41 years ago today, we took the first faltering steps into the Universe. Thank you, guys. Especially Michael, who stayed behind.
I remember watching that. A bunch of us neighborhood kids were gathered around the tv at my house because this was something you had to watch as a group!
A scant nine days later I got my learner’s permit. The world has not been safe since. 
I can’t believe I forgot what day it is! Been working too hard…
I can’t say I have a clear memory of the landing. I think I saw it, and certainly I saw the footage over and over. But memory fades. I do remember the whole school being called into the auditorium to watch the Apollo XIII splashdown.
Even then, I knew it was fake. 
j/k
I was only nine but it’s still is one of the memories that will never fade.
I remember watching footage of some of the [various Apollo missions] coverage either at home or at school, but I remember nothing about the first landing. Most likely, I was with my uncle fishing that day. What I do remember very vividly about the missions was this classic commercial.
I was still cookin’. The math works out, I’ll be 41 in November.
It was very sunny here that summer day. We had a crappy black and white TV that got it’s signal via antenna, and when it was sunny the signal was usually bad. But that day the signal was clear.
A 12 year old boy sat a few feet away from where I sit now, and sat still and watched for an hour or more. Amazed at it all. Mom was in the kitchen and the rest of the family was gone somewhere, so the boy watched it all alone.
Then I went back outside to play, just a little bit different than I was before.
I was glued to the TV with the rest of the family. It was one of those “Walter Cronkite takes his glasses off” moments.
1969 was also the year of the first flight of the 747 and the Concorde. It was if the human race could do anything it set it’s mind to.
There were a lot of problems in the world in 1969. But when you’re a little boy, watching every launch, being around airplanes, seeing the new machines that were coming out, learning about SEALAB, watching the Jacques Cousteau shows whenever they were on… It was a magical time.
What’s weird to me is that 1969 has always seemed like ancient history, waaaay before I was born.
But thinking about it, I was born in 1977, less than eight years after Apollo 11. Eight years is nothing - I’m still in the same job and living in the same house as I was eight years ago. Maybe 1969 isn’t that prehistoric after all.
I was 3 1/2 years old. Everyone (even some of the neighbors) had gathered around the crappy black and white TV we had at the time. My mother kept asking me if I understood that men were walking on the moon, the same moon that we looked up in the sky at. I understood it was a big deal, but only because everyone was making a big deal out of it. I was only 3 1/2. You say men walk on the moon? Ok, if you say so. You say milk comes from cows? Ok, if you say so. Same thing. I had nothing to compare it to, so I just took the word of the adults.
I watched it, I remember it, and it was only later that I truly understood the significance of it.
For years, I thought that the countdown they were periodically announcing was the time left until landing. Many years later I learned that they were actually counting down the seconds of fuel that they had remaining. I watched it live, and thought everything went perfectly. I watched clips of it again and again as I grew older, and still thought everything went perfectly. It was only as an adult that I learned how close they had come to running out of fuel and crashing.
It was my third birthday. I don’t remember it, but there’s a family legend that I’ve posted before - I was still using my pacifier, and my parents told me that something amazing was going to happen tonight, something the whole country had sacrificed to make happen, that a man was going to walk on the moon, that one up in the sky.
They said that the only way it would succeed is if everyone in America continued to sacrifice, and they said that maybe my sacrifice would be to give up my pacifier?
Apparently, I did, and never used it again.
I was almost 7 at the time and don’t remember it. I thought for years that I had watched it in the school gym with everyone else, but it happened too late in the evening for that, so I must have watched Apollo 12 which would have been in the mid-afternoon, EST.
I’m assuming my parents just put me to bed for Apollo 11 not understanding how my lack of viewing it would totally screw up the rest of my life.
Seriously though, the more information I read about the moon landing the more awestruck I am by the fact that they were able to accomplish it with the technology of the day. Astounding achievement. Absolutely astounding.
It was also the pinnacle of muscle cars. 396 chevelles, 440 GTX, 426 Chargers, 455 Olds 442’s, Mustang Boss 429’s, etc…
They’re “dynosaurs” by today’s standards but they were something in their day. Wish I had one of them in the garage right now. Sigh…
I was fourteen, and watched with my grandparents and sisters. I was so keyed up that when Armstrong came out and did his walk, I could not “see” it. My brain simply would not process what my eyes were taking in. I never took my eyes from the television, but I was asking “Where is it?”
Another thing I remember, in the pre-VCR days back then, was an article in our local paper giving advice on how to take a picture of your television screen, so you could record the memory.
I was an American taking a couple of courses during the summer in Cambridge. Leaving a parking structure with another American, we stopped at the kiosk to pay and the older fellow staffing the kiosk asked if we were Yanks. Normally when we answered yes to this question we received a scolding about Viet Nam, so I sighed and said yes, and was surprised when the fellow said, “Your men landed on the moon. Congratulations and well done!” We had lost track of the timing, but recovered and went off to the Eagle to have a celebratory pint.
UncaStuart, that was an appropriate pub to celebrate that.
I was 20. I was a big science fiction buff (still am) and all I could think was “WOOHOO - we’re gonna have a big, honkin’ base up there in a year or two!”.
I’m still waiting. It is an absolute disgrace that we don’t have a base on the moon.
One launch of the space shuttle costs 450 million. Imagine what it would cost to ship materials for one small house all the way to the moon.
I agree, it would be cool but beyond insane expensive.
I was 9, and Daddy was a PhD student working summers on the Apollo program. I remember the air of excitement around Huntsville and how proud everyone was of the missions. 