Forty years ago today — 11 years before I was born — Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the LM Eagle and became the first human to ever step foot onto a celestial body. Stop and think about that for a minute. For uncounted millennia, people had looked up at these strange lights in the sky, weaving fantastic yarns to explain their origin and composition. But now we were there. It really was one giant leap for mankind. Throughout my life, it's served as an inspiration. At one point in my youth, in fact, I wanted to join NASA and get onto the first manned mission to Mars. I had it all planned; on the way there, I'd convince everyone else to go along with the plan. Whether it was me or not who stepped off the ladder first and made the historic speech didn't matter, but whoever it was would step onto the Martian regolith, start in with the speech, and then interrupt his or herself, saying something like "Did you see that? I swear that rock just moved!" Then a black form would zoom by the camera, and the screams would start. More forms zoom by the camera, one of them knocking it over; and as the screams grew to a crescendo, we'd cut the feed back to Earth, coming back on 8 hours later to cheerfully say "Only kidding!" and getting on with the mission as normal while the people of Earth recover from their collective heart attack. I mean, come on, we'd be on Mars! Who would be able to stop us? It would have been glorious.

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