The Night Vietnam Landed on the Moon
I told them.
I told them when I was in Vietnam during my first visit there in December 2016. I told them at a talk I gave to the leadership of its new “rocket to the future,” the smart city of Binh Duong. I told the big shots from its government what they were building.
I told them that in my country (the USA), the hope of the tortured 20th Century was given a boost by the landing on the Moon. It gave people everywhere a new sense of hope, a feeling of possibilities and wonders to come. The technology that flowed from the innovations that had to take place to get men on the Moon, over time, became part of the global economy and embedded in the world we live in today, especially the world of communications. It fed engineering schools new, inspired students who wanted to go to work for NASA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or General Foods, makers of Tang, the first orange drink mix the astronauts had with them in space! It enabled young, aspiring poets like me to wonder about the workings and nature of the universe, which had opened up like the clouds of a Renaissance painting.
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