Thursday, July 16, 2009

And Speaking of Speeeed ...

Apollo 11 launch
Forty years ago they launched a rocket to somewhere or other.

7 comments:

Tamora Pierce said...

I'm going over my memories, too. I can still feel the rush. Good times.

I need to find my photos that my cousin on the Hornet took of the splashdown.

Rick said...

You can safely guess that I will blog at more length about this on Monday!

Kedamono said...

I was 8 years old and half asleep while we watched the landing on TV. I had grown up with Gemini and early Apollo. I remember watching the first American spacewalk when I was 4. I was really excited over man going into space and all that.

And then it was all dashed to pieces when they cancelled the Apollo program.

Citizen Joe said...

I was born on the 22nd. I think they were on the way home. I don't have much memory of the events, but I've always had a strong interest in space exploration.

Anonymous said...

"I was 8 years old and half asleep while we watched the landing on TV. I had grown up with Gemini and early Apollo. I remember watching the first American spacewalk when I was 4. I was really excited over man going into space and all that.

And then it was all dashed to pieces when they cancelled the Apollo program."

You sound just like me. The headlines about landing on the Moon were the first time I remember color on newspapers. I once had a poster (lost during one of my many moves), that compared rockets from the U.S. and the Soviet Union...even the ones that they hadn't built yet. It included a nuclear variant of the Apollo/Saturn and something called a Nova...

Ferrell

Rick said...

I was born on the 22nd. I think they were on the way home. I don't have much memory of the events

It would be amazing for you to have any! Except retrospectively, of course. :-)

I was in high school. But the greatest personal moment of awe for me was really Apollo 8. I was going to a evening science club meeting, and when I went out at dusk ... there was the Moon, and people were up there, going around it. Of course that didn't make Apollo 11 just another mission, but that evening looking up toward Apollo 8 was the 'this is for real' moment.

Rick said...

A sad coda: Walter Cronkite has died. He was the face of the CBS Evening News in the golden age of the national media, an era hard to even imagine today.

But most to the present point, he had a true love of the space program. Amid all the dismal news of 1969, Apollo 11 was thing he liked reporting, and it showed.

Godspeed, Walter. You are Go for liftoff!