Tom Hanks remembers the precise moment the moon made his head explode--or at least that's how he describes it. It was December 1972, and Hanks ran home from school to see the transmissions that the Apollo 17 astronauts were beaming back live from the surface of the moon. "There was no lunar module in sight," Hanks says. "All you could see were the astronauts in the distance as the camera panned around this incredibly alien, incredibly desolate place. I was just gone."
A lot of boomers--especially boy boomers--snapped their terrestrial moorings the same way back then. But in the 33 years of space travel...