12 thoughts on “Forty-One Years Ago”

  1. I will never forget that day. Nor will I forget what my father said when I came to him with the news that they had landed. He said “So what?”

    It’s a better question than I was able, at the age of 15, to answer at the time. But I can answer it now.

  2. I came to him with the news that they had landed. He said “So what?”

    Theres untold amount of wisdom in these words. And i say this as a space geek.

  3. ken anthony Says:
    July 20th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
    One day more people will be in awe that we landed on the moon in the age of vacuum tubes.

    Not only that, but the engineers still used slide rules, and I’ve heard that the LM computer was roughly as powerful as modern pocket calculators. (I don’t know whether that’s literally true, but I read it somewhere.) My family’s TVs definitely used vacuum tubes, though.

    I was a kid growing up in the 60s, and if anybody had told me that we wouldn’t have permanent Moon and Mars bases in 2010, I’d have said they were crazy. It’s hard not to think that that period was the pinnacle of American civilization, and that we are now on our way downhill to a new Dark Age.

    Someone please tell me I’m wrong. Please?

  4. Back to 7/20/69:

    I remember riding in the back seat of my dad’s car. We had gotten a paper model of the LM from a Gulf gas station. I put it together and had it sitting on the shelf under the rear window, and I was showing it to the other drivers on the road.

  5. “We had gotten a paper model of the LM from a Gulf gas station. ”

    Yeah, I remember those too. I also remember my parents waking me up that night so I could watch Neil and Buzz do their thing. An amazing childhood memory, seen through different eyes these days.

  6. in 10 years time we were told told to shut up and sing with the ruling class.: nuclear, coal, oil ,manufacturing et al.

  7. I was 6 1/2. The landing was at 8 am here in NZ (4 pm EDT). My dad brought a transistor radio down to the farm gate with me to wait for the school bus. The bus came as they were descending. The driver and other kids on the bus listened until after they were down. We were late for school. I’m sure no one cared.

    Later, at around 3 pm (11 pm EDT), the audio of Neil getting out of the LM was played over the school intercom system.

    Several days later, after film of the landing had been flown to NZ from the USA (there was no satellite dish or video-capable cable to the country in 1969), we went 5 km to the only house in the district with a TV to watch it.

  8. After spending the day working on thermal predictions for the proposed Apollo 13 landing site, my wife, myself and ouf 8 and six yearl children gathered around our TV set in El Lago to wath the landing.

  9. One of my favorite quotes from this year’s ISDC was from the young ladies who had won one of the Pete Conrad Spirit of Innovation awards:

    “Do you remember Apollo? We don’t!”

    For us younger generations, the definitive HSF space program moments are Challenger and Columbia, and the hamster wheel of LEO. Going to the Moon? That happened to someone else, not us. Yet.

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