I’ve been keeping this notebook since October 1957. Fifteen and a half years.

Apollo 17 came home in December. The program is over. Skylab is ongoing — the second crew is up there now, and the third crew is training. The Space Shuttle is in development. The program continues.

But the thing I was watching for, the specific thing that Kennedy said we’d do and that I believed we’d do and that twelve million technical complications stood between us and doing — that’s done. The twelve men. The footprints. The rocks. The flag.

I’ve filled four notebooks. This is late in the fourth one and I’m going to move to a fifth if I keep going, and I think before I do that I want to stop and describe what I’ve been.

I’ve been a witness. Not a participant — I never worked in the space program, never stood at a console in Houston, never drove to Cape Canaveral to watch a launch in person. I was in Ohio, reading newspapers and magazines, watching television, filling notebooks with observations and reactions.

But witness matters. History is made by the people who do things and preserved by the people who record them. The astronauts and engineers and flight controllers did the things; their official records and technical reports will survive in NASA archives. But what it felt like, from the outside, from a mid-century American suburb, from a kitchen table in Ohio at 2 AM after the first Moon landing — that’s what these notebooks have been trying to capture.

Betty asked me a few months ago what I was going to do with them. I said keep them. Maybe someday I’d write something from them. Maybe someday someone would find them interesting. She said she found them interesting and I should stop keeping them a secret.

So I will stop keeping them a secret. I’m going to keep writing.

The Space Shuttle will fly sometime in the 1970s. Pioneer 10 will reach Jupiter next year. Pioneer 11 is on its way to Saturn. Voyager spacecraft are planned for Jupiter and Saturn and beyond.

The universe is very large. We’ve only just started.

I’m still paying attention. I’ll be here when the next thing happens.