NO On that summer morning in 1969 when Neil Armstrong went for a stroll on the moon, my father got us all out of bed so that we could watch those cloudy steps on an uncertain black and white television set. If you weren't alive then, it's hard to convey the sense of exultation that people felt at this achievement. President Richard Nixon made a rare stab at the truth when he crowed: 'This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation'. He was simultaneously having a dig at the Soviet Union, of course, but there really was a feeling that anything - anything - was now possible.
But the euphoria evaporated pretty rapidly. It's funny how Armstrong just managed to take his small step right at the end of the 1960s, which was a decade of mellow belief in mankind, even if you didn't inhale. The 1970s coincided with so many gloomy events and heartsinking buzz words (think Vietnam, OPEC, Belfast, Munich Olympics) that people lost the will to look heavenwards. Everyone plodded around in their three-day week darkness and complained that NASA spent too much money. Costs were the final frontier.
In the meantime, however, that fuzzy television set from my childhood became a lot clearer. And microwave ovens brought heat-deflector shields into kitchens. And satellites made mobile phones and CNN a living reality, about which you might have severe reservations but I hear that they've improved some people's lives. And computers - well, I remember reading somewhere that the entire technology which got Neil up there doing his moonwalk would now fit on a microchip the size of Michael Jackson's nose.
And the point is that even though Challenger ended up in smithereens, and nobody's moved into a condo on the moon just yet (although apparently there's some entrepreneur merrily selling moon plots to anyone flaky enough to purchase), we've benefited in a million ways from the space programme. Those are the hard facts, chilly but useful. That's not counting what it's also done for the spirit of human endeavour.
Quaint notion, isn't it? Human endeavour usually means dying Scott writing his Antarctic diary or men in goggles with bits of balsa wood, flapping on a cliff-edge. It's connected to the romantic past. But there's glory and courage in space exploration, too. If you doubt me, read an extraordinary book called The Diving Bell And The Butterfly. The man who wrote it, Jean-Dominique Bauby, had a stroke in 1995 and could only communicate by blinking his left eyelid. He was locked within his body but his imagination soared. He died earlier this year. In his final paragraph, he writes: 'Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? ... We must keep looking. I'll be off now.' YES From time immemorial, some men have been plagued by a burning urge to boldly go where no man has gone before. I understand and sympathise completely. Once, in primary school, I boldly went to have a look in the girls' toilets, and received a caning for my troubles.
But my brave excursion into a terrifying and unknown dimension cost nothing, apart from a sore rear end and a slightly bruised dignity. It did not cost taxpayers umpteen billion dollars - unlike NASA's forays into the void.