In May 1961, I watched Alan Shepard ride a Redstone rocket into space for fifteen minutes on a television in a department store window. He was the first American in space. He was thirty-seven years old.

Today, Alan Shepard landed on the Moon. He is forty-seven. It took ten years to get him there, and most of that time he was grounded — an inner ear condition called Ménière’s disease kept him out of the cockpit and off the flight roster for most of the 1960s. He managed the astronaut office, he trained others, he watched his colleagues fly while he stayed on the ground. Then surgery corrected the condition, and he was cleared to fly again, and he lobbied for a command.

He got Apollo 14.

The landing in the Fra Mauro region went smoothly. Shepard is the commander; Ed Mitchell is the Lunar Module Pilot; Stuart Roosa is orbiting above in the Command Module. Shepard and Mitchell landed the Lunar Module in a region that the original Apollo 13 crew was supposed to have explored. Lovell and Haise never got there. Shepard and Mitchell made it for them.

His first words on the lunar surface were not as choreographed as they might have been. He looked around and said: “It’s been a long way, but we’re here.” That’s it. That’s ten years and a medical grounding and surgery and the patience of a man who watched everyone else go first while he waited, and he put it all into six words: It’s been a long way, but we’re here.

He is forty-seven years old. He is the oldest person to walk on the Moon. I think he will always be the oldest person to walk on the Moon in this program.

I have been following Alan Shepard since that day in front of Caldwell’s department store in 1961. The television in the window. The crowd on the sidewalk. Fifteen minutes. The first American in space. And now he’s on the Moon. In between: Mercury, a medical grounding, administrative work, surgery, long waiting, and Apollo 14. Ten years, from orbit to the Moon.

Ten years ago, the Moon landing was a presidential promise that many people thought was impossible. Today it happened for the third time, and the man who started it all — the first American to go to space — is standing in the Fra Mauro highland region in a spacesuit, looking at Earth hanging in the black sky, ten years later.

It’s been a long way. But he’s there.