[caption id="attachment_1346" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Apollo 13"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/apollo-13-patch1.jpg"><img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-1346" title="apollo-13-patch" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/apollo-13-patch1-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a>[/caption]

Once was the time we reached out into space and the American people marveled.

Forty years later, we not only don't go back, many of our people don't even believe we ever went.

I was watching Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" earlier today, and the thing that surprised me the most about it is that I was 20 years old when it happened in April 1970 and I have no memory of it at all.

It isn't that I didn't care about the space program; I remember the thrill of having a television wheeled into my classroom in fifth grade so that we could watch Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn go into space. But eight years later, when Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the lunar surface, I was working as an usher at a movie theater.

And nine months later, when Apollo 13 flew, I was right in the middle of having the most fun I had ever had in my life up to that point. I don't know if it was the weekend of the liftoff or the weekend of the return, but my first real girlfriend and I went down to Charlottesville for Easters Weekend at the University of Virginia.

It's hard to explain, but for a few years there -- from about 1968 to 1971 -- I wasn't really that involved with what was going on in the outside world. It was a really tumultuous period in my life -- age 18 to 21 -- and not much was going right. I was at war with everyone and everything, but too timid to do anything that really might have constituted taking a chance on something good.

But even if I wasn't part of it, there were still heroic things happening in the world.

[caption id="attachment_1349" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Safely home."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/images.jpg"><img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-1349" title="images" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/images-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a>[/caption]

When Apollo 13 landed safely, it was a happy ending to America's greatest space drama up to that time. The only deaths in our space program had been the three astronauts of Apollo 1 in a launching pad fire, although we would lose two shuttles and their inhabitants off in the distant future, after we stopped believing in ourselves.

Once was a time we accomplished amazing things. We harnessed American industry to supply the war machine, and we rebuilt the free world after the war. We did something private industry could never have done when we built the Interstate highway system.

When it came time to go into space, of course it was a partnership between government and private industry. It was too big deal to be done for profit.

Then came the time when we lost faith in ourselves. Conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan, decided that the only way people could be depended upon to do their best work was if there was money in it for them.

Government, they told us, couldn't do anything right.

And when they told us we were mean and greedy and venal, we started to believe it and we became meaner, greedier and more venal. Because people tend to live up -- or down -- to the expectations we have for them.

If there is one thing the last 30 years have taught us, it ought to be that.