I was 3 years old, almost 4. We only had a small black and white tv at home. Even though it was the Monday after the actual moon landing the night before, My dad was off from work, so he took my older brother and I to one of the television stores in the downtown area of the city we grew up. All of the stations were replaying the footage from the night before.
I remember walking around the store. There were probably 30 different size televisions all playing the broadcast. I was mesmerized watching the footage of the Neil Armstrong walking on the surface of the moon, which was almost incomprehensible for a 3 year old.
While I was only 3, and most of my understanding came from my parents and TV broadcasts, this was a time of much national pride for Americans, in accomplishing such a feat. The astronauts were considered and still are national heroes.
I remember continuing to follow the US space program, including the 5 subsequent moon landings, the shuttle program, and its ultimate demise.
A couple of years ago, I was working with a woman, who was the grand daughter of Alan Shephard. She was very private about her relationship with her grandfather. And was very reluctant to share who he was. She was very proud of him and his accomplishments.
Who knows if mankind will explore in that way again, or will it all be done by machines?
The first transistor radio came out in 1954. The first commercial transistor-based computer came out in 1957. TTL logic integrated chips came out in 1963.
Believe it or not, NASA had heard of this stuff.
The Space Race played a key role in the miniaturization of transistor-based equipment. Smaller, faster, less power consuming all go together.
My parents were on vacation in Colorado so my sisters and I watched the landing with my maternal grandparents.I was fourteen. My grandfather was not quite sixty-nine, having been born just barely in the 19th century, October of 1900. And he lived to see guys walking on the moon.
I was so keyed up that my brain would not process what the eyes were taking in. I kept asking, where is it? because all I could see was blobs of gray, white, and black. A little while later we saw the repeat and I could SEE it. It was clear here in NE Kansas, I went outside and looked up at the moon, knowing there were people up there.
Apollo 11 happened almost exactly one month before I was born*. I grew up in the afterglow of Apollo.
Was a high school junior when the Challenger blew up. That was the first big blow to the space program and the first fatalities after the long years of nothing but success. I took the news hard.
On a happier note, I’m working on my PhD at Purdue University, in aerospace engineering, and we’re having a lot of celebrations this summer: 50th anniversary of the moon landing (various speakers including Gene Kranz are coming!) and 150th anniversary of the founding of the university. Good times.
*Oh, and my own 50th anniversary is coming this summer too.
I’m old enough to remember when NASA had exactly 7 astronauts, the “original 7” or “Mercury 7”: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. I had a book that I loved with lots of color pictures that predated the first manned space flight, and described all the preparations that the Mercury 7 were going through. I religiously followed every space light from Mercury through the Gemini series to the final Apollo series.
Slide rules, yes, vacuum tubes, no. Vacuum tube mainframes no doubt played an engineering role in the early days of rocketry, but as already noted, solid-state computers were in use throughout the manned space program, on the ground and in flight. The transition to solid-state second-generation mainframes happened at the end of the 1950s; by the time Kennedy announced the moon program, which launched the entire manned space program initiative, second-generation mainframes like the IBM 7090 were well established, and so were even solid-state minicomputers like the PDP-1. In fact the industry made the transition from second to third generation mainframes well before the first moon landing.
I was able to visit the Kennedy Space Center museum last year. The old rocket hardware is awe-inspiring. Much of the stuff looks like it could have been made in some reasonably crafty person’s garage. It all looks so primitive and bulky compared to, say, a mid-70s Toyota. Bravery doesn’t begin to describe what it would take to climb into that gear sitting atop an enormous bomb and head off (if you’re ‘lucky’) into a void relying pretty much entirely on some land lubber’s geometry skillz to get you home alive. And the rockets are a lot smaller in person than you’d think.
All these mentions of slide rules leads me to say that I still have a slide rule, and know how to use it! Of course I seldom actually do take it out, but I have one.
Also an abacus. I am not as proficient on that, but it is kind of fun.
I remember that night well. My parents took the portable B/W TV out on the patio so we could see the moon while we watched, as if we could actually see anything! My parents, and the adult neighbors, understood the significance but us kids lost interest fast and ignored their pleas to “pay attention, this is important!”
I always liked the wall poster that was available in hippie neighborhoods in 1969-70 that was the newspaper full front page photo of the moon landing with the headline replaced by “SO WHAT?”
But that’s just me. I was also disenchanted about the ancient symbol of virginity and The Female being violated by a big phallic U.S. rocket during the Nixon Presidency.
My Father and I were looking at the moon with my 3 1/2 telescope the day after the launch of Apollo 11. Some neighbors driving by asked if we could see the spacecraft. Dad explained to them it was like shooting ducks, hitting a moving target.
I turned 8 on 19 July 1969, and already the space race was the first thing for which I ever experienced full geekout mode, something so grand, so literally Far Out. I was insatiably consuming material well beyond my putative reading level, because I wanted to know all about this. And here it was, the Main Attraction itself. (Complete with a local papers human interest nexus since back at the start of WW2, a General J. Lawton Collins had been Army commander for Puerto Rico and a certain son of his had attended Junior High at San Juan.)
Anyway… I watched the moon landing with my first bf and his family. I think his younger siblings slept through it, since it was way past their bed time.
