When the lunar module Eagle landed on the moon 40 years ago, I was in Denver with my five sisters, mom and dad watching the blurry, ghostly images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin tentatively walk on a barren sea called Tranquillity. The excitement in our living room was palpable. The seemingly impossible goal that President Kennedy charted out eight years before had just happened. I felt emboldened, empowered and infused with the notion that anything is possible.
The previous summer I experienced my own exploration awakening, having the opportunity to study invertebrates at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. As a Colorado native, I was astounded to discover a wealth of life in oceans. It was a world filled with incredible diversity of forms and functions, from sea stars to lobsters to exotic small creatures, many of whose daily rhythms were profoundly linked to the far away moon and its influence on the Earth’s tides.
The Apollo triumph had an unexpected impact on how we view our oceans. It energized a new focus on the vast unexplored regions of our own home planet. And through iconic images like the Apollo 8 "Earthrise photo," an entire generation was inspired to cherish and protect our planetary home, which from the perspective of space is an ocean-dominated world.