[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 --