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When I grew up, I saw the moon landing, and I was fascinated watching them as a child, and that's what really turned me onto space and science fiction, and I started watching things like 'Lost In Space,' and that led me to 'Star Trek,' which was a major influence on my life.

The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic.

For a deeper interest in the Moon than I ever felt before.

One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.

I've always loved airplanes and flight. The space program was really important to me as a kid. I still have a photo of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon in my living room.

We got to the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, at the end of a poor year for this country. We had Vietnam. We had civil unrest. We had the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. But we went around the moon and saw the far side for the first time. A script writer couldn't have done a better job of raising people's hope.

'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.

We've all heard about space and landing on the moon, but somehow it's a very tom-boyish adventure. It's planting the flag on the moon by Neil Armstrong, and it has this very male-hero edge to it.