It was 36 years ago today...

[fleetfootmike]

...that Neil Amstrong uttered the first words from the surface of another world. I can just remember it, watching the flickery black and white images on the TV at home: I was *almost* 6. I can dimly remember Apollo 8 - talking about it with my grandfather, and for some reason having the name Jim Lovell imprinted on my memory as a hero: more so after the events of Apollo 13.

And there are people - far too many people - in my friends list who weren't born the last time a man walked on the moon. Let's face it, you only have to be 19 for the Challenger disaster to be outside your lifetime.

To commemorate, Google have come up with Google Moon - do zoom ALL the way in :) Missing from there, of course, is Apollo 13.

Comments

[catmcroy.livejournal.com]

I was 6 when Challenger exploded. I remember watching it on TV.

[plaid-dragon.livejournal.com]

I remember the Challenger disaster. I think I was in junior school at the time, and I mainly remember it for the sick jokes that were flying around at the time. I remember being excited because there was a school teacher going up, so all the schools were following the mission. I'm not sure whether I remember seeing it on TV or if I am getting confused with the more recent Columbia footage.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I was at work, watching the launch live on one of the earlier "pocket" portable TVs...the screen was about an inch and a half diagonal.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

"It's cheese, Gromet. but not as we know it!"

[bardling.livejournal.com]

Oh, neat! :)

[ian-myatt.livejournal.com]

I was around for the first lunar landing, but I was 1 year old, and, according to Mum, slept through it while she watched it.

I do, however, have blurry memories of watching later space action from the early 70's.

[aunty_marion]

o/~Twenty years and more / since we have touched her face... / Still the dream won't die.o/~

[hrrunka]

I'm always tempted to sing o/~ Thirty years and more... o/~ and I wonder... :/

[plaid-dragon.livejournal.com]

Heee!

Am I old enough to have been born before the last person walked on the moon?

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

You don't look it :)

1972, December.

[plaid-dragon.livejournal.com]

Nope, I missed out by 5 years. Is it really that long since the last trip to the moon??!

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

Sadly. No-one's walked on the moon in your lifetime.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. I'll be downloading that tonight... Google Mars to follow? With the Twin Cities of Helium duly marked?

I remember trying to make out what was happening when 11 landed. The pictures were blurry and disappointing, the voices over the intercom were scarcely decipherable, and I'd seen it done a lot better in my head. Maybe if it had heralded a bright new age of lunar colonies, manned missions to Mars, L5 habitats and zero-gravity industrial platforms...but it didn't. We had better things to do, obviously.

Still, here's to them. (hoists empty coffee cup, thinks about it, goes to make coffee)

[aunty_marion]

Incidentally, I was 15 at the time of Apollo 11. Mum let me stay up late to watch it. I remember, *just*, Gagarin and Tereshkova (spit, she did me out of 'being the first woman in space', which was my childhood ambition till then!). And barely, barely, Sputnik 1. My father worked at Keele University (in WAE) and at one point when I was about 6 (?) they had a liaison party of Russians who came over for something or other, and brought a model of Sputnik 1 for the Chancellor. Dad had to take it for a few days till he could hand it over, and it was a music box that played the Russian National Anthem. I remember it standing on Dad's mantlepiece, tinkling this foreign music at me and shining silver....

[armb.livejournal.com]

We watched 11, but I don't know if what I remember is that or repeats.

[hrrunka]

The first space event I remember listening to "live" was Apollo 8's re-entry. I also remember listening to one of the Apollo 11 moon-walks on a crackly transistor radio at school. Our P.E. teacher decided that it was more important than exercise at that particular moment. The first moon landing I was able to watch live on TV was Apollo 15.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Somewhat frighteningly, I remember explaining to a group of young teens recently that - yes - people *had* been to the moon.... They'd never heard such a thing.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

There's telling. Nobody talks about it any more but us.

[wolfette]

I was 10 years old, just short of 11 (birthday in August). I remember watching the landing - we had a tv and many of our neighbours still didn't at that point, so there were a few neighbours in the house that night to see it too.

[demoneyes.livejournal.com]

I have very vague memories of Apollo 7 - such as they are they must be some of my earliest fragmentary memories. Apollo 8 I recall fairly clearly, diagrams of the flight plan etc. For the landing I was 6 and remember following it through the mission.

12 men walked on the moon. I think there are 9 left. 9 of how many billions?

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I don't remember Apollo 7 at all. I do remember Apollo 8, but what happened to 9 and 10? And I saw the landing of 11 and the "One Small Step". And 13, and the agonising wait while they were out of contact (one thing the film didn't -- and couldn't -- achieve was that suspense). And not very long after it was the last time...

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

one thing the film didn't -- and couldn't -- achieve was that suspense

Oddly, here we disagree.

Apollo 13 (the Tom Hanks movie) is to my mind one of the best movies ever, and I find that re-entry / loss-of-contact sequence very powerful and effective.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I agree it's a very good movie. Part of the reason I found a lack of suspense was, of course, that I knew the ending. There's just no way that I could forget that for long enough to create suspense. Also, they didn't have the time. But as I said, those are things which they couldn't do anything about, the film as a whole was very well done, and they did that sequence as well as it could be done in that medium. (I remember watching it on TV 'with' bardling when I was in Germany -- she was in Hamburg and I was 800km in Ulm, both watching our own TV sets and on the phone...)

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I have a DVD set with ALL of the TV footage from that mission.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There's some Apollo XI footage on the DVD of The Dish (a movie I highly recommend) -- apparently NASA has huge amounts of film that nobody had looked at for decades

When I were a cub, we had rockets on the launch pad just up the road, we had men walking on the Moon, and we could buy tickets on supersonic airliners flying the Atlantic.

Tell young people that today, and they won't believe you.

[gingicat]

*nod* My mom had just entered her second trimester of pregnancy with me.

[gingicat]

(For Apollo 11, that is. I was in high school when Challenger exploded.)

[wolfette]

LOL - nice one, Google!

[fivetrees.livejournal.com]

As Mike knows, I'm a total Apollo nut. I have a CSM model on my shelf beside me, and the Saturn V model still to build. (I find it strange that these models are no longer in production. Is no-one interested anymore?)

I was 12 when A11 landed, and I was (and still am) obsessed. I was glued to the telly from about the Gemini period - any coverage, however shaky, and I was *there*. I have shelves full of books and biogs...

Re A13: I agree that the LOS period during re-entry was scary. IIRC, LOS (loss of signal) was supposed to last 45s - it actually lasted nearly 3 minutes, by which time we'd pretty much assumed the worst. And then those 3 parachutes appeared on TV, and everyone went nuts...

Re A11: the track "Monochrome" from the "Static and Silence" CD by the Sundays sums up my memory of that 3am TV coverage pretty well: "It's 4 in the morning, July of '69, me and my sister, we crept down like shadows - they're bringing the moon right down to our living room - static and silence, in a monochrome vision..."

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com