Moon landing shows how far our horizons have narrowed

The 50th anniversary of the Moon landing yesterday was a nostalgia-fest for many – 500million people tuned in on July 20 1969 to watch what was possibly the most spectacular event in history, one that radically reconfigured our relationship with the Earth, the sky and the universe.

Although I was born over a decade later, I nonetheless found myself being swept along by commemorative coverage. My own sense of wonder is less at the event itself – my generation has grown up amid far more advanced orbital achievements – and more at the way it captivated the world. Young people in 1969 were obsessed by space, and astronauts were God.

The Moon landing was almost unbearably exciting. John Haines, 66, of Australia, remembered, aged 11, being prevented by a teacher from rushing home to watch. “I skidded through his legs shouting, ‘Sorry sir but I’ve got to see the landing!’” Craig Schwab, 64, of Glendale, New York, described “a state of childhood frenzy”, while Stephen Voce, 56, of Leicester, recalls being so excited “it brought on my asthma”.

Today, it can be hard to remember a time in which young people were obsessed by something as remote from themselves, and their feelings and identities, as space. The talk of the town today at schools, on university campuses, and offices is more likely to be about gender identity, racial oppression and transphobia than about the wonders of science and the mind-boggling nature of human incursions into space.

An obsession with what’s wrong with society has replaced excitement at technological progress.

It’s not that there aren’t people devoted to science and space any more, as the battle between Elon Musk and Richard Branson to send commercial craft to Mars shows. But the sad fact is that millennials are more likely to have an asthma attack about the social rather than the solar system.