Apollo 11 Landing Stories

I wasn't around 40 years ago when the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed. I would like to read stories about how people and their families witnessed this event by watching TV, etc. I will actually start with my mom's short story. My mom's family was watching the landing on TV when suddenly lightning struck the TV lead-in wire!

I was 10 at the time and glued to the TV set - nearly the whole family. I just could not understand why my 4 yr old brother was not as facinated as the rest of us. Of course, now I do.

It was quite a thrill to literally grow up as a kid during the space age, especially in a small town just 30 miles from where Neil Armstrong was born. The funny thing was, after reading so much sci -fi, it almost seemed like we were technologically behind. "you mean, this is the first time anyone has been to the moon? Why has it taken so long?"

Looking back at it all, what a high risk venture - nearly no chance of a rescue if something went wrong outside of the back up systems.

I see Mars as an entirely different situation. IMHO, we should add mass and water until it hits about 1.2 earth masses before we bother visiting. That way, it has the potential to actually be inhabitable.

HarryN said:

I was 10 at the time and glued to the TV set - nearly the whole family. I just could not understand why my 4 yr old brother was not as facinated as the rest of us. Of course, now I do.

It was quite a thrill to literally grow up as a kid during the space age, especially in a small town just 30 miles from where Neil Armstrong was born. The funny thing was, after reading so much sci -fi, it almost seemed like we were technologically behind. "you mean, this is the first time anyone has been to the moon? Why has it taken so long?"

Looking back at it all, what a high risk venture - nearly no chance of a rescue if something went wrong outside of the back up systems.

I see Mars as an entirely different situation. IMHO, we should add mass and water until it hits about 1.2 earth masses before we bother visiting. That way, it has the potential to actually be inhabitable.

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HarryN,
Where did you grow up at? I just took my daughter to the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio. I live about 23 miles away from there. I'm not old enough to have been able to watch the actual landing but the museum did have a pretty good short film about it.

Chris

I was 2 months short of finishing Navy Flight Training in Corpus Christi, TX. My wife's sister and husband were visiting us. They gave us the day off from training. WE had a very small apartment, so the four of us sat around on the couch and the roll-away all day and watched. We walked across the street for hamburgers to eat quickly so we could get back and not miss anything. Even though I was about to get my wings, I realized how good these guys really were. I was in awe of their accomplishment. They were truly heroes.

Don't you know that all lunar landings were staged in a warehouse at Groom Lake. :tinfoil: :nana:


I'm kidding. I just wanted to be the first nut to toss that out there.



I was too young to have remembered any of that but I've always been fascinated with what we did, with the technology we had. It still seems strange that we landed six manned missions there.

I was only 2yrs old,I wish I could know if my memories of it were at that time or a few years later ...I do remember it being mentioned quite a lot
in the 70's everyone would say .....


they can land a man on the moon...but they cant run these trains on time:sigh:
etc etc...


my father said everyone was watching tv at his work (british army air base in West Germany) and everyone was talking about it in the local town

Great stories so far, I am actually listening to a stream of the radio transmissions made during the mission from the NASA site. They actually started it the day of the launch (plus 40 years of course). Linky: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_radio/
Also the JFK archives site which is doing the same thing plus some others: http://wechoosethemoon.org
The NASA stream is silent right now because there is nothing really to say as they are currently (Minus 40 years of course) under loss of signal conditions.

I was born the following July but my parents named me after Neil Armstrong.

What amazes me the most is what we were able to do with 1960's technology. What upsets me is how we had to go full circle with some technologies in the past 30 years, but if you lived through the times each step (even the backwards steps) were considered forward steps.

jrmcferren said:

What amazes me the most is what we were able to do with 1960's technology.

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Objectively, we pushed well beyond the envelope due to our competition against the Soviets; there's no way anything even remotely resembling those Apollo missions/hardware would be approved by the modern safety-conscious NASA. But a win is a win, we did indeed pull it off, and all those involved are without question heroes.

I was born well after the Apollo program, but after much study what I can say conclusively is that the moon landing will be a singular moment in history regardless of what NASA achieves from now on. We (humans, not just Americans) will almost certainly have a Mars landing given enough time, and that will pale in comparison to the moon landing (even though it is a much greater challenge). Americans will take for granted the ability to get to Mars, a good number will assume the entire thing is a hoax/conspiracy, there will be debates about funding and ad space on the Mars lander, the broadcast will be brought to you by a car/fast food/pharmaceutical company, etc...

I was born in '68 and remember watching the later missions on the B/W TV in the dining room upstairs while Mom made dinner. I was fascinated as a kid reading everything I could find. My dad had a collection of Life magazines set aside specifically about the moon missions and I had them memorized to the point where I corrected my teachers about the specifics of the missions.

Later, as I learned more about calculus and physics in high school and college I became more and more of a cynic and now I fully don't belive that we ever landed on the moon. I just doesn't make sense that the technology availble at the time could calculate the trajectory of the capsule with the complicated gravitational system. The "computer" they used for guidance at the time had less power than a simple calculator. The video from the landings just wasn't possible with the distance, propogation, and interference it would have encountered. The skeptic Rene also makes some very good points about converging shadows and repeated landscapes at supposedly different locations. And then there is the Van Allen belt and the associated radiation. I just don't believe it.

Radiophile said:

I just don't believe it.

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Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_Experiment

That's nice. I don't doubt that equipment could be placed there now, or even in the mid to latter 1970s as computer technology really took a leap forward, but I doubt it was placed there during the Apollo missions. Interesting that the data has been collected for 35 years and not 40 years.....

Still a skeptic.

Radiophile, there is PLENTY of material debunking each and every conspiracy theory about the moon landings being faked. Even the man who the Van Allen belt was named after, James van Allen, has said that the astronauts could have gone through. They would need to spend months in that belt to suffer any permanent damage from the radiation. The whole "converging shadows" bit is complete nonsense; those shadows can easily be explained by varying terrain on the lunar surface.
It doesn't matter that the lunar lander did not have a very powerful computer; all it did was basic calculations of a very specific nature, that the computer was designed and programmed to do. Apparently, a lot of the calculations were done back at mission control, and the data were fed back to the astronauts.
The most convincing argument is this:

If we truly did not land on the moon, who would know first? A couple of American citizens, or the soviets? If we had faked the moon landings, there is no way that we could conceal it from them, but you don't here Russia saying anything about the landings being a hoax. If they were faked then Russia would have found out at some point along the line, and they would tell everyone. The fact that they haven't should be proof enough.

Unless, of course, the US government is paying the Russians to be silent...

Which is about as ridiculous as the moon landings themselves being faked.

40 Years Ago Today . . . .


Yes, i remember it well.

I was almost 16 years old, so was well aware of the Historic significance.


I actually took a roll of Black & White photographs,

right off our television set,

using my trusty (and, alas, junkie) Kodak Brownie Fiesta 127-roll film camera,

which i had received on Christmas 1962.


I wanted to make sure this moment would be captured forever.


Yes, those photos were crappy, but they DID show the image.

(gotta' love that Verichrome Pan film)



And, of course, we all drank Tang (a powdered orange drink, used by NASA).

BTW, i truly loved the taste of Tang. I learned later that most folks didn't.



That day was certainly a Magical Moment.

A defining moment in the lives of those of us old enough to appreciate it.


We all stayed up well past Midnight, watching the Live TV coverage.

Believe it was about 3 or 4 A.M. (Central time)



Hey, get this . . . .

Many people were actually Complaining about it:

" Good Grief ! Couldn't they have planned this for a decent hour ? ? ? "






PS: Great idea for a thread !

:twothumbs

_

digitaleos said:

HarryN,
Where did you grow up at? I just took my daughter to the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio. I live about 23 miles away from there. I'm not old enough to have been able to watch the actual landing but the museum did have a pretty good short film about it.

Chris

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Hi Chris, I sent a PM to you about my hometown. It is close to Lima.

If you like the Armstrong museum, stop at the Wright Patterson AFB Museum just North of Dayton. Plan for more than 1 day if you are a serious aero buff. The downside is that once you go there, the Armstrong museum seems - much less.

One of the things that really made the whole adventure work is that the AF was already flying a lot of high altitude and high speed test vehicles. Their was a surprising amount of infrastructure already in place to support the program.

It sounds really funny now, but when I was 12, I saw a poster in our classroom showing a height comparison of the Apollo craft to an adult man. I stared at that for a long time, kind of disappointed, really realizing that there was no way my brother and I could build one in the back yard. :sigh:

One of the things that is really unfortunate, is that even a science buff like me started to get bored with the missions. It was interesting if they were really doing something new, like adding the rover, etc, but once they got into the rover based missions, more trips started to seem routine, and they were hardly even on the TV anymore.

I think I read somewhere that the Russians actually sent a robot vehicle to the moon with an intention to be "the first craft on the moon". IIRC, it crashed just days prior to Apollo 11. (which also would have crashed if not for the manual over ride)

That reminds me of one more memory of this - we all knew when the LEM was supposed to land, and when it didn't land on time, we also knew how many seconds of fuel it had left - and were counting it off in our heads! That event spawned the video game, "Lunar Lander".

jrmcferren said:

What amazes me the most is what we were able to do with 1960's technology. What upsets me is how we had to go full circle with some technologies in the past 30 years, but if you lived through the times each step (even the backwards steps) were considered forward steps.

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If you try sitting inside one of those capsules, you will find out very quickly just why the shuttle program was launched. In order to fly in the Apollo, you had to be a very special shape and size, and not mind being in cramped quarters under completely insane conditions for days. After a trip more nerve wracking than anything I can imagine, you crawled out from the capsule and smiled like you just watched a good baseball game.

While today we see the Shuttle as high risk, at the time, the concept of sort of "flying" back to earth rather than "dropping like a rock" seemed like a good idea, and the cost per pound projections were quite compelling.

Burgess said:

40 Years Ago Today . . . .


Yes, i remember it well.

I was almost 16 years old, so was well aware of the Historic significance.


I actually took a roll of Black & White photographs,

right off our television set,

using my trusty (and, alas, junkie) Kodak Brownie Fiesta 127-roll film camera,
And, of course, we all drank Tang (a powdered orange drink, used by NASA).

BTW, i truly loved the taste of Tang. I learned later that most folks didn't.
_

Click to expand...

I was about 3 but I remember the family slide shows that we would watch yearly, also taken right off of the TV set, and my dad would have to remind everyone that the blurry B+W image was the actual moon landing.

Ahh, tang and space ice cream although I never tasted that one but it was everywhere.

Radiophile said:

Later, as I learned more about calculus and physics in high school and college I became more and more of a cynic and now I fully don't belive that we ever landed on the moon. I just doesn't make sense that the technology availble at the time could calculate the trajectory of the capsule with the complicated gravitational system. The "computer" they used for guidance at the time had less power than a simple calculator. The video from the landings just wasn't possible with the distance, propogation, and interference it would have encountered. The skeptic Rene also makes some very good points about converging shadows and repeated landscapes at supposedly different locations. And then there is the Van Allen belt and the associated radiation. I just don't believe it.

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I guess you don't believe signals are still received from the voyager craft that is way past the outer planets?
Do you have a complete understanding RF transmission, reception and propogation to make such a claim?

Believe it or not, they have thrusters and could make course corrections or even abort the landing. Computers could be plenty powerful in those days. On YouTube, there is a video of the GM's Pontiac division from 1970 showing CNC equipment cutting 3D molds.

The bulk of the guidance calculations were NOT computed on the craft itself, but back on Earth, and the results transmitted.

Also, when you have a big enough antenna, the transmission power required is EXTREMELY small. The Pioneer and Voyager transmissions are only a couple watts in power IIRC.

There is lots of hard evidence, peer reviewed that says we went. There is absolutely no hard evidence, peer reviewed that says we didn't.

Occam's Razor wins again.