Forty-three years ago seems like ancient history.

That was 1969. Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president. Gasoline was 35 cents a gallon. You could buy a new car for a little over $3,000. Jerry West was still playing for the Lakers. U.S. troops captured Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. Woodstock was held on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in New York. The 100-to-1-shot Miracle Mets beat the Orioles 5-3 to win the World Series. “Sesame Street” premiered on PBS.

And while it seems so long ago, there were some pretty amazing technological advances that year. The Internet was born. The first artificial heart transplant was performed. And it was the year of the first in vitro fertilization of a human ovum.

We’ve had an incredible flurry of advancements since those amazing milestones. But what struck me this week was the realization that 43 years ago Friday, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong (born not too far southeast of Fort Wayne in Wapakoneta, Ohio) and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in Apollo 11 and walked on its surface while half a billion people around the world watched their images on live television. No human being had ever been in space before 1961. And yet in just eight years we were walking on the moon.

A total of 12 men have landed on the moon. The last of six NASA manned landings with Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17 lifted off the moon’s surface on Dec. 14, 1972 (Cernan was the last human to step off the lunar surface).

What is astounding is how far we have advanced in so many areas of technology and medicine, and yet one of the most incredible accomplishments of modern civilization (“a giant step for mankind”) did not spur us to continue to boldly go where no man has gone before.

When I watched images of Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing up and down on the dusty surface of the moon 43 years ago, my imagination raced with the possibilities of the future. Probably like most Americans, in looking as far ahead as the year 2000 (much less 2012) I thought we’d be colonizing Mars and zipping around the solar system.

While the space shuttle program and the international space station were certainly great achievements, the end of the “space race” in the mid-1970s was a great disappointment.

It took President Kennedy’s determined initiative to commit our resources to the moon back in the 1960s when it looked as though the former USSR was taking the lead. If we don’t have a leader who will commit NASA to such endeavors in the future, it will need to be the genius and vision of private developers who will make it happen apart from government. And perhaps that’s best.

But however we do it, I can’t wait until the next Americans travel to the moon and then — as Buzz Lightyear would say — to infinity and beyond.