For All Humankind: Memories of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing from Mexico
The following is an excerpt from For All Humankind: The Untold Stories of How the Moon Landing Inspired the World by Tanya Harrison and Danny Bednar.
The small wooden bookshelf in Matias’ room housed a collection of science fiction classics, including Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Contained within their pages were the blueprints for a child’s dreams of space travel. For most of human history, this was the only way space travel happened, in the imaginations of writers and on the page.
But dreams of humans travelling into space didn’t stay on the pages of fiction. For Matias in particular, they became a reality within just eleven years of his time on Earth.
In the 1960s, Matias watched the events of the Space Race closely. He followed along with the accomplishments of NASA’s Mercury and Gemini programs. Reading about imaginary astronauts was replaced with the real deal. He felt a connection, as if these astronauts were going to space for him — and for everyone else on Earth. It felt as if they went up so that the rest of us down below could join them vicariously. Through the astronaut’s descriptions of what it felt like to be in space, and the footage on the nightly news, everyone got to go along on the journey.
