Actually it's tomorrow, but I look back on Ed White's spacewalk as a birthday present that I received as a kid. True, I opened the present a couple of weeks later when Life magazine printed the color pictures, but memory has a way of consolidating events. What mattered was that the mission took place around my birthday, and that's how I'm content to remember it.

A few months earlier we'd seen the grainy, monochrome, stop-action film of Alexei Leonov conducting the first EVA, but the medium conveyed a message of unreality. It took images of Ed White in glorious full color, floating above a deep blue Earth, pristine white spacesuit and golden visor, to bring home the reality of a man floating in space outside the capsule.

Alan Shepard's toothy grin, Ed White's spacewalk, the full Earth from Apollo, Earthrise over the Moon, Buzz saluting the flag...those for me are the iconic images of the first space age.

Thanks, Raoul.