While we’re all waiting for The! Event! Of! The! Freaking! Decade!, be advised that today is the anniversary of the moon landing.
Nothing special about the 38th, of course. Just that I noticed the date and thought, “Oh yeah – the moon.” How I envied my classmates who were born in 1969. All us 70s had was ages that matched the date.
When you say “ages that matched the date” do you mean that you turned 10 in 80, 20 in 90, etc?
I was born in 69 (hee hee) and I could never figure out how old I was back during a particular year, lol. I was born in the third trimester of 69, so for the most part, I was age ten through most of 1980.
Why were you envious?
I was 3 1/2 years old when the moon landing took place. I remember watching it on an old black and white TV that we had. My mother kept telling me that we were watching men walk on the moon, the same moon that we saw when we went outside and looked up. She kept asking me if I understood what that meant. Men are walking on the moon? Ok, if you say so. Milk comes from cows? Ok, if you say so. Milk and moonwalks both had about the same significance to me then. I understood what she was saying, and I understood it was a big deal, but only because all of the adults were acting like it was a big deal. It was only later that I truly understood the significance of it all.
Heh! One small step for static.
That’s a classic! Never heard it put that way before but I like it. 
It fits the situation exactly!
Today is also my fourth wedding anniversary, which I think is way better than visiting the moon. 
I’ve been in Space Geek mode for the past week. I have From The Earth To The Moon playing right now. Last week I watched Moon Shot and the first half of FTETTM. The last three nights I watched a documentary on Flight Test.
I still have Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff in the stack to watch.
Strangely, I don’t have a clear memory of the moon landing. I do remember Apollo 13 fairly clearly though.
I remember being up late at night watching the moon landing - I was 15.
Speaking of static, my husband works for a contractor at NASA Goddard and he was telling me about the frenzied search for the original recording of the first moon landing. He figures it probably went home with someone, although it’s entirely possibly it was tossed in the trash. Apparently a lot of stuff gets tossed in the trash there. Your tax dollars at work.
Don’t read Harry Potter, old chap?
Two obligatory references:
(1) The Australian movie The Dish shows a very funny side to the Moon landing.
(2) You need to go to Wapakoneta, Ohio (“Wapa” or “Wapak” for short) to see the Neil Armstrong Air & Space Museum (which I have photographed recently) – partly to see what an ordinary small Ohio town Neil Armstrong came from.
I was almost 6 when I saw the Apollo landing on the Moon on our black and white. One very vivid memory from a very hazy past. But that one memory did get me hooked on astronomy though.
I was a certified space nut throughout the sixties. I would make my parents get me up at 5 in the morning to watch the Gemini launches, and I had models of all the rockets. I dearly wanted to be an astronaut, probably until I was well out of college. I definitely remember the landing and the first steps. We were in Colorado at the time, up at my grandparent’s cabin, and I remember sitting around the radio listening to the audio of the landing. We drove back in to town the next day so we could see the first steps. I was absolutely thrilled to death. I was 11 then, and can still remember it very clearly.
I don’t think I gave up on being an astronaut until I realized that the shuttle flights were not going to live up to their hype of 50 per year (one a week!). I just knew that they were going to need all sorts of astronauts and space mechanics, and that’s what I was going to do. Once the bottom fell out of the aerospace business and the shuttle became more or less another (but much more complex) rocket that went up once in a while, I figured it was time to move on. I’d still love to go up, though.
I thought it was the arrival of Bacon Salt in everyone’s mailbox.
Yes.
Well, generally because when I was in elementary school, the moon landing, and the space program in general, was still regarded as supercool. None of us saw it, but there was a cachet to being able to say you were born the same year, that one just didn’t get from being born the same year as…uh…Kent State? Wait – it was also the first Earth Day. Just seems like anything significant in 1970 was the prelude to or the conclusion of an event, but nothing important came to a head then. And the '69ers also had Woodstock and the Miracle Mets for the trifecta.
Mr. Rilch is a '69er. Once when he got cocky, and was adding the premiere of Monty Python to his list of bona fides, I quietly reminded him that 1969 was also the year of the Manson murders.
SBSO, no offense, but do you go on the net much, besides here? Pottermania may not have taken over your hometown, but online, there’s been a blitz of “X number of days until HP7!” People on LiveJournal have icons marking the date. And I’m actually ashamed of myself now that it took me this long to remember that 7/20 is also a significant date.
FCM, yikes! If the moon landing happened today, you know that recording would have immediately gone into a vault.
ETA: Oh, and 1970 was also the year the voting age was lowered to 18. Still, you can’t draw that, the way my '69er classmates drew rockets at the start of their personal timelines.
I stayed glued to the TV for most of the moon landing. Seems like only yesterday.
I vaguely remember the landing - it wasn’t till around 10 or 11 PM CST iirc, which was way, way, past my bedtime.
I remember later landings a bit better - and astonished at the much higher quality video feed (for approx a second or two, before the astronaut inadvertantly pointed the camera directly at the sun, burning out the unit). It wasn’t until the slick magazines came out weeks or months later that we saw really high quality images of the lunar surface and other stuff - not to knock what video feeds there were - it was an amazing technological feat just to provide comms for those missions. I’ve been to Goldstone, California near the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. This is one of the locations where the space comms were handled. I believe there was one in Australia (Alice Springs?) and probably Hawaii?
Today is my parent’s 55th wedding anninversay!
I was fourteen in 1969. My parents were in Colorado, and my sisters and I were with our grandparents. I was so excited, so keyed up, watching the landing that when it actually happened I couldn’t see it. My brain literally would not make sense of the images the eyes were sending it. I kept asking “Where is it?” I never took my eyes from the television though. My grandfather, born in October of 1900(technically the nineteenth century) went, in one lifetime, from horse and buggy to men landing on the moon.
Later that night I went outside and looked up at the moon and thought “There’s people up there!”
And my youngest turned three today. Since it was moon landing day I tried to convince Lady Chance to go with ‘Diana’ but she stuck with ‘Gwendolyn’.
I never get my way.
I was two.
There are pictures of me watching the first moon landing on TV, but I don’t remember it. I do remember in later years watching navy “frogmen” leap into the water from helicopters to help retrieve returned astronauts and equipment on later Apollo missions, however, and of course (here’s where I make a bunch of us feel old when the young’uns ask, “what were those?”) I remember Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz missions.
