posted 07-20-2010 09:14 AM               

I was at the NASA news center in Cape Canaveral following the landing. As a 19 year-old college reporter I didn't have the funds to go to both the Cape and Houston, so I covered it from the Cape, as did a fair number of others, especially foreign reporters.

The news center had a few television sets, "squawk boxes" with commentary and voice transmissions from mission control, and tables piled with press releases and voice transcripts. There were also long tables with some typewriters and telephones.

The atmosphere was electric for the landing since this was the first of a kind event. I remember total silence in the news center, except for the mission commentary, for the last few minutes.

"Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." After those historic words from Neil Armstrong, there was a collective sigh of relief. I remember thinking we had just seen Neil and Buzz in their spacesuits here four days before walking out of the MSOB, and now they were on the Moon.

While we all waited for the first steps, there was less excitement than for the landing, especially with the time lag between the landing and the first EVA.

Everyone was trying to hear the first words but the transmission was clipped and a little garbled as we heard it then. We waited for the voice transcripts to come out to verify what was said, and even now 41 years later there is still controversy about whether Neil said "a man."

posted 07-20-2010 10:28 AM               

However, the moon landing has been a topic of much conversation with my 7 year old daughter. I remember one night we were sitting outside and looking at the moon, and she asked me if people had gone to the moon. I told her that yes, several people had gone to the moon. She wanted to learn more, so we talked for about 45 minutes. Now she knows that the second man on the moon was NOT Buzz Lightyear!

posted 07-21-2010 12:03 PM               

This split screen montage combines footage from four different cameras used by NASA to capture the moment Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20 1969.

...filmmaker Stephen Slater, working with archive film company Footagevault, has united the visual material with recordings of the original mission audio.

posted 07-15-2014 07:16 PM               

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to have social media during the Apollo days? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

posted 07-16-2014 10:43 AM               

I can hardly believe we didn't have better Moon and Mars globes in those days. Medio the 1960s Replogle started to produce the well-known Moon globes and in 1971 the first COTS Mars globe.

In this photo of the 1968 Replogle Moon globe there's only an "Apollo Landing Zone" as Apollo 11 still had to be launched... It took until 1980 before the first decent Mars globe became available.

posted 07-18-2014 12:14 AM               

Forty-five years ago, this week, 123 million of us watched Neil and Buzz step onto the moon. In 1969, we numbered about 200 million, so more than half of America was in the audience that day. Neil Armstrong instantly became a household name, an icon, a hero. And then — and this, I bet, you didn't know — just as quickly, he faded away.

"Whatever Happened to Neil Whosis?" asked the Chicago Tribune in 1974.

This is a missing chapter in the space exploration story. We like to think that after Apollo 11, the first duo on the moon became legendary. We know the names Aldrin and Armstrong now (or, at least many of us do), and we imagine they've been honored and admired all this time, the way we honor our favorite presidents, athletes, and war heroes. But that's not what happened.

In his new book, "No Requiem for the Space Age," describes how only a year after the landing, a vast majority of Americans couldn't remember Neil Armstrong's name...

posted 07-18-2014 08:47 AM               

The Apollo missions were an incredible engineering feat. To deliver 24 men to the moon, 12 of whom ventured to its surface, with 1960s technology, is even more remarkable from our vantage point four decades later.

posted 07-20-2014 10:03 PM               

A New Look at the Apollo 11 Landing Site

Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, a little after 4:00 in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time. The lunar module, nicknamed Eagle and flown by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, touched down near the southern rim of the Sea of Tranquility, one of the large, dark basins that contribute to the Man in the Moon visible from Earth.

Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two hours outside the LM setting up experiments and collecting samples. At one point, Armstrong ventured east of the LM to examine a small crater, dubbed Little West, that he'd flown over just before landing.

The trails of disturbed regolith created by the astronauts' boots are still clearly visible in photographs of the landing site taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) narrow-angle camera (LROC) more than four decades later.

LROC imagery makes it possible to visit the landing site in a whole new way by flying around a three-dimensional model of the site. LROC scientists created the digital elevation model using a stereo pair of images. Each image in the pair shows the site from a slightly different angle, allowing sophisticated software to infer the shape of the terrain, similar to the way that left and right eye views are combined in the brain to produce the perception of depth.

The animator draped an LROC photograph over the terrain model. He also added a 3D model of the LM descent stage — the real LM in the photograph looks oddly flat when viewed at an oblique angle.

Although the area around the site is relatively flat by lunar standards, West Crater (the big brother of the crater visited by Armstrong) appears in dramatic relief near the eastern edge of the terrain model. Ejecta from West comprises the boulders that Armstrong had to avoid as he searched for a safe landing site.

Apollo 11 was the first of six increasingly ambitious crewed lunar landings. The exploration of the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, when combined with the wealth of remote sensing data now being returned by LRO, continues to inform our understanding of our nearest neighbor in space.

posted 08-12-2014 02:08 PM               

The Apollo 11 mission and quarantine period were over, and one of the first pieces of public business was a luncheon at the Rice Hotel in Houston - "Salute to the Apollo 11 Team".

Captured from about 00:59:00 to the end in this silent archive footage, the event was a way to thank the array of NASA and contractor workers behind Apollo 11's achievement.

A fellow cSer’s father obtained two crew-signed menus and other memorabilia while working the event as part of NASA’s Public Affairs Office. I’m honored to now have one of these signed menus along with an unsigned menu and Rice Hotel ashtray, all now assembled in shadow-box form with a BIG patch and video stills.

I like that the team came first, before the NYC/Chicago/LA ticker tape parades, State Dinner, and “Giant Leap” world tour that followed. It must have been an exhausting finish to an already-exhausting period for the crew and their families.

Pages 228-229 in a USGS historical writeup give an amusing perspective from luncheon attendee and lunar geologist Gerald Schaber. In part:

At the end of the crew’s remarks, someone said that the crew and their wives would be willing to stay up on the dais for a few minutes to sign some autographs. Well, that was a big mistake!

All of a sudden, this rather sophisticated and well-dressed group of 400 or so, slowly—then quickly—stormed the dais with their programs in hand. In fact, the program even had space marked for autographs on the back page!

Here were people who lived with the Space Program around Houston every day—and some of them actually lived among the astronauts in Clear Lake City and Nassau Bay. Nevertheless, this large group of people suddenly became possessed with the need to shove their way up to the dais and get those autographs of the Apollo 11 crew and their wives.”

I will admit to being one of those “possessed” people that afternoon. “I politely” shoved my way through the now scary elite of Houston society, and finally got the autographs of at least the three crewmembers on my program from that evening. I don’t think any of the planners of this sophisticated affair ever dreamed that the autograph session would turn out to be more or less out of control.

posted 10-11-2014 11:49 PM               

In 2010, I was privileged to visit the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. One of the highlights was standing beside the Quarantine Airstream exactly where President Nixon would have stood speaking with the astronauts after their successful mission to the moon. For some reason I so vividly remember that moment as an 8 year boy watching on black and white TV.

I stood there in front of the actual unit for 30 minutes occasionally chatting with other folks stopping to look. I was saddened that so few people I spoke with even recalled the event. I expect they thought I was a nut bar because of my enthusiasm of where I was standing. It would be nice if the Smithsonian had that image on display with the Quarantine Airstream.

posted 07-17-2016 08:56 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by David Carey:
Captured from about 00:59:00 to the end in this silent archive footage...

---

posted 07-19-2016 02:15 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Headshot:
...then technically the U.S. would have not met Kennedy's deadline.

---

There was no year 0 A.D. So the first decade (deca=10) started in year 1 and ended in year 10. The second decade started in 11 and ended in 20. Skip a few hundred decades and you will obtain that the "sixties" decade started in 1961 and ended after 10 years in 1970.

posted 07-20-2016 08:28 AM               

Just think, the 50th anniversary of the first moon walk is only three years away. Although I am now 82, my doctors seem to think I have a good chance of still being around for it. I doubt I will be up to the dawn-to-dawn workdays and multiple deadlines of yore, but a bit of the remembered excitement should be a tonic.

posted 07-12-2019 09:15 AM               

NASA Celebrates 50th Anniversary of Moon Landing

On July 16, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a journey to the Moon and into history. Four days later, while Collins orbited the Moon in the command module, Armstrong and Aldrin landed Apollo 11's lunar module, Eagle, on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility, becoming the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface.

Highlights of events in which NASA is participating:

July 16 – Apollo 11 Launch Reflection at Pad 39A

Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins will reunite at the historic launch pad where Apollo 11 began its mission 50 years ago for a question-and-answer session with Kennedy Center Director Bob Cabana, beginning at 9:15 a.m. EDT, followed by a visit the Launch Control Center and Firing Room 1 to connect with Apollo-era launch controllers and those who will launch the Artemis missions that are part of America's Moon to Mars approach for human space exploration.

This event will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

July 19 – NASA's Giant Leaps: Past and Future

On July 19, NASA's Giant Leaps: Past and Future will air 1 to 3 p.m. EDT on NASA TV and the agency's website, and will be simulcast on the Discovery Science Channel. Hosted from the agency's Kennedy Space Center, the show will salute the heroes of Apollo and discuss the agency's future plans, with segments at:

• The National Mall in Washington
  
• NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, including the newly restored Apollo Mission Control Operations Room and Space Center Houston, Johnson's official visitors center
  
• The U.S. Space & Rocket Center near NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama
  
• Neil Armstrong's hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio
  
• The Apollo 11 command module on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle

The show also will feature slices of Americana at other anniversary celebrations around the country.

At 3 p.m., NASA TV will air a special program, STEM Forward to the Moon, which will feature kids participating in Moon landing simulations at four partner museums across the nation:

• Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas
  
• Saint Louis Science Center in St. Louis
  
• Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey, California
  
• Arizona Science Center in Phoenix