I remember being woken – in what my memory says was the middle of the night – and being herded into my parents bedroom with my brother (I don’t remember my sister being there maybe my parents decided she was too young, she was only 2).  That was back before the days when people actually had televisions in their bedrooms but they had moved the television from downstairs up there.  All four of us climbed into their big bed, something that usually only happened on birthdays and we watched transfixed as the Eagle landed and after what seemed like an eternity first Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldren stepped out onto the moon.

It is probably the clearest of my early childhood memories, I was 5 at the time, I really was one of the children of the space race.  We believed that by 2000, never mind 2009 trips to the moon would be common place, that people would be living on the moon, that mars would have been visited to see for definite if that planet was the home of friendly or hostile aliens.

As I look back today the reality is completely different, it has been decades since the last one of our species stepped foot on the lunar surface.  Space travel for average individual is still the stuff of sci-fi; despite having an international space station in orbit around this blue planet colonies away from the pull of its gravity is still a long way off; and while probes have journeyed passed the moon we still haven’t.

Disasters such as Apollo 13 no doubt slowed things down, but today as I think back it seems as if we have not just slowed down but almost ground to a stop.

The events of 40 years ago pointed to a bright new future, a future of new discoveries and new frontiers, what happened?  Maybe the dreams and hopes of a 5 year old were always unrealistic after all no one can deny the fact that the space race did indeed change the world.  The technology that got us to the moon is now part of our daily lives just not in the way an excited child woken in the middle of the night envisioned.