I inherited depression from my mother's side of the family. Her father committed suicide. She committed suicide the year before I went to the moon.

The way I see it, what is going to come out of the moon activities is a respect for U.S. leadership.

History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

My Sunday mornings are spent in a recovery meeting in Pacific Palisades.

I've been to the Titanic in a yellow submarine and the North Pole in a Russian nuclear ice breaker.

I was given permission to serve myself Communion, with wine and a wafer, on the surface on the Moon. But I was advised not to say anything about it at the time. Someone had strongly objected to the Apollo 8 crew reading from the Bible. We didn't want to get into any further trouble with the religious critics.

We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way.