[T]he American past is rich with breakthroughs that were both sublime performances and world-changing scientific leaps. To borrow a phrase from the historians David Nye and Perry Miller, Apollo was a peak example of the “technological sublime” — a moment, characteristic of American history, when a feat of technical mastery inspires a feeling of near-religious awe. But the classic examples were not purely aesthetic: The steamship, the railroad, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyscraper, the jet airplane … these were all transformative as well as awesome, more than operas to be appreciated for their artistry alone.

So the fact that Apollo promised something similar and then failed, at least for our time, in the face of space’s vastness, feels like a crucial inflection point in the American story — one manifested since in the decline of the technological sublime into the simulated sublime of the Marvel Universe, or the nostalgic sublime of the Space Shuttle’s retirement flight, or the pocket-sized sublime of the iPhone.

Whatever happened to those faces in the old photographs? They did something great, in keeping with the best spirit of this often great, sometimes wicked, always remarkable country, and in so doing they also reached a ceiling on human daring, a so-far closed frontier.