Fifty years ago this Saturday, the first humans set foot on a celestial body other than Earth. I imagine there will always be skeptics. I particularly like the joke about NASA hiring Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing only to have Kubrick insist on filming on location for authenticity. We are living in the time of Photoshop, visual effects, and DeepFake videos; a couple of months ago I watched a talking raccoon travel back in time through a subatomic realm and then fight a purple giant alongside a shrinking man and a woman riding a winged horse. So you can see why the photographs, stunning as they may be, are no longer as compelling. While I am convinced astronauts really did make the quarter-million mile journey, I’ve found myself thinking about the sense in which they did not fully depart the Earth.
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