I can honestly say - and it's a big surprise to me - that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.
Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions.
Does it make sense for the U.S. to expend hundreds of billions of dollars to mount a new Apollo-style program to return to the moon? Or have we blazed that trail? Shouldn't we help other nations achieve this goal with their own resources but with our help?
For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.
My first biography written in '73 was not 'Journey To The Moon.' It was 'Return To Earth.' Because for me, that was the more difficult task - disappointment.
Innovation is what America does best. Whether it is the Apollo Project to the moon, developing the most advanced defense technologies available, the rise of the Internet or the latest advancements in biomedical gene therapies, our nation leads the world in transformative innovations.
My favourite festival experience is a show at midnight with the moon blazing and a crowd full of open hearts ready to dance.
I was driving across Georgia with a warlord and his bodyguards riding shotgun with their Kalashnikovs in a convoy of Mercedes and Land Rovers. The guy put on Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon' on a cassette, which they played on loudspeakers as we raced across the mountains, and I remember thinking, 'This sure beats respectable life in England.'
'Goodnight Moon' is a staple of any nursery bookshelf. So, too, are 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' and 'Madeline.' These books are just as much a part of mainstream reading culture as 'The Catcher in the Rye,' and they are passed down from generation to generation.
'The melancholy of all things done' is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.
I will aim at the moon to reach the highest bounty.
Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens, you have made them bright, precious and fair.
In fact, Moon came on tour with us for a bit just before a big festival in Brighton, I think.
The dark areas, the 'mare' plains of the moon, are so incredibly smooth that the English astronomer Thomas Gold has suggested that they might really be depressions filled to the brim with dust. A rocket hit would show whether they are that or not.
Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.
Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.
Apollo 13, as you may remember, gave us a reactor that is bubbling away right now somewhere in the Pacific. It's supposed to be bubbling away on the moon, but it's in the Pacific Ocean instead.
The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that it basically just says, 'Look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other.' That way... you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, 'I'm out of eggs. What have you got?'
'The Moon Rabbit' is laying against the bunker, dreaming and thinking about life and dreaming the impossible possible and creating its own true stories.
Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we're doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting.
