As this week’s 40th anniversary of the first moon landing fades from memory, let me bother you for one more backward glance before our memories slip again until 2019.

That will be big: the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. By then, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin may be gone, along with the rest of the dozen men who captured a nation’s imagination between 1969 and 1972.

These heroes, all in their 70s, put human footprints on another world, uniting the human race like nothing before or since.

Those who have followed them have built a useful legacy of space shuttles and space stations but nothing to rival the wonder of leaving the bubble of earth orbit.

If we have the vision – and if there is any taxpayer money left after our current spending binge – we may be about to return to the moon to colonize it and may one day see the footprints on Mars that should have been there by now.

Maybe a bit of long-hidden history can remind us of how it felt to set spectacular goals and achieve them. Forty years ago today – July 22, 1969 – a tired but exhilarated Apollo 11 crew was halfway back from the moon. But what if a lunar module malfunction had stranded Armstrong and Aldrin on the gray desert of the Sea of Tranquillity?

In that unspeakable event, President Richard Nixon would have spent this day delivering words written for him by William Safire, who started his career in politics and journalism as a Nixon speechwriter.

On July 18, Safire delivered to Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman a memo chillingly titled, “In Event of Moon Disaster.”

Its stunning words remind us of the risks we took to do something magnificent – not for Teflon or calculator technology or just to beat the Soviets – but for the glorious sake of directing the human exploration instinct toward the stars.

A nation that would have been reeling from the roller-coaster plunge from triumph to tragedy would have heard the president say:

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

“These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

“In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

“In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same – but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

“Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

From a speech never delivered, let us rekindle some fraction of the awe we once felt at the miracle of man in space, shaping from it a new appreciation for those who are there today – and those who will blaze the trails that unify us once again in future moments of human triumph.

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