Prompted by this quote in the Neil Armstrong thread.
I’ve mentioned several times over the years that I was born in the Space Age. Yep, by the time I came around people had flown in space. I vaguely remember Project Gemini, but Project Apollo was the one I watched. Of course being a small child, much of my interest in space was fed by entertainment. I didn’t watch I Dream Of Jeannie for Barbara Eden. I watched it for the planes and rockets and astronauts. I watched It’s About Time because it had astronauts in it. I watched Thunderbirds for the cool ships. And then there were the actual missions, with Walter Cronkite and that big plexiglass panel with the little capsule on it showing the progress of the flights.
I grew up around airplanes. Dad was a pilot, mom worked at Gibbs Flight Service, and she got her license too. We lived near NAS Miramar and went there frequently. Between the jets flying from Miramar and the planes flying over our house from Montgomery Field, every day was Aviation Day. You may find this hard to believe, but I was the class clown. After some jape in 5th grade my teacher (Where are you now, Mr. Hyatt?) said he was going to report me to the Amelia Earhart Fan Club. It was also the time of the X-planes. I thought the X-15 (which Armstrong flew) was über cool. My best friend had a model of an XB-70, and I had a model of the X-3 Stiletto that I thought was much more nifty than the aircraft actually was. For my 8th birthday my cake had a Mercury Redstone rocket, and the Mercury capsule popped off under spring pressure when a couple of levers were squeezed. There were two solid plastic astronauts that must have been five or six inches tall standing on the cake.
And then there were the Moon missions. Strangely – and disconcertingly – I have no clear memory of watching the event as it happened. I do remember how my friends and I would quote the ‘One small step’ line and hop around in slow motion pretending we were on the Moon. I do remember Apollo XIII and, not knowing about CO[sub]2[/sub] and all that. In my imagination the astronauts were throwing themselves against the LM hatch to keep a cloud of deadly black gas from forcing its way in. 
I was at school at splashdown time. We were called to assembly and a TV was brought in so we could watch.
I’d watched Star Trek and loved it. I watched U.F.O. and it seemed like something that might happen in my lifetime. (I was too young to realise how dark that series really was – but it had cool space ships and a Moon base!) Space: 1999 had a Moon base, and I was certain that when I grew up we’d have a real lunar colony. I grew up in a time when people were flying in space, people were flying airplanes, and the coolest flying machines on the planet were being tested just a couple hundred miles away while F-4s and F-14s flew over my house. The Future seemed so promising when I was a child!
I got older and moved in with my dad in the Antelope Valley. He was with the FAA by then, and I was still immersed in aviation. Better yet, Edwards AFB was right there! I was disappointed that the Apollo missions were over, but the Space Shuttle was just on the horizon. I went to one or two of the Approach and Landing Tests of Enterprise. Eventually, after high school, I got a job with a contractor at Edwards. Now I was doing data support on actual flight tests! Better yet, I got onto the Space Shuttle Support Team. It was an exceedingly small role in a gigantic enterprise. We collected Rawinsonde (meteorological) data, and my job was to process it and transmit it to Johnson Space Center. I had access to NASA on my badge, and a frontline seat for all of the Shuttle flights that landed at Edwards. And I became a pilot.
And then the world changed. Sure, the public liked the Shuttle missions. But it was the '80s and people seemed more interested in BMWs, Rolex watches, and cocaine. Science? Expanding humanity into space? Nah, people would rather party and snort lines. And eventually we got the Internet.
It seems to me that before the Internet people would go out and do things. After, people became consumed by the new technology. Airplanes, once affordable to virtually anyone with a middle-class salary, became much more expensive. (I wish I could post my graph here!) It’s much cheaper to buy a copy of Flight Simulator or one of the less realistic games. And you can’t fight monsters or go on villain-ridden adventures in real life! Fantasy is so much easier!
Today I can chat with my ‘imaginary friends’ all over the world. Anything that interests me (and that’s virtually everything!) can be accessed with a few keystrokes. I can carry a phone in my pocket. Remember that line from Pink Floyd’s The Wall album? ‘I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.’ Now I have a couple-hundred channels. When I started driving I thought I was getting away with murder if I got 25 mpg. Now I average 47 mpg. I no longer have to carry a Thomas Guide thanks to the built-in GPS navigation system. I can do my job from my couch. Pretty futuristic stuff!
But it’s not The Future. In The Future flying from place to place in ‘little airplanes’ is common. In The Future we have an ever-expanding lunar base/colony that will one day allow humanity to expand from its womb. In The Future there are still test pilots (more than there are now) flying actual machines instead of everything being computer-simulated. (Yes, it’s better and more efficient, but still…) In The Future people look at our scientific achievements and say ‘Let’s see how far we can go – and then go beyond!’ not ‘Dear Facebook, I just had a cookie. It was awesome!’ Growing up in the Space Age I thought The Future would be different. It seems, from my perspective, that we became distracted.
The Future ain’t what it used to be.
