My family watched the moon landing on a black and white TV. We could see the neighbors watching on their color TV. My mother, who insisted that the old TV was just fine, bought a new color TV the next weekend.
Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the first mooncast in black and white anyway? The mmon part I mean, not Mission Control. I seem to recall it in B&W.
As I said, we watched For All Mankind a few months ago, but I can’t even remember from that, let alone 39 years ago.
You’re correct. The video from XII was in color - until they pointed the camera at the sun, that is. I had a black and white TV also back then.
The color film of the moonwalk you see now was taken by the astronauts on the surface using a movie camera.
I was in elementary school and remember well the four classrooms in our building coming together in the center area where the teachers had a TV set up and us all watching. We did this for each of the subsequent missions as well during the important/entertaining phases.
I also remember in the grocery stores there were NASA photos for sale showing a fantastic Earthrise from the Moonscape, that and flimsy, sheetlike vinyl records of some of the Astronaut/Mission Control conversations.
Actually I have a set of albums that have the radio talk from the moon mission.
Too bad I don’t have a turntable.
For those of you that remember, did you think we would continue going to the moon or did you know we’d stop pretty quickly.
Also, did you expect we’d fly to Mars by 2010 or did it seem as unlikely as it does today?
I expected a manned space station in earth orbit, then a moon base, and finally manned and unmanned flights to mars to follow the Apollo missions.
I was fairly sure (16 years old at the time) we’d run out of things to do on the moon pretty quickly. But 2010 seemed so impossibly futuristic that I was completely confident we’d be on MARS by then.
I always thought, even at the time, that “one small step…” seemed non-spontaneous and not terribly poetic. But first hearing “Tranquility Base here…the Eagle has landed” gave me chills then and still does.
And the quality of the live video from the moon was pretty crappy. But it got dramatically better on subsequent missions.
I would have watched it, but I was seventeen years away from being born. Alas. Obviously I’ve seen the footage, and I get goosebumps every time - when Armstrong says he’s going to step off the LEM, I inevitably find myself wondering what must have been going through his head, and I can’t imagine. What a literally awesome moment.
Another mission to the moon would be great, or more work towards Mars, but I’m just going to be realistic: I dream of seeing regular network TV programming bumped for space program news that’s not the loss of life. Please? Can we as a society remember that rockets are really neat and space is really, really awesome and exciting and cool?
Man, there’s just no pleasing some people, is there? 
Among my treasured possessions is a fragment of Apollo 10 heat shield, acquired by my grandfather while he worked at Alcoa Aluminum. Right after that mission, his department was assigned the task of constructing a museum display case for a portion of the capsule’s shield. Grandpa said that the chunk in question was about 14 inches wide when first delivered; but after being circulated among the awestruck engineers at the Alcoa offices, the final mounted specimen was strangely only about 2/3 its original size… 
I was born between Apollo 11 and Apollo 17; one of the first generation that never knew a time when human footprints were limited to a single world. And yet somehow the country responsible for this miraculous achievement spent the next two decades traumatized over fucking Vietnam instead.
I am in full agreement with you, NinjaChick, even though I’ve definitely got a few years on you, having been born in 1976. It doesn’t help that my first major space-related memory is of Challenger. I was nine.
Wow, Terrifel, that is seriously cool.
Interesting indeed. When Apollo 8 went up, it scared the living shit out of the Russians because it meant we could, if we so desired, put a space based weapons platform up AS BIG AS A GRAIN SILO.
Also interesting times because of the sheer badassery of our engineering projects. The engines for the SR-71, fastest plane ever built, were certified in '58. The F-! rocket engine, five of which powered the booster phase of Saturn V, is still the third-baddest rocket engine ever made. It was developed in the Fifties and fine-tuned during the Sixties. Still the most complicated machine ever made (as well as the biggest rocket ever made), the Saturn V is the platform we will be returning to when we go to Mars.
It really seemed like we were on the verge of a major push out into the solar system. I really expected to be on Mars long before now.
2010, even 2000, seemed so impossibly far in the future that it might as well have been 3010. It was ALWAYS going to be the 20th century. 
I was in a summer theater production of Brigadoon and the director was a madman dictator. So while the entire world was watching the first landing of man on the moon, we were forced to rehearse the Highland Fling and not allowed to go 200 feet away and watch it on television.
One of life’s regrets…I would’ve loved to have seen a Saturn V taking off in person. Just to experience the blast, the noise, the awe-inspiring sight of the single largest thing ever to get off the ground (and possibly that ever will).
(There’s a slight nod to this experience in the movie Apollo 13…where Gary Sinise watches the liftoff beside his car, about a mile away – and the impact knocks him ever-so-slightly off-balance.)