You mean back when when we had leaders who Made America First?
About 1972 I had a Geology class for a science elective. The professor had been in the Astronaut program, which would have taken scientists like him into space.
He was a fantastic science teacher. Took us to field sites, to see first hand. Also constructed models in the lab, to witness geologic processes.
I worked in the oil business for a reservoir engineer, and a geologist at that time. Both had MS degrees.
I grew up in the tidewater of MD, so I had seen a lot of the basic sedimentological processes. In college I got to learn what they were called and find out some of the physics behind why they did what they did. Great stuff, when you spent your whole life around nearshore sedimentation. The weekends we didn't spend in the field on coursework, we spent doing something related, whether it was caving, climbing, or just out hunting 'goodies' (mostly fossils, but some minerals or rock specimens for the Department, too).
You could tell who would head for an office right away when they graduated, because they were the 'groaners' who whined at the idea of another field day. There were those of us who had a ready bag good to go and would leave at a moment's notice, whether to just go see, to collect, or to go climbing or caving. We got a reputation for blowing off frat parties and going caving instead ("You can't do that at night!" was the comment we howled at--"It's dark in there, anyway, who cares!" the retort.) and we had a 24 hour caving crew list of people who would be interested unless they absolutely had something else they HAD to do. Those years were a lot of work but the more you saw, the more you learned, and it was great.
I have worked since 1979 (as a mudlogger first to get to know what was going on), and then as a consulting wellsite geologist, in ND, MT, WY, SD, UT, CO, and NV, mostly in the Williston Basin. I have had the opportunity to work in a few different regions, different reservoirs, and was in on directionally drilled wells early on and working horizontals as a consulting geologist in 1990. It has never been dull, so no regrets except that we could have been so much farther into space, and we would not have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing poverty instead of putting people to work and seriously reducing it.
Even worse, though, for a space age brat, was the idea that people stopped dreaming. Content to watch it on the big screen, they gave up the idea that they could be part of going from here to there, that essential need to see what is over the next hill that has driven human advancement for a very long time. Instead, people started 'exploring' their own constructs and lost their wonder for the universe.
