(Over the past several weeks, we’ve asked readers to share their memories of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Here are the responses we received.)
The space kid
In 1966 my family moved to Cocoa Beach, Fla., because of the Apollo program. My father was one of a handful of lawyers for NASA’s legal team. My friends and classmates all had parents who worked at the Cape. We were the space kids, and we cherished our roles.
During a launch I had two missions: find Walter Cronkite and head down to the pier and tell tourists they just missed an astronaut walk by.
We watched rockets launch simply by walking out our front door. But, sadly, our collective enthusiasm was diluted when three astronauts perished in a catastrophic launch-pad fire in 1967. My father was on the investigative team and was gone for days.
We knew the danger of space flights. We also knew that the moon landing was what our parents at the Cape had been aiming for.
It was the middle of summer in 1969, and my sister and I would go every summer to our grandparents who lived outside of Boston. When Apollo 11 launched, I watched on a black-and-white television. My mother and brothers watched from our front yard in Cocoa Beach. My dad was in launch control at the Cape. When the lunar module landed on the moon, I was amazed at Neil Armstrong’s first words. My grandparents kept saying they never believed they’d live long enough to see this historical event.
I was proud to be a 12-year-old space kid and know “space talk.”
When I called home to Cocoa Beach that night, I had a million logistics questions for my dad. I understood most of it, but I still couldn’t figure out how they went to the bathroom.
LISA BROWN
Concord
Happy camper
Fifty years ago this July, I was a camper at Camp Calumet on Lake Ossipee – a beautiful place on the north shore of the lake.
Being a 10-year-old in 1969, I followed the space program like an investigative reporter. In the middle of the night the camp played reveille. We walked in the dark to assigned TVs scattered throughout camp. Ours was a tiny black-and-white in the dining hall, and there I watched Neil Armstrong bounce off the ladder onto the moon.
JIM KALLGREN
Barnstead
I was on a trip to Hawaii with my mother and sister in 1969, and we were sitting in the airport on Maui on July 20, the day astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Hawaii had been a state for only 10 years, and they were very enthusiastic about the lunar landing – the airport workers were shouting and celebrating. We all listened on the radio because they didn’t have TVs in airports in those days. So we didn’t actually get to see the first steps live. We did see replays on the news broadcasts later at our hotel.
Our travels took us to Oahu by the day they returned to Earth. Back then, astronauts returned by splashing down in the ocean, where they were scooped up by the Navy.
We learned on the local news that they would be bringing them back to Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu after pickup for transport back to the mainland – and the public was welcome!
So we went out to the base along with several thousand Hawaiians and military to greet them. NASA wasn’t sure if they would be contaminated, so they had been placed immediately into what looked like an Airstream trailer while still onboard the ship. But we could see them at the windows of their trailer, and we watched them being rolled down the tarmac and loaded into the military transport plane for their trip back to the mainland and debriefing.
They were waving at us, and we waved back at them.
DIANNE SCHUETT
Pembroke
In 1969 I was in the process of traveling around the world. At the time of the moon landing, I was on a passenger ship going from Melbourne, Australia, to Southampton, England, and we were in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The ship was full of other 20-somethings like me from all over the world, except the U.S. A young woman and I were the only “Yanks” onboard. Everyone was crowded around whatever radio they could find that could pick up the faint, scratchy signal of the BBC coverage of the moon landing. And both “Yanks” were constantly getting handshakes and pats on the back. A great time and place to be an American!
DICK LUDDERS
Henniker
Our journey after theirs
We had the U-Haul packed up except for the TV, so we watched the moon walk during the night. The next morning we moved to New Hampshire, where we’ve been ever since.
MARTHA and DAVID BURNHAM
Concord
The lunar landing and moonwalk was fake news – or at least that’s what my girlfriend’s grandfather believed at the time and for the rest of his life.
I watched the lunar landing at my girlfriend’s house in New Jersey along with her parents and grandfather, an Italian immigrant farmer who spoke very little English. Of course, this astonishing event was a huge scientific and technological achievement and a great source of national pride. But what I remember most of that day was that her grandfather, who was born in the 1880s, refused to believe that the whole thing was not staged in a television studio.
He was very adamant about it and there was nothing that we could do, then or after, that caused him to change his mind. To him, it was simply fake news.
BOB SEIDMAN
Concord
My wife, Pamela, and I witnessed the launch of Apollo 11 from the VIP stands in July 1969. It was a gut-moving experience we will never forget. We, Pam and I plus Kotcho Solacoff and his wife, Dori, were there at Neil Armstrong’s invitation. Neil, Kotcho and I had been very close buddies for three years in the early 1940s in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Both Neil and I lived there for the three years but then parted ways as our dads’ jobs took both of us elsewhere. Kotcho stayed in Upper Sandusky and after medical school returned there to have a career as the local doctor.
A major focus of our time together had been the Boy Scouts. We were all three in the Wolf patrol of Troop 25. The patrol was a real winner with friendly competition for skills, rank and rewards so that in time we all three became Eagle Scouts. Another focus was aviation, as during World War II military aircraft were the high-tech wonder. In this area, Neil was the clear winner. His balsa models were far better than ours, and he was always driven to study everything about airplanes.
After his fame had quieted down, we all three got together again, mostly in annual ski trips out West with our wives and Neil’s new wife.
He was a good friend, totally genuine. He was quiet but given to some unexpected flashes of humor. I miss him very much.
JOHN BLACKFORD
Exeter
Here we are, the strongest, richest country on Earth. We are able to build anything we can think of – the richest country on the planet yet the most forgetful. I and several million people were staying up late to see the most complicated project that man has ever covered – landing on the moon and coming back. I remember the science-related things that were imaginable. We have the most wonderful machines that man could dream of, the most complicated, and yet I know by watching TV for all this time that the TV screen did not look right. What the . . .
The picture was upside down. All that technology, and the TV camera had been installed upside down.
I along with 50 million other people were standing on our heads. Not such big shots are we. Being installed upside down, what a folly.
WILLIAM PUCKETT
Concord
In July 1969 I was on Air Force active duty at a Spanish Air Base in southern Spain.
About a week before the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Kennedy we were informed the mission timeline placed a NASA telecommunications station some 20 miles from that Spanish AB in position to handle the uplink/downlink, video/audio transmissions between command module and lunar module and Houston mission control when descent and landing on the moon would occur.
A landline communications link would be set up from that telecommunications station to our headquarters and into a conference room to a 16-inch black-and-white TV monitor. We were told downlink transmissions from the lunar module to Houston would have a few seconds delay for the station communications console controller to “tweak” the video/audio quality before it went on to Houston. The landline communications link to us would tap into the downlink transmission as it arrived at the station communication console and before any “tweaking” would be done.
Their point was this had never been tried before and there were a lot of big ifs and no guarantees we would see or hear anything.
The Spanish AB was six time zones ahead of Houston. On July 20, 1969, about a dozen gathered in the conference room. The link was activated. Communications between Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the lunar module and Michael Collins in the command module and Houston were scratchy and hard to follow as lunar module separated from command module and began its descent to the moon’s surface. There were frequent long silences; no commentary from the likes of Walter Cronkite since we were on “direct feed.”
As descent continued we heard Houston control following status and addressing key decision points. Then, 30 minutes after the start of the descent, we heard program alarms, easily resolved by Armstrong and Houston, and concern about fuel.
We began to see visuals of the moon’s cratered surface as Aldrin called out descent speed and angle while Armstrong took manual control and commented on how it looked “down there.” As they neared the surface we saw moon dust fanning out from the engine exhaust blowdown.
Then, 33 minutes after separation from command module, we heard Armstrong’s “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
With the few second delay to “tweak” the downlink transmission, we had seen it and heard it before Houston did.
WILL GRAN
Bow
In 1969 I had a summer job as a programmer in an MIT research lab. The whole campus was excited about the upcoming moon landing, and perhaps figuring out how much work was likely to get done anyway the administration declared that Monday to be a paid holiday. Like other long weekends, I went to my grandparents’ cottage in New Hampshire.
My grandparents went to bed Sunday at their usual early hour, while I stayed up to see the moonwalk on their tiny, ancient black-and-white TV. I was surprised when my grandfather got up again to watch the moonwalk, as he hadn’t said he was going to. So a man who was born in a previous century in a sod house on the prairie, and moved to the city in a covered wagon when the family lost the farm in a drought, got to see grainy video of a rocket ship on the moon. I don’t think anything that could possibly happen in the rest of my life would be as much technological change for me as what he went through.
ROY SCHWEIKER
Concord