I grew up in the Sixties having been born in the late Fifties. It was a golden age in some ways and to a pre-pubescent boy the space race was one of the most exciting things around, culminating in the moon landings in 1969.
Of course the Sixties weren't perfect. I was raised as one of six in an industrial town in north Wales. My dad was middle management in a large steel works and probably was well paid but the benefits of that were offset by the number of mouths he raised. Consumerism wasn't a word or even an idea - stuff lasted for as long as it could be made to and hardly anyone aspired to new cars or home ownership. None of these things were problems - I never went hungry and didn't feel disadvantaged, still don't. They were simpler times, great music was happening and something as basic as transistor radio was the epitome of indulgence.
The space race, though, showed an alternative reality. It's easy to look back on those days and the basicness of the technology the astronauts had to work with, but it was a close to science fiction without actually being fiction you could get. Unless, of course, you're a conspiracy theorist believing it was all filmed in Burbank.
Roll on the Seventies and music really got a grip on me - everything from Glam Rock to Motown (having started influencing me towards the end of the Sixties). In my teens now I was interested in other distractions although space still fascinated me and Bowie provided the track to my years. I was convinced in the existence of aliens and believed that UFOs were a thing, but life as always got in the way and as Punk Rock, a genre I never really got into, kicked off I had joined the military and my aeronautical engineering career. Oddly I became less enthused with space, but with retrospect, space had started to become a little stale.
The moon landings had finished - to be fair after Apollo 13 it was a hard act to beat - and the Space Station was embryonic. The Space Shuttle caused a stir but was deliberately low-key, almost day-to-day. The Shuttle disasters reminded us that it was actually still a high-risk affair but with earning a living, raising a family and avoiding the worst of Eighties music space faded into the background. Of course then came the Nineties and in retrospect the Eighties music wasn't too bad after all. The Noughties gave me a similar appreciation of the Nineties. I have no idea about the recent teens, having focussed on the blues.
But now it's getting all interesting again - I have two grandsons, one seven, the other three - and as they grow up towards their teens humans are returning to the moon, Mars is going to be explored and who knows, colonisation on Mars might be an employment option for them in their twenties. The older one is aware of the International Space Station and has watched it pass overhead but currently space is a slow burner for him, however I'm sure his generation is going to have an exciting time watching the build up to the next moon landings and the colonisation of Mars. I hope to be able to witness these events myself, just a bit wary of the soundtrack to be honest.
After years of baby steps it looks like we're suddenly going full pelt. Space tourism is looking like a reality for a select wealthy few and pushing back the boundaries of near space is happening on a weekly basis. The reasons for this are apparently clear - our wish to discover new ground is one touted reason, the need to be ready for the next asteroid impact is another. I proposed an alternative a while back with The Journeymen and the sequel, Day of Reckoning - books about the longest game played ever to curate and send ancient DNA to a home planet with a very distorted set of values driving it.
Both of those books are available in eBook and paperback format from Amazon and if you have Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited they can be read for free. I'm convinced they are fiction, but I think that about the Burbank link to the moon landings, and a lot of people disagree with me on that score, so who knows?
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