grandparents had finally succumbed to a television set - although they rarely watched it. I went off to them after the college day was over and my grandfather actually sat and watched the replay on the news.
    "Shocking that they should be asked to take those risks," he said.
I wonder what he would make of Andy Thomas's notion that this will be the century men land on Mars? My grandfather had been born before Henry Ford built his first car. It is little wonder that he thought the moon landing was a risk.
And yes it was of course. It was because nobody really knew much at all. They thought they did but they didn't really know in the way that they needed to know in order to make it at least relatively safe. 
"Space" isn't really "safe" even now. We may not think of it as dangerous in the way we once did but the risks are still enormous.
And some of the magic has gone too with the increasing number of successful launches. We don't have entire schools of children getting excited about "lift off" and "landing" any more. 
Ms W thought it was "interesting I guess but sort of history now".
That's really rather sad.