In more than forty years of covering politics and dabbling in covering sports I have seen and I have met a lot of famous people but I have seen and I have met only a few great people. It is in that small number of heroes that I place the men who rode that rocket—and their colleagues who dared greatly to push our spirits as well as our frontiers forward. I respect those who continue to ride rockets although their reach is well short of the men who began their journey so dramatically that early morning and the men who first risked everything to reach beyond our known world..
I worry sometimes about those who are considered heroes today in a time when we are less interested in testing our potentials as societies and as mankind and more focused on protecting the little that we are.
When Gene Cernan died last week, we lost more than the last man to walk on the Moon. We lost another of the dwindling few human reminders that greatness derives from reaching outward while mediocrity, narrowness, and failure result from looking inward.
In the stairwell leading to the library at my house is a poster created by Shelbi Burkhart commemorating the Apollo XVII mission. It is signed by Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt, the geologist who landed on the moon with him. It is framed with my Cape Kennedy and my Johnson Space Center press credentials from that mission.
Although my work gave me—and still gives me, I guess—a lot of opportunities to collect autographs, I collect only a few and those few are from those who have seen the whole earth as I will never see it (only six of them are left), or from fellow authors. One series is kind of a vicarious participation in the great adventure of exploring space. The other is kind of a compliment, a shared experience, with those who have gone through the discipline (and sometimes the agony) of writing a book.
But the signatures I cherish most are those who were, and are, heroes not just to me but to my generation. They are tangible reminders that greatness is not achieved by limiting what we can be by focusing within. I have met some of them and it is comforting to realize that people who look just like me or look just like you are capable of greater things than we often let ourselves think. And I wonder when the time will come when we will look outward again.
Bravo! I’ll praise this entry because of its recognition of Dr. Harrison Schmitt, astronaut and lunar geologist. One of the unspoken tenets of the science of geology is that geologists know the most who’ve spent the time in the field and been there. Thus, a California geologist spends time and considerable effort in California. A Missouri geologist spends considerable time and effort in the State of Missouri. Schmitt can truly be called a lunar field geologist……he’s been there.