July 17, 1969: Apollo 11 blasts off from Cape Canaveral. At long last, we are headed for the moon. What once we had only gazed at, we will now visit. bq. "All was ready. Everything had been done. Projects Mercury and Gemini. Seven years of Project Apollo. The work of more than 300,000 Americans. Six previous unmanned and manned Apollo flights. Planning, testing, analyzing, training. The time had come... As we ascended in the elevator to the top of the Saturn on the morning of July 16, 1969, we knew that hundreds of thousands of Americans had given their best effort to give us this chance. Now it was time for us to give our best." July 20, 1969: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Tomorrow is that anniversary. We came in peace, for all mankind; and as Rand Simberg reminds us, we are not done. Like LaughingWolf, he talks about the need for a viable space industry, and looks forward to a free-enterprise future consisting not of one small step for a man, but of many thousands and millions of steps into the cosmos for mankind. Which brings us to Tom Paine's wonderful post: Return, O Israel:

"...we may live different lives, have different problems, face different challenges, but we're still Jews. Here in the O'Neill habitat we may live in a hollowed-out asteroid, but we still mark the passing seasons with our festivals, the harvest, the planting, the first rains, and we count the Omer still. We may do most of our work in front of a viewscreen with instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, but the Torah we read from in our sanctuary is parchment, written by a sofer, in the ancient way. And most importantly, the words we read, are the same as they've always been. They may mean different things to us nowadays. Would the Rabbis sitting in Yavneh have dreamed that the laws of shatnez, of mixing wool and linen in the same garment, or of cross-fertilising different seeds would one day be applied to the deliberate alteration of human DNA? Maybe not. But I believe they would have understood and appreciated that their insights into human nature and the way to live a good and meaningful life, would still be studied and argued over, thousands of years into the future... ...Return. Return to what? To the land we were given by God? To the way of life of our ancestors? To farming and working with our hands? To an unalterable belief in an all-powerful supernatural deity who controls every aspect of reality? Is that the return we are urged to make this Shabbat? No. Our generation, like all generations, stands hand in hand with the future and the past. We inherited Judaism from our ancestors, and it is our sacred trust, to pass on to our children and their descendants. One generation passes away, and another generation comes. And the world abides forever. The sun rises, the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. All the rivers run into the sea yet the sea is not full. We come, we spend our brief time, we live, we love, and we make our mark. We change things. What we leave for our children bears our imprint, as the Judaism we received has come down to us infinitely richer for the contributions of those gone before us...."

It gets better. It will be better. Our story's not yet at an end.