it is the earliest childhood memory that i can absolutely fix in space
and time (there are some earlier ones, but i am not entirely sure when
or where they took place)

sitting in the living room of my grand parents, with lots of
relatives, watching the b/w tv sitting on top of large cupboard at
some ungodly hourr ..

...................................

the following is stolen from some blog (Chaos Manor) but it fits my
feelings perfectly:

"Once we walked on the Moon. When I was in high school in the 1940's I
read science fiction and knew that I would live to see the first man
on the Moon. I did not know I would live to see the last one.

NASA ate the dream. It is not lack of money. It is NASA, turf wars,
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

We have spent enough since Apollo to be half way to Alpha Centauri. We
cannot even go back to the Moon."

servus

markus