As a boy, I was preoccupied with the Space Race, and shared the excitement and optimism that came with the moon landings.
However, not everyone shared this enthusiasm for what was a hugely expensive ambition, at a time when America was poring vast sums into either bombing Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, or blasting a handful of men into deep space.
My youthful self was therefore always disappointed when television discussions of the Lunar landings always had to include someone who opposed the adventure, like the head of Oxfam, or acerbic journalist James Cameron, usually delivering impeccable arguments along the lines of how the West's economic extravagence sat in contrast with the existing, and treatable wrongs in the world like third world poverty.
By the third world, they included places like India and China, where there were thousands dying of starvation and disease, deprived of the resources that the West was seen to fritter away on consumerism and nationalistic follies on a previously unseen scale.
Imagine, then, my unease with the zeitgeist, that I have lived long enough to witness headlines like "Banglore to train astronauts".
Yes, not only do we hear that the world's best hope of surviving the oncoming recession is the ameliorative impact of the burgeoning Indian, Chinese and Brazilian economies, but that these sleeping giants are themselves now establishing their own superpower credentials by putting on superpower displays of their own. And nothing says superpower like a space programme!
Meanwhile, the former Cold War superpowers, no longer reliant on each other to provide an adversary, regress into nineteenth century sphere of influence foreign policies to reassure themselves of that they still count.
Ho Hum!
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