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As this is the 40th anniversary of what remains – in my opinion, at least – our species’ finest achievement, I’d just like to quote something that Apollo 11 astronaut Ed Mitchell said in the wonderful documentary film, In The Shadow of The Moon.

I find it particularly moving:

The biggest joy was on the way home.  In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens.  And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience.  And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars.  And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn’t ‘Them and Us’, it was ‘That’s me!’, that’s all of it, it’s… it’s one thing.  And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of  ‘Oh my God, wow, yes’, an insight, an epiphany.