Virtual moon atlas errors1/7/2024 Eventually, I became manager of the Return To The Moon project and I organized the Return To The Moon IV and Return To The Moon V conferences. I became a very active member of the Space Frontier Foundation, taking on roles of increasing responsibility. Fast forward 20 years to today: many of those people are now leaders in the private commercial efforts to build new launch systems and develop the technologies that will enable our conquest of space.Īs a result of my involvement and my new network of connections within the space advocacy community, I looked for more opportunities to contribute. But that turned out to be the best part of it: with only a hundred people at the conference I got to meet and talk to almost everyone there. I was initially disappointed that only about a hundred people showed up. The “Return To The Moon” conference was an amazing experience! I had expected that a few thousand people would be attending. No matter how menial the task might be, it would be more than doing nothing. Even if it was just stuffing and mailing envelopes. My thinking at the time was that I would volunteer for any job or task that needed to be done. I readily signed up for membership and registered for the Las Vegas Conference. They were having a “Return To The Moon” conference in Las Vegas. Their mission statement hit home in a very profound way: “To open the Space Frontier for all of Humanity within our lifetime”. I found an organization called the Space Frontier Foundation. I went online and looked for groups and organizations that shared my passion for the Moon. If you have a real and persistent dream, you must do whatever is in your power to work towards the realization of that dream. It was just a feeling that there were countless things within my power that I could have done, regardless of the outcome, that I just did not do. It’s not that I imagined that anything that I could have done in those 30 years that elapsed since I saw the live broadcast from the Moon would have made any difference at all. After all, what had I personally done to contribute, in even the smallest measure, to making that imagined future a reality? The painfully honest answer is that I had never lifted a finger I had done absolutely nothing! Reflecting on this I realized that I had no right to feel disappointed. I despaired that my dream of one day visiting the Moon was never going to happen. America and the world had abandoned the vision. Worse, there was no plan in place to make it happen. As the year 2000 arrived, we had failed to build the future I had dreamed of and hoped for. By the year 2000, I thought, I would be able to stand on the surface of the Moon and look back at Earth!Īlas, it was not to be. As a ten-year-old in July of 1969, I figured that in another 3 of my lifetimes, somewhere around the year 2000, that future that I was imagining would have become a reality. My own personal memory of the event-which I have come to regard as the single greatest moment in all of human history so far-is of being excited at the thought of a future where anyone could one day go visit the Moon and I certainly wanted to be among those. We were all witnesses to history being made as we watched the live broadcast from the Moon of Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the lunar surface. Many of our Virtual Moon team share a similar memory of how our passion for the Moon was ignited.
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