America, and the world, is in your eternal debt.
My fond memories from this time would not be complete without the mention of another person.
Thanks Walter, to you too, wherever you are.
America, and the world, is in your eternal debt.
My fond memories from this time would not be complete without the mention of another person.
Thanks Walter, to you too, wherever you are.
ahh, this is when NASA was interesting… and the science starts to get into other dimensions. I clicked on the Google icon yesterday and found, inter alia, Buzz Aldrin explaining a cryptic message they sent – asking about where the ejected earlier stage rocket was – because they’d seen a UFO flying alongside them and they couldn’t exactly talk about it but this was their way of indicating it.
Fast forward to today… any chance of a piece on crop circles here? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mAdrSvOgwI&feature=related is an excellent video (long trailer) with a fair bit of science.
I was a mere five years old during the moon landing. When Armstrong descended the stairs of the lunar lander, my father took photographs of the television screen. As we all know, there was no videotape recorder or Tivo, and this was his way of preserving a memory of the event. He told us that this was a very important day and we should always remember where we were when it took place. I remember I watched for a few minutes, but the images weren’t very good, so I lost interest and went off to play. But I’ve never forgotten where I was that day…
Outstanding video. Thank you.
And a tear in my eye when Cronkite misreported the results of the Tet offensive and declared the war lost. Nothing Rather ever did could possibly equal this.
Thousands of American lives and millions of Asians. Thanks again Walter, sniff.
Imagine if the Spanish and Portugese explorers had waited 40 years after Columbus returned — just to make a decision about another expedition 40 years hence….
I was in Phoenix, Arizona, it was just about sunset Phoenix time. I was angry at my younger siblings playing outside who wouldn’t come in and watch with me.
I was only 10 – but even at the time I knew I’d never witness anything that historic again in my life.
Chris Wright (02:29:27) :
It is disappointing that America and NASA seemed to lose their way in the decades that followed Apollo. Building up capability for low Earth orbit operations with the ISS and the shuttle was useful and perhaps necessary. But back in the time of Apollo it was almost assumed that we would have men on Mars by the eighties. Now, forty years later, it’s probably even more distant. I’ll probably never see it in my lifetime.
With that in mind, what could be a better tribute to Neil, Michael and Buzz than an international effort to put men on Mars by 2020?
How about exploring the oceans properly first or instead? Robots can do much better on Mars than people can. What if something goes wrong 3 weeks out? What if the astronauts go insane? (Some of the space station folks have come close to losing it.) What is the point of putting a fragile hairless ape on a frozen dead planet?
Going to Mars is very romantic, but there are much better ways to spend our money.
We could also cure malaria, or just make sure every child on the planet has clean drinking water… sorry to be a spoil sport.
@ur momisugly – Purakanui 02:13:29) : I feel kind of cheated now.
Why? Because your girlfriend was wrong, and you didn’t die in WWIII? It was distinct possibility!
@ur momisugly – John A (03:11:16) :
*. We should aim for Mars.
Nearly everything we have done in space has been an anticlimax after Apollo*. We should aim for Mars . . . The exceptions would be Hubble, the Pioneers, the Voyagers, the Vikings, Spirit and Opportunity, Galileo and Cassini.
Those are all unmanned explorations, which many people would like to support at the expense of, to their mind, wasteful, manned voyages. I tend to agree with them.
It was a wonderful moment, although bittersweet for me because I knew Congress had cut off funding for the Apollo program.
I also don’t think highly of the ISS, except it has given us experience in living quarters and more recent technologies than those in the Shuttle. We’ll need that further out in space.
I wish I could have been inspired by this…once again I find myself thinking I was born too late…
The biggest and most remarkable and impressing event of the past century.
“How about exploring the oceans properly first or instead? Robots can do much better on Mars than people can. What if something goes wrong 3 weeks out? What if the astronauts go insane? (Some of the space station folks have come close to losing it.) What is the point of putting a fragile hairless ape on a frozen dead planet?
Going to Mars is very romantic, but there are much better ways to spend our money.
We could also cure malaria, or just make sure every child on the planet has clean drinking water… sorry to be a spoil sport.”
Arrgh!!
Does no-one else see this as the flawed logic of a decaying culture??
That was a forward-looking can-do generation – an era in which bravery, success and triumph were to be championed, not derided.
Compare the Apollo epic with today’s world.
My children are not allowed to have a sports day, in case someone wins.
My children are not allowed to walk to school, in case they hurt themselves.
My children cannot play ball in the playground, as it is dangerous.
Boys are not allowed to play cowboys and Indians, as that is violent and racist.
My children have to slow their education, to allow others to catch up.
Engineering is for dumbheads who cannot get into finance.
Rockets may harm the environment.
A deliberate concentration on simple wind technology will prevent anyone building a nuclear space-probe to go to Mars.
Money needs to be channelled towards helping the Third World, not elitist stunts.
We need to reduce wealth and output, to help the environment and prevent CO2.
It would be more environmentally friendly if we lived in mud huts and used strip-farming.
The Medieval Era was a golden age.
Just before the moonwalk, my father called us in from the backyard in Chico, CA, where my brother and I were playing in a Lunar Module built from an old Sears refrigerator box.
>>>We could also cure malaria, or just make sure every child
>>>on the planet has clean drinking water… sorry to be a
>>>spoil sport.
Oh, brilliant! So we can overpopulate the Earth even more and denude its resources completely, while decaying as a species to a point of irrelevance.
Rather, we should introduce population control (population being the biggest threat to the environment) and reach for the stars. We either stagnate on a festering planet for the next billion years, or boldly strike out with new technology to ‘go where no man has gone before’ (and all the other clichés). I know where I would rather be.
The Apollo landing was one of the high points of my life. I now look at it as bittersweet. My generation (Baby Boomers) were given the keys to the stars by our parents and we threw them away…. how very sad. We never even tried to build on this legacy. My G-d! we are still using the spacecraft our parents built (the Shuttle)! Another tick mark for the Worst Generation. Hopefully our children will pick up the torch. Sorry about the rant, but this is one sore spot with me and hits me each July.
Sandy (02:29:56) :
The accountants, lawyers and politicians somehow hijacked Human ingenuity and took it beyond the reach of normal people with extraordinary ideas.
Yeah, once we accountants invented the pocket protector, it was all over. It’s only a matter of time before our diabolical plan to deluge the world with beans comes to fruition!!! Ah, hahahahaha!!!
Wow, and I thought we were just doing people’s taxes all this time. I gotta ask the AICPA where to apply for one of these ingenuity hijacking jobs.
A toast to Neil, Michael, and Buzz. One of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.
Oh, and uh, if any of you happen to read here and need someone to do your taxes, don’t hesitate to look me up.
Sandy: “Does no one else see this as the flawed logic…..?
Of course I do. This is Pelosi-think from the school of Reidian philosophy. The USA is, of course, capable of only one action at a time and the beginning of any course of activity is an absolute barrier to any other activity.
@Robert: Yeah, I’m a little choked up about Walter too. I got home from Nam in May of 70 and within a week had developed an absolute aversion to agenda driven network news which persists to this day. I figure Walter had a hand in about 25,000 US casualties. Congress can take credit for most of the Asian dead.
This is a wonderful thread! I love hearing the stories about where folks were when they watched the moon landings, especially from posters in other countries.
People today don’t realize how close the world came to nuclear war.
I was a 19-year old kid in Viet Nam during Apollo 11, watching it on our base’s single 19 inch B&W TV set. A million things could have gone wrong; computers — what there were of them — still used lots of vacuum tubes/valves. The trip itself was astonishingly risky.
One of the old timers watching the moon landing with us at our base [Tuy Hoa] told us he’d been stationed in Taiwan during the Cuban missile crisis. He said they had loaded each aircraft with “atom bombs.” I asked him why [since Russia was the main enemy back then, at least in the eyes of a naive young 19-year old kid].
He told us that we were going to take out both Russia and China, because communism was the enemy. He told us that the Taiwan F-100 fighters were each loaded with 2 atomic bombs, and three extra fuel tanks. The pilots were not expected to return.
I remember during the Tet offensive when Walter Cronkite declared the war lost.
But many years later I read a quote by the NVA’s top general and strategist, General Vo Nguyen Giap:
Yes, we had won. But like Hannibal at the gates of Rome, we blinked.
And we found out the “domino effect” was true. Burma [now Myanmar] is still ruled by brutal communist dictators. The Cambodian killing fields were a direct consequence of our misunderstanding of the last gasp of the North Vietnamese military’s loss in the Tet offensive.
The loss of the Vietnam war can be laid directly at the feet of the propagandists in the media, with their constant drumbeat of defeatism, 24/7/365 — the same self-centered, elite media that constantly beats the AGW drum today.
The results of the media’s false AGW propaganda will be every bit as disastrous as the results of misinforming the citizenry of who really won the Tet offensive.
I relived some fond memories last night, watching the replay of the mission broadcasts. That mission lifted off the day before my 15th birthday, back when my Dad worked for NASA at Goddard Space Flight Center. He got me into the communications control center during the mission on a visitor pass (Goddard managed the comm network for Apollo)…something I’ll never forget. I can’t help but think he’d be disappointed and a bit angry with what some are doing with Goddard’s good name nowadays.
My hat’s off to that whole generation of adventurers and scientists who pulled that off with what they had at the time, creating technology along the way that we take so much for granted today. Thanks to all.
“Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits” – but no worries – “Hollywood will restore them” – http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE56F5MK20090716
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin comments on the “Monolith” on Mars Moon Phobos: “God put it there” –
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=7252
And last but not least – “Walter Cronkite receives “Global Governance Award” from World Federalist Association (in 1999) –
These men are heroes for all mankind. I had great expectations for the future, but the future seems to have fizzled out. Launching from the earth’s surface has too many draw-backs. Development of the space elevator has so many pros to it that it seems illogical to even ask “should we”? I hope Sandy is wrong, and that we light a fire under our collective asses and make the future a great one. Fear and complacency leads to a vegetative state, which leads to rot and corruption. It seems these gentlemen (and their team) had more courage than all of us put together.
That version of the USA is long dead. It died in 1972. This new USA, this banana republic, is to its former self as Cambodia is to the Old Khmer Kingdom.
We did not sleep that night, waiting their moon landing. How times have changed! since then. Hope there will reappear the good guys again.
Pardon my english, what I meant was: Hope there will be again good guys.
ralph ellis, you sound like John Holdren. How will you control the population: forced abortions, forced chemical sterilizations, mass genocide, or just let them drink filthy water?
Control of population by rationing the energy consumption is the same idea of crazy green eugenics we are fighting here against.