Observe the Moon

On a tour of the Johnson Space Center yesterday I learned that tonight is International Observe the Moon Night, a date set aside each year to look at and learn about Earth's satellite. I didn't even know there was such an event, but I consider myself lucky that I learned about it where I did.

Home of moon rocks and interplanetary dust, of an intact Saturn rocket housed in a building as impossibly long as it is impossibly tall, the Johnson Space Center is also where the Orion spacecraft is coming to life. Orion is built for interplanetary travel — and will someday take humans to Mars.

Also on the Space Center campus is the historic mission control center: the place where nine Gemini and all the Apollo missions were monitored, where scientists scrambled to bring Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth, where cheers erupted when the words came crackling through the monitors: "The Eagle has landed."

It was the moon they saw, the same moon we can see tonight. Only for the first time in history, a human footprint was outlined in its dust.