As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s famous “small step for a man, giant leap for mankind,” I picked up Basil Hero’s The Mission of a Lifetime: Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon. Hero is an award-winning former investigative reporter with NBC News. From childhood, and throughout his career as a media entrepreneur and nonprofit executive, he has maintained a lifetime fascination with space exploration and the men who went to the moon.
Hero points out, “Space is making a comeback. In 2017, 18,300 people applied to NASA for fourteen available astronaut slots… all of them hopeful that they might, one day, run their gloved fingers over the surface of another world.”
The men who went to the moon remain history’s most elite fraternity. Their extraterrestrial view of Earth from the moon changed them and the world. They remind us that courage, quiet patriotism, and conquering fear—the real right stuff—all emanate from deeper sources: a commitment to the common good, and belief in something greater than oneself.
Their wish for all of us is to keep pushing the boundaries (as they did) and always, always live life with fierce optimism and faith that, like the moon shot, any goal—no matter the odds—is as achievable as your resolve to see it through.
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