I'm Here for the Rockets
A lively crowd filled our small apartment, watching the broadcast at my birthday party. People say the whole world is excited about something big and it’s on MY birthday. Maybe not all the crowd was for my birthday - we were the apartment with the color tv.
(come moon landings and Wizard of Oz, we were All That)
I got this present,
I tore into the huge box & tossed aside the packing stuff. Some of the packing held its plastic stand, that I instantly broke.
“…when you grow up, there will be cities in space”. This wasn’t far-fetched crazy talk. It was in planning, it was happening.
Consider that the moon landing after this was just four months later.
(2026 space nerds: I cannot apologize enough for this bringing this up)
There was a new space mission every few months. Just look what happened in my grandparents’ lifetimes with cars. Then came the interstates. My parents’ generation got planes.
And then we were here for rockets, the natural next step, our birthright.
Generational envy happens - there’s always something to wish you were around for - I missed out on the real flower children and by the time I got to high tech, all the big companies already existed. So it seemed.
This birthday present had no spinning wheels or propellers, but it had a special moving part. A movable “meridian strip” - a narrow plastic strip with latitude marks, connected at its poles. it slid around the globe and you used it to locate any place from “coordinates” (big word!). the globe came with a guide book, which i did not break, with a list of famous craters and their coordinates.
My Dad showed me how you can get to any spot on the moon with just 2 numbers. Slide the meridian strip to the marking on the equator for the longitude. then find the latitude on the meridian strip. It was like a treasure map.
…here, this spot, is where they are right now on the moon. You need these coordinates because they don’t have roads on the Moon, they can’t follow driving directions. The guide book had articles about the moon, but all I ever used it for was the index of craters in the back.
I got quick at finding places on the moon from coordinates. I learned that scientists used coordinates on Earth too.
Some generations feel too early for something, that the next ones get. But I wasn’t too early or too late for rockets. I was right on time.
Yo! I am here for the rockets. Where are my damn rockets?
The cracked plastic stand got lost in a move, and the only moving part - the meridian strip - fell off. i still have the guidebook. probably. It’s a "I know I wouldn’t have thrown it away" item.
I can’t say that the moon globe represented the “promise” of the space age - it didn’t feel like a promise as much as it was just the next thing.
There wasn’t a particular day the space age failed to arrive. It just kept ‘not happening’. Labels like “Dawn of X”, “Beginning of the End of Y “ get applied later. At the time, it’s just Wednesday.
Like everyone, I saw this as stalling out, a delay of what humans were supposed to do next, with everything running late. Then just today I heard Hank Green transform the whole story. He said:
Perhaps humans honestly had no business getting to the moon in 1969, but did it anyway. I can’t argue with that. Thanks, Hank Green.
The moon globe was in my college dorm rooms, and every living room up to today. As my totem, its meaning changed. It stopped being a literal map to look on, to chart the latest landing, and it stopped being a map of what my generation was doing.
It speaks more now of family history - that my Dad was a science teacher, and even knew where to get such an object. That i was a weird enough kid to be into it. It defines me in time - here’s a thing you’ve read about. But I was there. I have proof.