Tonight, a group of us closed the evening by watching the movie, Apollo 13. It was the tail end of a series each Sunday night that included documentaries and a mini-series about the Apollo space program.

I remember, growing up, of boyhood obsessions with rockets, with the lunar module, with the entire idea of our traversing to another planetary body. Some of the first drawings that I remember hanging on a wall were of the Apollo spacecraft, dreams marking the summer before third grade. There was still a public excitement about NASA and our pursuits beyond Earth’s atmosphere, or so I remember. The shuttle program was exciting, I tracked satellites to the other planets, and the images of the Challenger disaster are still seared in my mind.

Lately, it seems, the only public information I find regarding NASA deals with budget cuts, the end of the shuttle program (and its lack of a clear replacement), or the Columbia accident. It’s rare to see passion, fire, or drive toward the exploration of our heavens, at least that as directly experienced by fellow human beings.

I don’t aspire to be an astronaut myself (unlike a very committed man here, but I still dream. The auroras never cease to steal my breath or the moon to add shadowed comfort to a late night. My imagination runs rampant that here, on the bottom of the Earth, if I just let loose my feet, I might fall into the stars below…

…and I find it troubling, that in order to explore the wonder that grew in me as a child, I have to look to our actions, our stories, from before when I was born. To go to the moon, Mars, or else may not be the most pragmatic choice possible for a society, but to unify as a community behind that idea, that ideal? To me that seems a far better focus for our energies than war.