QotD: Moonwalk

Tell us about the first time you walked on the Moon.

Weightlessness, floating, Earth as a big blue marble, blah, blah, blah. You tourists take your mass-produced, hermetically-sealed memories over to the SpaceHugs.com forums where they belong, among the weekend-warrior comet chasers and Kbelt-surfers. My biggest problem is that I can't decide what I liked more about my first time: wiping Neil Armstrong's footprint off the face of the moon, or wiping the smirk of space superiority off the face of USians once and for all.

I told Darcy there was no way I was down with the plan unless I was the one who got to get out onto the surface. And of course there wasn't really a "plan" as much as there was a vague idea. But the idea was enough when on day three of base construction a massive radio failure effectively took out the robots for the better part of eight hours. No one noticed when two low-level techs and one service buggy levved away from the build site. Or at least, no one cared.

So the first time I walked on the moon was in the exact same spot where Neil Armstrong walked on the moon fifty-six years previously. I didn't have any pithy remarks planned, but "that's one giant kick in the ass for mankind" sufficed as I kicked up and stamped out that outdated symbol of space-race superiority. Now my size 12 Nike-logo moonboot print is there, a detail the cowards in Nike's marketing department have failed to capitalize on for the past thirty years.
 

Anyway, it was a good thing we thought to bring a blower, because stamping out all of the footprints in that area, while satisfying, would have taken forever. We switched the American flag for one with the letters "Mtv" on it - probably less than a dozen people got that reference, but Darcy was insistent.

We upped the video to YouTube and the whole thing sort of pissed off the mission commanders - not because of the footprint, but because they were afraid we might have damaged the buggy. But it's not like they could eject us into space or anything. At worst we could have been docked some pay, but they never even bothered. Everyone else called me "Buzz" for the rest of the mission, which cracked me up.

The vid had made the rounds by the time we got back Earthside and while much of the world laughed the Americans were naturally pissed. Well, the American government types were, anyway. Most regular Americans were too busy earning a living. But there was nothing they could do - they were in no position to get people back to the moon. Oh god, remember the Boot Plan? They had Armstrong's original suit, and some Florida politico put forth the idea to send it to the moon in an unmanned ship, and have some robot drive it out and stomp it in the original location. That idea was declared extremely lame by Congress, not that they could have paid for it anyway.

I've been accused of doing it for the money. Sure, I've been more or less living off this incident for the last thirty years, and I'll keep milking it until it is dry and then some. But that's just because I'm an opportunist. The real story is simply that I'm petty. Some say building a moonbase was proof enough of who really won the space race. I say it's not a real victory until you crank up the humiliation factor.

My only regret is not finding those damn golf balls. Christ, I would have got a fortune for those things on eBay.