The footprints are still there, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong's boots, caked into dust. There's no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don't blow away and they don't wash away and there's no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they're so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they'll last for tens of millions of years.
This summer marks half a century since Armstrong first walked on the moon, though cosmologically, that was a mere snap of the fingers ago. “Man on the moon!” cried Walter Cronkite on CBS television news, gasping, while the world watched, rapt. Kids away at summer camp were marched from their tents deep in the woods to mess halls to plop down in front of a little screen, while camp counselors tinkered with rabbit-ear antennas. “That's one small step for man,” Armstrong said, immortally, as he stepped off the ladder of the Lunar Module on July 20, 1969, “one giant leap for mankind.” And then Armstrong pressed his gray-and-white boot into the dust, and left that first trace.
But what really lasts from that moment? What was the mission for? And what did it leave behind, here on Earth? Fifty years later, floods made more frequent by the changing of the climate have begun to wash away the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, from which Apollo 11 was launched (NASA has been shipping in sand to try to shore up devastated dunes), and hurricanes worsened by the rising of the seas threaten the site of Apollo 11's mission control, the Johnson Space Center in Texas. Houston, we have a problem.
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