July 20, 1969
 

I'm watching the History Channel showing of the original broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing (a little poignant with Walter Cronkite) and thinking that this piece of history hadn't come up here. Then it occurred to me that not that many of us here remember...

We'd followed the mission - at home, at school - and everyone knew what was going on. With only the three major networks available, everything was much more of a communal experience. This was the only thing that mattered that night.

I had just gotten home from a camping trip with some friends, and the rest of my family were still at church. I sat on the green shag carpet in our living room, watching on our black & white console television as Armstrong and then Aldrin stepped onto the moon.

The world got smaller. I remember going outside and looking up at the moon, pale in the early evening sky, in awe of the fact that men were there, looking up at me.

That's when we all learned to find the Sea of Tranquility.

Okay, fogies. Who else remembers?

A few of these people.

What amazes me more is that in 3 and half years Apollo 17 would mark the end of trips to the moon. At the time it seemed the moon was a stepping stone to even greater adventures. If only they brought back gold or spice.

Has there really been such a wondrous experience of exploration as our exploration of the Moon? I don't remember anything quite as exciting as experiencing that as one of the millions of TV viewers.

But what of the cheese!?!

I wasn't there so it is moot for me, but the Mars rovers have been my highlight and they don't run into the conflict I have in that I don't support government funded manned spaceflight (even if it is really, really cool, which it is).

I found this pretty cool. NASA just released a still from the footage on the moon, the only frame where you can actually see Neil Armstrong's face through the suit's face shield. I've always found it weird that all of those images of people in space were so oddly faceless, this image gave me absolute chills, finally seeing a face!

Wow, seeing his face really is cool. Reminds you that it's a person, on the moon!

I wasn't born yet but - It is pretty amazing! We put someone on something explosive, aimed, and they got there. Even more amazing is that they were able to get back.

Thanks for that, GD. Yeah, seeing the face is bloody awesome. That was a really unfortunate drawback of the moon suits.

I learned of the History Channel and internet repeats just this morning, too late to watch. Don't know if I would have in any event. It was 6 hours of boredom followed by 10 seconds of the biggest thrill ever, and I remember it well.

The rest of my day was more exciting. Us kids were looking forward to the man-on-the-moon all day long. But during the TV broadcast that night, though we had fun, we couldn't stray far from the room with the TV - lest we miss it.


TVs were not common where I spent the summers in the 60's, so it was like 30 or 40 of us from a summertime community all crammed in a room. That made it much more exciting than if I had just been with my immediate family at my usual home. Good fortune that it happened in July.