I’ve written before about the July night in the Half-Moon Lodge at Warner-Tully Y Camp when I joined about 80 other kids to watch Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the full moon, the real one.

Forty years ago.

The fact that someone had found or brought a TV to Warner-Tully was pretty amazing in itself. It was a 13-inch black and white portable. The camp director put it on top of a spinet piano, wiggled the rabbit ears and we waited and waited — sitting on the concrete floor long past normal lights out — to see the blurry images on a TV that offered blurry images even when the camera wasn’t a quarter-million miles in space. Horseflies batted themselves against the window screens, attempting to get at us.

In those days, we could all recite NASA facts and figures.

Today it’s hard to describe how great the anticipation was and how many years Americans, collectively, sat on the edges of their seats needing to see something done right.

Even as kids, we had the sense that the nation otherwise was coming apart at the seams. Two Kennedys murdered and one Martin Luther King. Civil rights marches and killings punctuated a general racial tension that was increasing by the day. Hippies, drugs, rebellion songs, sit-ins. A president who was almost held prisoner in the White House by protests against an undeclared jungle war in which 10 times as many U.S. soldiers died than have in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Mercury, Gemini and Apollo got us through the 1960s. We were a people of accomplishment after all. We would end a tempestuous decade with a win for bravery and brain-power. Even as kids, we sensed that was pretty important.

This month, Scientific American magazine reminds us that the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon, NASA had nine more manned lunar missions on the drawing board.

Interest, however, waned and fear rose, especially after the near-disaster of Apollo 13. In the mid-1960s, NASA had 400,000 staffers and contractors on its payroll. The year after Apollo 11, the number was down to 190,000 and NASA announced 50,000 more jobs would be cut.

Over the past few days, a lot of the reminiscing has been about whether space programs, then and now, are worth the money.

A dominant feature of a lot of the articles has been to attempt to list practical “spinoffs” of space science. They are amazing and there really are too many to quantify.

• The Owens-Corning fabric created for space suits is now the roofing material for sports stadiums.

• Almost all cordless tools are the progeny of a Black and Decker contract to develop a drill to penetrate the moon’s surface.

• Satellite TV.

• Polarized, scratch-resistant sunglasses.

• Medical imaging devices from MRIs to CAT scans are the progeny of machines developed for applications in space exploration.

These days, hot-dog eating contests get more TV time and viewers than shuttle missions or International Space Station.

It’s summer, so kids are still gathering in the Half-Moon Lodge down at Warner-Tully. I haven’t been there in many years, but I’m told the place is air-conditioned, which probably frustrates the horseflies even more than the window screens. There may even be a big, flat-screen TV for videos and such.

But I imagine — or at least I hope — there are kids in the Half-Moon like we were.

The practical aspects of space exploration or the cost-benefit ratio didn’t matter to us.

In our vocabulary of that day, pretty much all we could say was, “neat” or “cool.”

That summed it up.

Kids then and now need to sense that people can do stuff — good stuff, “impossible” stuff — when they focus and put their minds to it.