I have mentioned before here that during my childhood, it felt a bit like there were enormous events that transpired not long before I was born, and which helped shape the world in incredible, almost earth shattering ways.
World War II changed political maps quicker and more dramatically than any other event in history before or since. Tens of millions of people died around the world, and the shock value alone will likely be remembered throughout human history.
The Kennedy assassination was one day that changed the history of the United States and, indeed, arguably, the world. It certainly was shocking to everyone who lived through it, and everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about it.
The civil rights movement ended legalized segregation in the Jim Crow South, and there were huge moments during that struggle that linger on in the history of the nation and, yes, even that of the world, both good and bad.
The Vietnam War, and the counter culture back here in the United States, was another series of events that rocked the previously conformist nation to it's core. Woodstock perhaps was the culmination of that counterculture movement, and it has retained it's place in history as a result.
But a few weeks before Woodstock, there was the lunar landing, when man achieved an enormous victory by reaching the moon.
It was something that everyone, and especially all Americans, could be rightly proud of! What an epic achievement! President Kennedy had laid out the goal for all to hear, and the nation had heeded his words. Exactly as he had wanted, the nation sent a man to the moon, and brought him safely back, within a decade. Several men, actually. And there were more missions to space after that.
Since then?
Well, the achievements have neither been as heroic or as memorable.
NASA still gets some victories here and there, when unmanned space explorers reach distant planets (one of them just reached Pluto), and where new information and pictures of distant galaxies and planets come to light.
Yet, somehow, it feels like the excitement over these achievements has waned. Or maybe it is just in the spoiled United States, because other nations seem to be leaping into what was formerly the Space Race (which was an extension of the Cold War, obviously).
Europe, China, and now India seem to be steeping up and filling in the void rather nicely, to their credit, and that has to be, at least on some level, because of public support and interest, even when that same has waned here in the States.
India just launched an enormous rocket into space and, rightly, the nation should be very proud!
Wish we had something like that which could still unite us.
India launches biggest rocket into space BEC CREW 19 DEC 2014
http://www.sciencealert.com/india-launches-world-s-biggest-rocket-into-space
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