40 Years Ago Today
Forty years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and became the first humans to land the moon. (h/t anon)
Apollo 11 photogallery, from NASA.
Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, and he’s in elite company. Only 12 men have ever walked on the moon, all Americans. Getting to the moon was a huge achievement and no person has been to the moon since 1972.
The space program showed what public funding of science could do for a country. The space program inspired millions of people to become scientists and engineers. The moon landing was a stunning success and one we Americans should take pride in.
I remember being woken up by my parents to watch them walk on the moon. Glad my parents did that.
Oh and by the way, I’m still amazed by the number of lunatics (pun intended) that don’t believe we went to the moon.
Scientific American has a bunch of cool features commemorating this anniversary.
A really great movie about this period is “The Dish” — about the role that a remote antenna in Australia played in broadcasting the images from the moon. Funny, warm and a great reminder of the astonishing achievement this moon walk really was. It is also interesting to note just how captivated the world was by this (the whole space program, really), and to see a world that could still be really engaged in a major achievement. I think we’ve lost some imagination along the way….
I’m with Nemski on that one. I swore I was going to stay awake, but I fell asleep on the couch and my dad woke me up. He had a really good HAM radio setup and we had listened to some of the radio chatter during the mission
The History Channel is airing a documentary tonight, called Moonshot. I also heard an interview with Buzz Aldrin this morning, I guess he’s got a new book.
Am I the only one who sees the irony in the fact that 40 years ago we were celebrating beating the Russians to the moon, and today our space station astronauts are lining up to use the Russian’s toilet because ours is out of order?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1200879/Space-toilet-order-13-astronauts-told-ration-relief-breaks.html
Forty years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins became the first humans to land on the moon.
Collins didn’t land, he stayed in orbit (I stayed awake to watch…)
I gather that Buzz and others are lobbying President Obama today for a manned mission to Mars….
Thanks, anon. I’ll correct it.
The landing happened 2 days before my 11th birthday. It was nighttime in CO and I had the TV on watching everything (I was really, really into space travel). I was also making “Creepy Crawlers” and one burned because they finally announced that “The Eagle has landed!” at the Sea of Tranquility and I got distracted. Yeah, it was a nice early birthday present.
Those wacky kids at Google have put out Google Moon (I think this is new) showing images of moon landing shots from the location they were taken.
That was totally cool, Cassandra.