Celebrating human triumph: Happy 40th, Apollo

Source:  NASA

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the first manned mission to the moon.

The Apollo program stands as one of humanities greatest achievements.  Even today, the Saturn V remains the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed.  Some 30 stories tall, these monsters could break away from our planet in a roaring pillar of smoke and fire that would have awed Moses himself. 

Two and a half minutes after launch, the rocket had burned over four million pounds of fuel, climbed 42 miles above the earth's surface, and was traveling over 6,000 miles per hour.  The spacecraft continued to climb higher and faster, swung into orbit, around the earth, and finally hurled itself at the moon at 25,000 miles per hour - over 30 times the speed of sound, easily outrunning any bullet fired from a gun.

And then forty years ago today, in an epic climax of humanity's knowledge and will, human beings stepped into the soft dust of another world.

We are explorers.  We've braved deserts and oceans in a constant attempt to see what was over the horizon.  Through creativity and ingenuity, we have always found ways to do the impossible.  From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age and beyond, we now find ourselves standing on the moon - a feat that put the tower of Babel to shame.

We broke heaven.

We planted a flag and conquered an orb that in generations past had been worshipped and feared.  As understanding grew, superstition and old religion had fallen away.  There seems to be no reason to think this trend should ever stop.

We did this.  We understood enough about the universe to figure out how to escape the bonds of our planet.  We mastered enough physics and chemistry to do something nature could never have intended: a species of hairless ape escaped their own planet.

There are few things that demonstrate our triumph as a species as proudly and as boldly as the Apollo program.  It was the greatest achievement of mankind, and yet the rocket was not fueled by prayers.  We did it by understanding and using cold, hard, reality.  It wasn't magic that sent us among the stars.  It was naturalistic science.

Of course, this doesn't mean there is no God.  It only means that while God obsesses over our bedroom activities and whether or not we believe in him, we're reaching new worlds and new horizons all by ourselves.  He can fret over foreskins and coffee.  We have more important things to do.

In many ways, we're still so young.  We're just beginning to realize what we can build and how far we can go.  We should keep going.  We owe it to our civilization, and to our future.  This is what we do.

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