1968 is over. I’ve been sitting with it for a week, trying to figure out what kind of year it was.

The honest answer is: both. The worst year and the best year. The year America seemed to break, and also the year three Americans reached the Moon.

What happened in 1968: The Tet Offensive. Lyndon Johnson announcing he would not seek re-election. Martin Luther King assassinated in Memphis. Robert Kennedy assassinated in Los Angeles. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police beat protesters on national television. Richard Nixon elected president. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. 16,889 American deaths in Vietnam — the highest single-year total of the war.

And also: Apollo 7 proving the redesigned capsule worked. Apollo 8 reaching lunar orbit. Three men reading Genesis from 240,000 miles away on Christmas Eve. An astronaut photographing the Earth rising above the Moon.

How do you hold those two things together? You don’t, exactly. They’re both real. They’re both America in 1968. The same country that produced the National Guard in Chicago produced Gene Kranz in Houston. The same year that killed King and Kennedy sent Borman and Lovell and Anders around the Moon.

I’ve been keeping this notebook since 1957 as a record of the space program, but 1968 is the year I couldn’t pretend it was only about the space program. It’s about America, and America in 1968 was a complicated place to live.

The Moon landing, if and when it comes, will not fix what’s broken. It won’t end the war. It won’t bring King or Kennedy back. It won’t make the country’s racial fractures heal. Anyone who says “if we can go to the Moon, why can’t we solve [problem X]” is mixing metaphors — the Moon is a technical problem with a solution that money and engineering can reach. The country’s other problems are moral and political and require different kinds of will.

But it matters anyway. The Moon matters. Not as a solution to anything. As evidence that people are capable of extraordinary things when they commit to them clearly and work toward them honestly and don’t give up.

I needed that evidence in 1968. I received it on Christmas Eve.

1969. The landing attempt. The hardest part.

I’m ready.