Thanks Mike - great idea - makes us all think back to another era.
1946 I was born 2 years after Hilter's V2s started landing on London. So perhaps I have always lived in the space age.
1957 I had stood outside our house in the country to watch Sputnik 1 pass overhead.
In 1958 I won a Rotary prize - a book called "Modern Marvels of Flight" - this book had a artist's impression of a "Buck Rogers" style space ship sitting on its four rear wings on the surface of our Moon. From then on I dreamed, "Would I ever see a man land on the moon?"
1958 was also the year of my first flight in an aeroplane - a DH89 Rapide -
yes a fabric covered bi-plane!
Two years later my dream became a possibility:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kza-iTe2100
1969 Just 9 years later I was a Qantas trainee Engineer sitting on the wing of 707 in a hangar actually living that dream! We were watching a portable TV with a faint B&W image of Neil Armstrong making that first step live!
1969 was also the first flight of Concorde, by coincidence my aviation career began 5 years earlier and ended just after the last Concorde flight.
14 Dec 1972 Just 41 months after Armstrong and a few hours after our son
Andrew was born, I watched another B&W image of Eugene
Andrew Cernan, as he became the last man to step off the Moon.
1993 Our family spent a day at KSC, watched a rocket launch with a satellite, drove past a Shuttle on Pad 39B, stood beside the preserved Saturn VB Moon Rocket and visited all the historic launch pads on Missile Row.
2012 Next year Andrew Gregor will celebrate his 40 Birthday and I will continue to dream of the day when another man (or woman) will step back onto the Moon! Andrew may live to see that day - maybe I won't.
So perhaps today holds memories of giant achievements in space for us baby boomers, but it is the end of the era laid down by Kennedy. I very much doubt we will see another "Buck Rogers" style space plane that can land on a runway under pilot manual control!
God speed and soft landing Atlantis & crew - its been a great ride.