One morning, about 2am in one of the Mission Control rooms at JSC, I was sitting next to two semi-retired flight controllers managing a simulation. They went back to Apollo.

One of my 20-something peers walked back to our row where the pizza boxes lay, ruffled through them, sighed “its all cold” and walked back to his terminal.

Now, we’d been doing this for weeks.

Old fart #1 turns to #2 and says under his breath “You know, I gave up my marriage and kids to get us to the moon”

And so they did.