The Big Read: One giant leap of faith

I have at home a copy of Life magazine that is one week short of 45 years old. On the cover is an astronaut in his stubby, backpacked white suit that now seems simultaneously so sweetly old-fashioned yet somehow still futuristic.

Reflected in his faceless golden visor is the bright white figure of another astronaut and the sharp bent leg - like a bronze spider crab - of the Eagle landing module. In the background is the supersaturated unending blackness of space, and also, still astonishing after all this time, the silver, scuffed, low-lit surface of the moon.

The astronaut isn't Neil Armstrong, it's Buzz Aldrin, because Armstrong took most of the photographs. If it happened today, they'd both be in the frame like a pair of backpackers on some distant windless plain, using a customised rod from the Eagle with a trigger-grip mechanism to hold the camera far enough away to take a picture with their arms around each other's shoulders, and instead of the title "To the moon and back" it would be "One small click for mankind!" or "A selfie out of this world!"

Life brought out its special edition dedicated to mankind's first footfall on the moon a full two weeks after the landing itself on July 20 1969. Today the 14-day wait seems an accomplishment of human self-control at least as extraordinary as the feats that took us up there in the first place. But the result is an astonishingly beautiful and durable artifact of an astonishing moment in the history of our species, an edition that at least one young woman bought and wrapped in plastic and put away in a drawer in case one day she would have a son, and he would want to see it.

I don't know if young children still dream of space, but I did. I couldn't believe my luck in being a living part of the human race just after we went to the moon, rather than just before: it felt as though I had been born into a family of superheroes just becoming aware of their powers. I lay on the grass in the back yard, waving my arms and legs in uncoordinated slow-motion, trying to simulate weightlessness. At night I stared and stared at distant flints and grits of light.

Space made me think about things that would have taken me years to think about otherwise. I pondered distance and vastness and the time it takes to go from here to there, let alone back here again. Once when I was small and he was still alive, I asked my father if he might ever be an astronaut and he said no, he'd be too afraid. I was disappointed. My father was a hero. He was James Bond. How could he be afraid? He said that now that he had me, he would be afraid to be stuck up there, unable to come back down to me. I think my first real understanding of death was formed then, thinking of the long coldness and silence, the exile from the oxygen of love, the distance you can't travel no matter how you try. My father died not long after, and somehow when I think of it I still have the image of a tiny steel speck in orbit, lit by a light from the Earth, and all the airless space between us.

As I grew older I met people with more serious social consciences than mine, who explained that the space race wasn't about wonder and aspiration and fulfilment, but rather Cold War fear and military rivalry, and that tomorrow's space programmes will be about the mineral exploitation of asteroids. They explained that space programmes are iniquitous in a world in which people still starve to death and kill each other, and just think of all the good that mankind could do with that cash. And it made sense, but I think they're wrong to assume a space programme spends money that would otherwise cure Aids. I suspect it spends money that would otherwise build more drones.

Forty-five years ago on Monday we walked on the moon, and I want to experience something like that again - a burst of optimism for the future, a shower of wonder at what we can do when we put our minds to it, a sense that we're all going somewhere, and we have somewhere to go.

When my mother put that Life magazine aside for me, she hadn't even met the man who would become, briefly, memorably, my father. When I see that magazine now, I see an act of optimism. Forty-five years ago humankind sent a man to the moon and brought him back safely again, and my mom, bravely, far below, believed in me.