Dear Director of NASA,

I’M writing to let you know that your organisation, NASA, went and broke my heart a long time ago, and I’ve been carrying that broken heart around with me for years, decades now. I should have dumped it back on you long before now, I should have spelled out to you my deep hurt and anger and frustration, and sought some consolation in you knowing, Mr Director, what you did to me, the dreams you gave and took away from me, and how you made me an unsuitable candidate for the ordinary humdrum of life here on Earth!

You see, Mr Director, you were responsible for lighting a fire in my imagination and creating a dream that, for me, nothing could compare with, no matter what I did, no matter what I thought, no matter where I went. You convinced me that we were on the cusp of magic and wonder, that the momentum of Apollo would carry on and carry us out into the universe and that we would see things we could never have dreamed of! You made me fervently believe that one time in my future life I could don a light spacesuit and, long before Matt Damon (above) walk down the sandy floor of the Valles Marineris on Mars on a sunny high summer morning and marvel quietly at where I was... and at the reds and ochres of towering canyon walls around me.

You see, Mr Director, my problem was that I had hitched my star, my hopes, my dreams and my fevered, impatient young imagination to your own journey, one that had taken me with you out into space and to the moon in a few short years. It was a journey that I believed would some day allow me personally to get out there, and look back at the Earth and “feel” and marvel close-up at the universe! You never warned me back when I was a kid that that was never, ever going to happen, you never prepared me, Mr Director, for the biggest let-down of my young life!

I can’t blame you entirely, Mr Director, Stanley Kubrick back in 1968 was as much to blame! He bought into the euphoria of limitless possibilities and portrayed 2001 as the year of our greatest imaginative leap — when one of us tramping around on the moon would stumble on evidence that we are not alone! Nobody thought at the time of its release that the PanAm moon ferry, or the extensive and busy moon-base, of 2001: A Space Odyssey was science fiction. After what Apollo had achieved in just eight years from a standing start, the following 30 years to 2001 would definitely have brought these, and a lot more, to pass.

Now in 2017, these things are indeed “science fiction”. Your once mighty organisation is a neglected shadow of its former self, you can’t even loft a man or woman into low Earth orbit, your budgets have slowed the pace of development of a new generation of spaceships such that I doubt I’ll even ever again see footprints on another world — even on TV. But don’t worry, Mr Director, I’ve caged my dreams and am trying every day to wrestle my imagination out of the clouds, out of the stars and back down to Earth — but, I have to say, Mr Director, it hasn’t been easy!

Michael Michael Guilfoyle, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16 (PS: I have to say though, Mr Director, thanks for the ride, it was great while it lasted.)