Excerpt from Leaving Orbit by Margaret Lazarus Dean, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A. D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

Is this not stirring? Rarely is such grandiose language earned by such specific and deliberate action, and this action is the counterbalance to the legacy of the failures. Few Americans were aware of it at the time, but looking back we can see that the beginnings of the end of spaceflight were already present at the triumphant moment of Apollo 11— the funding already reduced, the goals already compromised, three dead astronauts already martyred to the cause. In the future, fourteen more will die, and the shuttle project will never entirely recover from their deaths. But the plaque knows nothing of all that, and I love it for that reason, for the vigorous simplicity of its language. I love the language of spaceflight: the go and the no- go, the translunar injection burn, the nod and the twang. The names Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The sonorousness of the very acronym NASA. These are the sounds of dreams. Can we who were not there be blamed for wondering whether it was all a dream?

Margaret Lazarus Dean, excerpt from Leaving Orbit. Copyright © 2015 by Margaret Lazarus Dean. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.