Christmas came and went and I found myself at Betty’s parents’ house on Christmas Day explaining the lunar module to her brother Dale, who wanted to know if it was like a flying saucer.

Dale is 24 and works in an auto parts store and has a general awareness that the space program exists but could not tell you anything specific about it. He’d heard about the astronauts and the rocket and had the vague impression that we were going to the Moon “soon,” but the details were a blank.

So I tried to explain it. The command module, the service module, the lunar module. The role of each. Why the lunar module is separate from the command module. Why you need an ascent stage and a descent stage. Why the whole thing is too heavy to land on Earth.

Dale listened, nodding, and then said, “So the Moon part doesn’t come back?” And I explained no, only the capsule at the top comes back, the rest gets left behind. And he thought about that for a moment and said, “That seems like a waste.”

I tried to explain the physics of it — that having a separate lightweight vehicle for the Moon landing is vastly more efficient than trying to land the whole mission on the Moon — but Dale was already moving on to whether Bonanza was going to be on television later.

I told Betty about this on the drive home and she pointed out that most people probably have Dale’s level of knowledge, not mine. That I’ve been living with this for nine years now and it’s obvious to me in a way it’s not to people who don’t follow it obsessively.

She’s right. I sometimes forget that “rendezvous,” “translunar injection,” “command module,” and “lunar orbit insertion” are not part of most people’s working vocabulary. I’ve been absorbing the mission planning details for years and it feels natural to me.

This is why public communications matter. The program needs people to understand what it’s doing, not just cheer for it abstractly. If nobody knows what the lunar module is or why it exists, they can’t understand the achievement when it happens.

Gemini ends next month. Apollo begins. What comes next is the thing I’ve been building toward in this notebook since 1957.

I hope Dale is watching.