Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis yesterday.

I don’t have words for this.

I’ve been keeping this notebook since 1957 as a record of the space race. I keep writing about things happening in the country because the space program doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it happens in America, in the 1960s, which is a decade that cannot stop breaking things and breaking people.

Kennedy in Dallas. Grissom, White, and Chaffee on a launch pad. Komarov falling from space. Now King in Memphis.

I’ve been sitting with the fact that I write about rockets here and not about civil rights, which is a choice and a kind of selective attention that I think says something about who I am and who I’ve been. A middle-class white man in Ohio watching the space program, setting aside the other news, telling myself I’ll write about that in some other notebook.

I don’t have another notebook. This is it. And Martin Luther King is dead and the cities are burning tonight and it seems wrong to pretend that the only thing happening in America is the Moon program.

The Moon program is about humanity’s potential. About what people can build and learn and do and reach for. King spent his life on a version of the same question: what can people build, what are we capable of, what do we owe each other in a country that declared all men created equal and then spent two centuries making exceptions.

I don’t know how to hold both of these at once. The extraordinary achievement that is Project Apollo and the ordinary failures that are burning in Harlem and Chicago and Washington tonight. Both are America. Both are real.

I’m going to keep writing about the space program. It matters and I love it and it’s what I’ve been doing. But I’m going to stop pretending that nothing else is happening.

Tomorrow I’ll probably write about Apollo 6. Tonight I can’t.