I've got a Poloroid my grandparents took of their black and white television set.

You can barely make out a fuzzy space suit facing the screen, and a bit of the moon around it.

It's amazing the kind of teamwork, effort and ingenuity the space program took to get to that point. I often wonder if we'll ever be able to do something like that again.

I guess we probably do, but it doesn't have the same feel.

I'm sure it's partial truths filtered through the misty haze of nostalgia, but it seemed like there was something special that got us to the moon, something as a society I don't think we have anymore.

We treat space as mundane, barely worth our notice, and then come down in a barrage of hyper-criticalness if something goes wrong there. We forget that it's always been dangerous, always been a colossal effort to get there, even now.

I don't think we've decided there's anything big and idealistic to pull support behind anymore. Sure, it was to beat the Communists, but it was also for the science, for the exploration, for the potential of what we'd learn and find.

Does society really think that way anymore? Maybe, maybe not.

What I do know is that it was an amazing thing then, and still is now.

Even my grandparents, maybe even especially them because what they lived through, knew that.