It’s 3 a.m. Wednesday, July 17, and I awaken to intense light from the full moon streaming through my bedroom window. It brings an eerie brightness that is familiar but still miraculous. This moonbeam, which took 1.3 seconds to travel some 250,000 miles to earth, seems directed at me alone. And yet, of course, I know that across our planet moonlight is playing similar tricks on my fellow humans who feel the moon has also singled them out for a special connection to cosmic light.

The moon is on my mind this week, 50 years after many of us watched the televised coverage of the historic Apollo 11 lunar mission. About one third of Americans alive today experienced the July 16, 1969 lift-off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the remarkable lunar landing four days later. But the stunning photos taken during the mission permanently transformed, for generations to come, the views both of planet Earth and of our lunar neighbor.

The current widespread media coverage offers new visual and written opportunities for all generations to experience the remarkable achievements of that special space journey — the incredible engineering precision that made it possible but still high risk, and the courage of the three astronauts who set off on an experimental journey into the heavens where man had never gone before.

It’s worth wallowing a bit in the myriad 50th anniversary celebrations, including nonstop coverage on NASA TV. For me, most exciting is the historic grainy, black-and-white footage of the first men walking on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. While the oft-quoted words of Neil Armstrong, as he left the Eagle Lunar Module and put his left foot on the moon’s surface, live on — “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” — they sound a bit wooden today.

But I love skipping through more than two-and-a-half hours of footage, as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk and talk with NASA ground control about the experiments they are doing, pick up moon rocks and dirt (47.5 pounds worth), and plant the American flag. I’d forgotten about the sign they also left behind, which has words worth repeating in today’s war-torn world: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Between 1969 and 1972, 12 American men (and zero women) from six Apollo missions walked on the moon. None have done so since. Amid the nostalgia over the 50th anniversary is an ongoing debate about sending humans to the moon again and whether it is worth the cost and risk. Many argue that unmanned space travel has been much more effective in gathering immense amounts of important scientific information about our solar system. For example, since its June 2009 launch, the lunar reconnaissance orbiter has made 40,000 trips around the moon, providing exquisitely detailed photos to map its surface.

But NASA has bigger plans ahead and has already started an ambitious new lunar program, called Artemis, after the goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology who was Apollo’s twin sister. NASA says it intends to send the first woman and next man to the moon by 2024, and even more audaciously, to establish a sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028. At a time of strained federal budgets and political spending wars, sustained government support for Artemis remains in question. Meanwhile, the private sector’s jump into the space race is also opening a new, and less predictable, era in human commercial space travel.

Will the massive, nostalgic media coverage of the 1969 Apollo mission generate a new wave of enthusiasm for space travel among today’s American public? A new, and more diverse, generation of potential 21st century space explorers — whether astronauts or tourists — is waiting in the wings for answers.

Cristine Russell is a science journalist and seasonal resident of Chilmark.