40 years ago.

For those of us of a certain age (old) we remember where we were on July 20, 1969. If you have to ask what that date means, you're either too young to have any idea or just not paying attention. For children of the space age like me, the program was standard viewing, and in spite of all the hype surrounding the passing of Walter Cronkite, I was an ABC News kid. Either I liked Jules Bergman or we got better reception on channel 6 than we did channel 10. I think it was the latter.

I was an 11-year old, perched in front of the TV until I got tired enough to give into sleep. I remember my mother yelling down from her bedroom for me to "turn the TV off and go to bed." She failed to grasp the gravity (pun) of the situation. To a kid, it was better than cartoons.

Since we like even numbers, we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of men walking on the moon. We didn't celebrate 39 and probably won't celebrate 41. That would be senseless, right? It's nice, but it's also sad that we went all that way, did it 4 more times and then stopped. Like a child who loves that new toy, tires of it and puts it back in the box.

The point, of course, was to be the first. After that, subsequent missions were anticlimactic, even though we eventually brought a vehicle up there to drive around. How cool was that?

We like being first at stuff, and it ate our collective American hearts out that the Russians were beating us into space. So much so, that President Kennedy told the nation that, before the end of the decade we will land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth. I always thought that somebody reminded him to add the "return him safely to the earth" part. Oh yeah, got to bring them back, right? Although, I wonder how history would have viewed the event if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were stranded on the moon as permanent monuments to America's manned space program?

We spent a lot of money on that program. Billions, I suppose. I remember hearing skeptics saying that we should be spending the money here at home instead of using it to venture into space. Well skeptics, we aren't blasting into space much anymore, and we spend a fraction of what we used to spend, and how are things at home? Right.

The History Channel took a shot at drama tonight. They aired a program called Moonshot, which at times played loose with the facts, but generally was an interesting dramatization of the events leading up to the Apollo 11 mission. It was probably more interesting to people under the age of 50 who might not remember very much.

One fascinating thing was a continual ad for Omega watches, the ones supposedly worn on the moon. At the end of the ad, they promoted a web site: http://www.jfklibrary.com/ where you are supposed to go to get "further information." What you get is a cheap looking advertising screen full of discount watch retailers, airline flights and houses for sale. The "moon watch" can be had for $270 (regular price $295 - you save $15) plus $15 postage and handling. Of course, the real JFK Library, of course, is http://www.jfklibrary.org/.

Proving that, regardless of the passage of time, our capability to turn a profit from history is as infinite as the Universe.