I watched the Apollo 11 landing live (and all the others, too) and even taped it on an audio tape recorder (home video tape did not yet exist). Watched it on CBS where the venerable Walter Cronkite was excitedly narrating.
And I remember Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped on the lunar surface. It went like this:
Armstrong: That’s one small step for man, [crackle, pop] one [crackle, crackle, pop] mankind!
Cronkite: What did he say?
TBH, I don’t remember Cronkite’s exact words, but he definitely had not understood Armstrong through all the static. It took some time – don’t remember how long – before it was decoded for the world.
I don’t know why anyone would envy me for being there during that time. Do they envy me for being 70 yrs old?
I watched most of the launches and landings. As did most of the entire world, I remember that it was a really big deal for everyone.
I am a bit perplexed for the need to repeat a pass around the Moon by Artemis. Did orbital mechanics change? What are we proving this time? We sent 6 manned landing missions to the Moon. Artemis is not even orbiting the Moon. It seems to me to be a very expensive publicity exersize for little benefit, getting no closer to landing. Most of the things being learned were aready learned by Apollo.
I was alive at the time, but I don’t remember the moon landing. I was seven years old, and the space race did not interest me at all.
I was born on the day Wally Schirra flew the Sigma 7 around the world six times. That was what my father was watching on TV while my mom was suffering through labor.
I don’t remember that either, the labor or the Sigma 7.
As we all know now, it was done on a soundstage at M-G-M and directed by Stanley Kubrick.
I’m astonished there are people who believe this. It would have required the silence of thousands of people. Surely, in 57 years, somebody would have spilled the beans.
As Mr. Franklin observed, “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”
This sounds like one of the setups in the classic “2000 Year Old Man” sketches:
I am not old enough to remember Apollo. But I remember Challenger disintegrating (it did NOT explode, godammit!!!). Recently, I have been made to feel old for seeing it live. Little bastards.
I thought about this for a while, and it’s a tough question. I don’t think anybody has envied me for seeing the Apollo 11 moonwalk live. The closest anybody younger has come when they learn this is a remark like, “Wow! That would have been cool. What was it like?”
Note that I was living in Toronto at the time, so times in my location were EDT. In my case, I had spent the day playing with friends in a local park. We kept an eye on the time, because we all wanted to get home so we could see the moon landing and the moonwalk.
Which we did, and to make a long story short, our family was glued to the TV that night. Bedtimes for my sister and I were discarded so we could watch history in the making. And finally, at sometime after 11 pm EDT, Armstrong stepped out, said his famous words, and went for a walk. “Ho-lee shit,” I remember my Dad saying. The TV picture wasn’t the best, as you can see from replays today, but it was good enough that we could see Aldrin’s jump off the ladder, the flag being planted and other activity.
I don’t know how long we watched that night, but it was a long time. And a few days later, we watched the astronauts splash down safely.
A slight correction before some pedantic Doper does some fault finding calculations from the clues I left in my above post: I was actually six years old during the moon landing. Not quite seven.
It’s a test flight. It’s as different a vehicle from Apollo as a F-22 is from the Wright Flyer. We’ve had airplanes for over 100 years. We know how to make things fly. They still do test flights on new aircraft designs.
This Artemis flight will in fact orbit the moon. And the next Artemis flight, planned for next year, won’t even leave Earth orbit. It’s a pure test mission.
The thing is, despite how excited everyone was about the moon landings at the time, they turned out in 20/20 hindsight to have been a dead end. Most people think that the failure to continue with manned exploration of the moon or beyond was a failure of vision or nerve, and think that a “For All Mankind” counter-factual might have come to pass if it hadn’t been for the nay-sayers. But a sober examination of the facts doesn’t support this.
When did the “Space Race” end? Contrary to popular belief it did not end in July of 1969; it had in fact ended in October of 1967, when the Outer Space Treaty went into effect. This treaty banned basing nuclear weapons in space or establishing military outposts on the moon and beyond, and forbade nationalizing all or any part of the surface of celestial bodies. The idea behind the Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth” or the opening space scenes of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, that every major power was going to have nuclear warhead satellites in orbit. The Saturn program itself had originally been a Dept. of Defense project to develop the lift capacity to support such military endeavors; at one point they were proposing launching 35 Saturn V’s a year to build and support a USAF base on the moon. This was what the Space Race had really been about; it was never going to be about scientific exploration. The Apollo program was proposed both as a propaganda stunt and that it would incidentally create the hardware necessary to support military missions; and when that was forestalled by the Outer Space Treaty, Apollo suddenly had no purpose worth the price tag. If there had been any commanding purpose to manned spaceflight, the Soviets (who were inveterate worshippers of modernity and tech) would have gone ahead whether the USA did or not; but no nukes, no heavy-lift launchers.
I like to compare the Apollo program to the voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He. Unlike the oceanic exploration undertaken decades later by the Portuguese and Spanish, Zheng He’s voyages had no organic grounding in the economy of China; they were a purely top-down endeavor brought about for political purposes and they served no purpose once the political winds changed.
Third graders in the schools where I’ve been subbing were learning about Apollo 11 recently. I think both the kids and teachers were impressed that I watched it when it happened. For some reason I remember the splashdown more vividly. Four year old me was very interested in oceans.
You can do all the research you want. I was listening to (and recording) the live feed from CBS at the time, and there was a fair burst of static and Walter Cronkite at first did not understand what Armstrong had said.
