…AND TOUCHED THE FACE OF GOD: Megan McArdle on the cultural significance of the moonwalk. (On the actual moon, not Michael Jackson’s.)

I don’t know why this doesn’t resonate with me. Some of it is doubtless temperament. But a lot of it is that my very first “public memory”–the first memory I share with most people my age–is the white clouds spiraling down from Challenger. “Obviously [there’s been] a major malfunction.”

I remember when that tanked series, Enterprise, started up, I wished it would begin with the Challenger disaster. Because I loved Star Trek. I love it now. My heart shudders with those first high, weird notes, and “Space–the final frontier….” I couldn’t see the new movie because I knew I’d irrationally blame it for not being Shatner (my first and everpresent icon of leadership and loyalty), Nimoy and Kelley and Nichols and the rest. But I wanted the new Star Trek to acknowledge why we’re still, culturally, Earthbound. We were chastened, and so we retreated into the greatest truth of science fiction: Wherever you go, there you are. We retreated into the alienation of home. I wanted the new series to redeem that experience, somehow: to grapple with it and still tell us that “the eyes of the world look, now, into space.”

Well, it didn’t. But ours has been an anguished retreat–not a philosophical rejection of the beauty in the dark spiral of stars.

Reagan’s Challenger speech here.