Give me some space, or at least a little hope.

Byline: Brian McIver

FORTY years ago, it was the giant leap that was supposed to be the start of the space age.The entire world looked to the heavens in July 1969 as Neil Armstrong bounded about as the first man on the Moon.

We saw astronauts playing golf and enjoying lunar sports with javelins and cool little Moon buggies.

So an entire generation of Earthlings started packing their buckets and spades for the space holiday everyone thought we'd be enjoying within a couple of years.

But after Armstrong's giant leap, the last four decades seem to have been a bit of a limp.

Instead of space travel for all, the historic 40th anniversary was marked yesterday by the sight of the Shuttle Atlantis, the planet's most advanced spacecraft, being flown across America on the back of a 747 - getting a lift home like the sad old guy left at the end of the party.

Really? Is this the state of space-age progress in the shiny, silvery, super new 21st century? What happened to Moon hotels, alien space bars, hyperspeed, warp-drive engines and hot astronaut honeys such asWilma in Buck Rogers?

Instead, we have a fleet of satellites which help guide jeeps round car parks and an International Space Station, which seems to be more like an expensive convention centre for rich Star Trek fans.

After Apollo 11, we all expected fleets of Saturn rockets to be parked up and down the country like Easyjet 737s.

But 40 years later, we're only just developing the technology to make flying into space look believable in the movies.

So what happened? Was the Moon landing programme really the high point of human achievement, and then we went backwards? Did the Nasa rocket scientists decide to celebrate the landings in July 1969 by going toWoodstock a month later and taking so many dodgy drugs that they forgot how to actually build spaceships? Maybe the reasons included money, politics or wars. But conspiracy theorists have the easiest answer.

They claim the Moon landings never happened in the first place and were faked, like the movie Capricorn One, where shady Nasa bosses run out of money so have to create a false Mars landing to keep their public funding.

But, as mad as that sounds, wouldn't it be really sad if it turned out to be true, and we didn't actually go to the Moon after all? It'd be just like the moment in Toy Story when space ranger toy Buzz Lightyear discovers he is just an action figure and not a real hero.

Or when you found out that Scotland's win over England in 1967 didn't really make us the champions of the world.

Maybe it's better to believe that it is possible to reach right into space without going to the cinema and that, even if our progress hasn't been as exciting or as stellar as we had hoped, that we're still capable of it. Space has stalled in the last four decades, but maybe now, with the historic anniversary this week, is the time to start dreaming again of incredible journeys to the stars.

Sir Richard Branson'sVirgin Galactic programme, with commercial space flights possibly taking us into space within a year or two, is coming along well and, thanks to film director JJ Abrams, even Star Trek is looking cool these days.

It could just be time to dust off the Moon boots again...

CAPTION(S):

SPACE AGE: Neil Armstrong, Atlantis and Buzz