“Every impossible dream has to start somewhere,” Alan Bean told an opening day crowd at The Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit celebrating the 40th anniversary of man’s landing on the moon. “Mine started when I came to NASA to become an astronaut.”

In November, 1969, Bean, the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12, was the fourth man to walk on the moon. Since that golden age of space travel, he has gone on to become a successful artist, and several of his paintings are on display in the exhibit, called The Moon: Houston, Tranquility Base Here. The Eagle Has Landed.

“I made up my mind I was not going to be an astronaut who painted, but an artist who used to be an astronaut,” said Bean, who logged 1,671 hours and 45 minutes in space before retiring form NASA in 1981 to pursue an artistic career.

The MFAH exhibit chronicles man’s enduring fascination over five centuries with our nearest planetary neighbor. It includes, in addition to Bean’s work, moonlit landscapes by the Old Masters and the Impressionists, photographs taken on the moon by Apollo 11 crew members, and early scientific instruments, books, maps and objects from NASA.

The exhibit is a reminder of the heady days of the space program, when thousands of Houstonians were directly involved with the Apollo missions to the moon and when the news media covered every aspect of the program.

I was working in the women’s department of The Houston Post at the time, assigned to cover the wives of the Apollo astronauts while their husbands were strapped inside giant rockets in space. I was among reporters and photographers from all over the country camping out in their front yards, hoping for a few words from the women about what was happening on the home front.

We didn’t get much. The wives hid inside as much as possible, leaving their houses in the Nasa Bay area only to rush to their cars to pick up kids at school or other necessary chores.

Theirs was anything but a glamorous life, as several told me in a story I wrote in 1971 about what it was like to be married to an astronaut. The men were the heroes and household names while the wives were very much in the background. It was especially hard being out in public when female fans showered attention on the astronauts and ignored their wives.

“You walk into a bar and some little cookie runs up to him,” Louise Shepard told me, referring to her husband Alan, commander of the Apollo 14 moon landing. “You have to be a very mature person to understand it and not let it bother you.”

Lo Cunningham, who would later divorce her astronaut husband Walt, put it this way: “There are times when I think all astronauts ought to be bachelors.”

People were so fascinated with news and gossip about astronauts and their families that The National Inquirer reprinted my story, as well as another one I wrote about the astronauts’ barber, a pretty blonde who wore hot pants and boots to her shop and called her clients “just a bunch of cute little country boys.”

Now, the anniversary of the first moon landing is creating renewed interest in the astronauts and their families. BBC News recently celebrated the occasion with a series of interviews of 10 Apollo astronaut wives at their 40-year reunion party.

“The cost of Nasa’s mission to reach the moon was borne heaviest by the wives,” noted Sara Cuddon, who produced the program and wrote about it for the BBC News Magazine online. They formed their own support network, the Astronaut Wives Club, to deal with isolation, divorce and depression, and they needed a lot of support. Seven of the 10 wives, as it turned out, ended up divorced from their Apollo astronaut husbands.

The wives’ roles in their husbands’ missions were behind the scenes, of course, and their contributions to the manned moon landings don’t show up in the exhibit. But I’d like to remember them here for the mostly thankless part they played in their husbands’ grand, historic adventures.

The exhibit will run through January 10th, 2010, in the Audrey Jones Beck Building. A series of films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, will be shown in conjunction with the exhibit. For more information, call (713) 639-7300 or click here.