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Another Apollo astronaut is gone. I had connections to him.
I was born with the space age — in 1957. When I entered the scene, there wasn’t a single human-made satellite in orbit. No person had ever been in space. As as species, we were stay-at-homes.
That ended with Sputnik in October of my birth year. By the end of the 1960s, four astronauts had walked on the moon.
Like millions of others, I was fascinated by all of this. I followed space exploration closely and then, as an adult, set it mostly aside — giving an occasional sidelong glance at Shuttle missions. Except for a few tragic incidents, the future was here and it was boring.
No, the great adventures were in the early days, especially Apollo where humans literally went where no one had gone before. That was our real life Star Trek, although the multi-cultural crews that made it felt like our species was going into space, instead of a few white men, wouldn’t come until later. But whoever was going up there, it was HUMANS. It was US.
Just around the turn of the millennium, my interest in space travel reignited and I began collecting historic space artifacts. Among them was an item that belonged to Walt Cunningham, the Apollo astronaut who died yesterday.
