Man walked on the moon for the first time.
I’ve been reading the original articles right now (here’s what was on the front page of The New York Times on July 21, 1969. Read the article. You can so get the sense of awe and momentous import.)
Here’s an incredible photo of their approach to the landing spot, taken from the lunar module:
And here is the telecast of Neil Armstrong’s descent:
From The New York Times article:
His first step on the moon came at 10:56:20 P.M., as a television camera outside the craft transmitted his every move to an awed and excited audience of hundreds of millions of people on earth.
On this day. This momentous day!! What a moment!
Anyone who remembers this moment in their lives – please share in the comments. I’d love to hear.
No memories of the event to share, alas.. being only a few months on Earth at that point.. but Google has the landings pin-pointed
Zoom in really close for a revelation.
pete – HAHAHAHA
That is so funny!!
Whodathunkit, eh?
I was six years old, and I remember it VERY distinctly. We were sitting in the living room, watching the whole thing live on our early-sixties black and white TV. My sister was three – she didn’t get it. I was terribly nervous something would go wrong, and was overjoyed when it didn’t.
That was also the day Dad (who was teaching summer school at the time) brought home a guitar that some kid had left in his class years before. Eight years later, I fixed that guitar up and taught myself how to play – and it all started that same day. I remember what a red-letter day it was – moon landing AND guitar!
My dad and I built a model of the Saturn V rocket that summer. Fun!
That is great!!! I was less than a year old so I too was alive but have no memories of this event. It still thrills me, however, to see the pics and footage.
July 20, 1969
I was four. Our family had only been in the United States for months. Everything was an adventure for me then. All the things I had never seen or heard or experienced. Street lights, ambulances, baseball, a different language. Yet…
hahaha, that’s great pete! who knew that hollywood backlot was made of that?
I have very strong memories of that day. I was 13 years old. My family(Dad, Mom, sister, and I)had been on a two-week vacation in Myrtle Beach. July 20th is my Mother’s birthday. We were hurrying back to my Grandparent’s house in Beckley, West Virginia for a family birthday celebration, but mostly to see the lunar landing. We knew we had to get there before 5pm if we wanted to see the landing. We got into an enormous traffic jam in Virgina that was caused by a fatal car accident. We were all upset that we wouldn’t get to see the landing, but then we came up to the burning hulk of one of the cars, and a policeman told my Dad that there were two bodies trapped inside. Along with the unforgettable images of the lunar landing, my memories of that day retain that stark picture. I can still see the small burning rectangle that had earlier been a car. We reached my Grandparent’s house just minutes before the touchdown. As usual, their home was filled with local and out-of-town relatives–all of us abuzz with excitement and expectation. There were something like 17-20 of us packed into the small living room. My Grandfather always had a large console TV with enclosed phonograph, radio, and LP storage. We watched(young and old) all night until after the moonwalk was finished. For me, it is an event etched indelibly in my mind. There was an overwhelming sense of pride and wonder, and the feeling that ANYTHING was possible. I felt I lived in a country and world where the future promised unimaginable discovery and invention. One of my aunts took many photos that day of all the different family units. It has helped cement the day in our memories. I am looking at the photo of my family as I write this–my parents so young and attractive, my sister so bright and happy, and me just starting to grow my hair long for the first time—all of us as brown as Cherokees from the beach sun. All of the photos show people alive with the excitement of the day. It is difficult to explain to people who weren’t alive then, or very young, what it felt like. It was so hopeful. If we could go to the moon, what could we not accomplish. Maybe we could defeat disease, prejudice, war, transportation obstacles…anything. We are having a birthday party for my Mom tonight, and I will take these photos with me, so that we can all recall those great days of 1969. Too many of my family members in those photos are not with us anymore, but like that day, my memories of them are unfaded.
DBW – God. Absolutely gorgeous. Thank you for sharing that.
Good to “see” you again, by the way. Have a nice party tonight.
That first picture – the shadow – could it be?
How the hell did Bart Simpson make it onto that ship? He’s older than he looks.
I was 12 and was staying at a friend’s house down the street. We were “allowed” to stay up past our bed times for Neil’s famous step that night. It was truly history in the making on Live TV. Just awesome.
DBW,
Thank you for sharing that wonderful story.
I agree that the absolute beauty of that particualtr day was the hope for the future. That feeling of having reached a different level, another plateau, something higher than imaginable. there was nothing we couldnt do after that day. Nothing. As you say, ANYTHING truly was possible.
Linda – HAHAHA It does look like him!!
I was eight, and we had just moved to Germany, so I was watching it on Armed Forces television, in black-and-white. My parents thought it important enough to allow us to stay up very late (midnight?). But then my mother used to get me up before dawn to watch launches when I was three or four; they understood.
The NY Times story mentions the fact that Neil Armstrong’s heartbeat was elevated during the descent. Buzz Aldrin later explained that as they were descending alarms were flashing on the computer data screen indicating that their primary computer was unable to cope with the data coming in from the landing radar. And then the screen went blank. Mind you, this is at the point where Armstrong is looking for a landing site and the descent engines are rapidly running out of fuel. With Mission Control announcing they have thirty seconds of fuel left, Armstrong is still searching for a place to land. Aldrin estimates they had maybe twenty seconds of fuel left when they touched down.
DBW – exactly – it’s that spirit of hopefulness, of anything is possible, that floods my memories of that day, too. I was 10. I remember Walter Cronkite’s tear as he reported the landing. I also remember that there was all this reporting about whether the surface of the moon was hard enough to land on or would it be all dust and fly up and clog the lunar module’s engines. My parents and grandparents and I watched on a black and white TV, and my dad had read an article in National Geographic how to take pictures of the TV screen so he had his camera on a tripod about two feet from the screen. It was a spectacular day.
You all are making me cry. It’s awesome!!
Apollo 11 blasted off on my eighth birthday so I was old enough to understand not just the obvious stuff but also some of the context. Just by itself, to try to land a man on the moon was huge but there was also the whole space race thing and the national pride of beating the USSR. Success would also be a great tribute to JFK who had set the goal but not lived to see it. I know my parents were very emotional about that, way more than the “beat the Russians” thing. 1969 was a tough time in many ways but here was something we could look at that was noble and arguably man’s greatest achievement and for at least a little while people could set aside war and race and other problems.
My parents bundled all five of us kids (we were ages 5,6,8,9, and 11)into the car and we went over to the grandparents house because they had a color tv and we didn’t. It was a couple hours past our bedtimes but there was no way we were going to miss this event. We all huddled around the tv, us kids in our pj’s, and watched in silence as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon and then we all cheered and clapped and got lost in the moment. We were almost bursting with pride and joy. It was an amazing moment.
I can’t think of anything that has quite equaled it, on a national scale, in the 36 years since. Which is kind of sad in a way.
its amazing how not long ago this was
so much happens so fast
and we forget so quickly what we were like before
a decade ago i didnt know anyone with a cell phone
who did not work for the CIA
actually i did not know anyonei n the CIA either
in only the last decade
look how much the world has changed
the internet was barely worth a hoot a decade ago
and now the world is ruled by it
amazing
Bernard mentioned that the computer in the lunar lander was unable to cope with the flood of data coming in from the landing radar. It’s interesting to look at just how basic this computer (the Apollo Guidance Computer) was:
*RAM (modifiable) memory: 4000 words = 8000 bytes. That’s bytes, not kilobytes or megabytes.
*ROM (fixed) memory: 32K words=64K bytes
*Memory cycle time: 12 microseconds
All of the software required for the mission had to be written to fit in that 64K byte ROM. A real accompishment.
http://www.answers.com/topic/apollo-guidance-computer
I’m just remembering Buzz Aldrin (aged, what, like 70 at least) punching out that schmuck who claimed it was all a hoax staged on a set.
David Foster – wow. It just … boggles the mind. Basically, they just decided to go with the technology available at the time. What courageous pioneers!
I went outside to look at the moon and see if it looked any different.
It DID look different last night: so full, and bright, and just HUGE. :-)