I was a little kid the day Earthlings landed on the moon. I stood in a campground’s crowded rec room, stopover on one of our lengthy summer trips. Each summer our parents drove us place-to-place in a small car hauling a 15-foot Scotty travel trailer for the most frugal, yet educational, travel possible. That’s why we were here, looking up at a TV mounted near the ceiling. I could barely see due to all the people around me and still remember the press of strangers’ sweaty skin on mine.

My family had entered the room with celebratory excitement about this history-making event. But the prevailing mood here was far different. People seemed to anticipate disaster with unsettling eagerness. I’d never heard grown-ups talk around kids as these people did. There was rampant speculation that astronauts would “blow up in their suits,” or be stranded on the moon to die, or return carrying undetectable germs likely to infect our whole planet. A loud man in front of me said, “You won’t know aliens snuck back with them till it’s too late!” My calm and reasonable parents were somewhere in the crowd, along with my two siblings, but I didn’t risk taking my eyes off the screen to look for them.

The static-filled TV images I managed to see were hard to decipher. It was even harder to understand what the astronauts were saying. But I could easily hear Houston’s Mission Control. The very idea that people on the ground were speaking to people on the moon, a moon small as a sugar cookie in the night sky, gave me a sense we were all connected. Perhaps improbably, it reminded me of a scene I loved from the 101 Dalmatians movie, where people gave up looking for stolen puppies, but intrepid dogs never gave up. At twilight they barked and barked, their voices moving from attic window to alley to hilltop across improbable distances in a mutual effort to save those puppies.

We’d recently learned about space in elementary school. I was troubled by the concept of endless galaxies because it made me think of the tiny place everyone I loved occupied in the vastness of space and time. But this mission to the moon felt like an antidote to smallness. These astronauts were also tiny in the context of space and time, yet they went ahead anyway. They packed up their smarts and their faith in science to head off for an improbable adventure that, we were told, would benefit all mankind.

There are always people who are afraid (I know plenty about fear) but the engine of hope can’t help but lift us.  I was wildly proud of Science, Humanity, and the USA back when those blurry figures bounced like tiny cartoon characters on the moon. I’m still hopeful. It’s amazing what we can do when we have resolve and act on it, together.