Full Moon Over Schodack N.Y. 12162

July 24,2010 I was returning from a quick drop off visit to Schenectady NY. Stopped for dinner in my hometown of Castleton/Schodack N.Y. It was a warm beautiful evening. The kind of time that summer memories form a lasting sort of presence in the minds of vacationing children off from school. I took a few extra minutes and walked around my old high school track at Maple Hill High School damp from a brief shower that cooled things down. The moon was coming out in the early evening as I took my walk. The moon was full. This constant in our lives , looking no different than when our grandparents looked up at it as they held hands. The same moon young men saw before they left home for a distant war. No different from the moon Henry Hudson navigated by as he explored the someday named river for him and by many historians accounts came ashore in a yet to be named Castleton to meet with native inhabitants. Yet it is different , it no longer beckons us as it once did. Through much of my childhood and adolescence the moon was our national science goal. NASA formed in the Eisenhower Administration held our young attention. Men in space and with President Kennedy men on the moon. The space race as we called it then. We were going to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. We watched the blastoffs on TV at school. Alan Shepard , John Glenn became national heroes as Charles Lindburgh was to a previous generation. To those of us that liked science this was a great time punctuated every month by a full moon we could look up at. We were a nation under one moon. Our resources and our pride going towards that goal of landing and exploring. We of course circumnavigated the moon in Christmas of 1968 and the following summer landed to an all most undivided national and world attention. We all probably looked up at the full moon that night if we could see it. That beckoning moon we could now touch. The science that so touched our school yrs had come become a new reality. A new phrase sprang up "if we can send a man to the moon why can't we do....." As I drove back on the Taconic Parkway that evening towards 11509 the moon of Schodack became the moon of Chatham and Hyde Park etc. One thing struck me.As that time of my youth has passed so has much of the energy of the space program. We are not as energized as we once were by exploration. Been there done that. I know we will not return to that familiar object in my lifetime. No moon base or radio telescope on the dark side of the moon. In a sense the moon over Schodack has become a relic of my past.