Fifty Years From One Small Step: 20 July 1969 4 comments
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Subject: July 20 1969
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 89 01:54:40 EDT
From: ted@braggvax
Twenty years ago, a boy of eight sat in front of a decrepit black and
white TV and tried to make out the suited figures walking across that
desolate surface. If he thought hard he could remember Gemini. His
father could remember Lindbergh. He couldn't appreciate how
immeasurably far the world had come since Kitty Hawk, how impossibly
great an effort had been expended since 1961, but he knew what was
important and he was there watching. He heard the words that everyone
knows, and he watched until that strange buglike craft lifted and
returned the men whom history had just rendered immortal to their
companion in orbit and from there back to the embrace of the mother
planet. He knew where he was going when he grew up.
Twenty years later, when the future he had planned on has been bargained
away, he's sure of fewer things. He does know that he had the
privilege that July day in 1969, of living through the event to which
all previous human history will be just a footnote. And he knows too
that whatever else may happen, there will still be ...
footprints on the Moon.
4 Responses to 'Fifty Years From One Small Step: 20 July 1969'
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Tom
22 Jul 19 at 11:20 am
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I visited the space center in Houston a couple of years ago. My wife says Kennedy in Florida is cooler, but I've never been so I can't compare. I will say that I was absolutely awestruck to stand next to one of the engines used by the Saturn V rocket that got us to the moon. Wow...
There was a former engineer talking with us that day whose career went that far back so he knew Mr. Armstrong pretty well. Said he was a very humble person who never got a big head about being the first man to walk on the moon; it was just his job/service to his country. That is the other part of that trip I remember very well and fondly.
kkaos
22 Jul 19 at 5:04 pm
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@Tom -- yep, we got ours here.
ted
23 Jul 19 at 1:22 am
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Maybe OT but -- I remember as a kid going to Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. For a souvenir, you could get a dime or nickle irradiated. They'd give it back to you in a little plastic case.
tuphat
25 Jul 19 at 7:32 pm
I have that book. It was given out as a promotion by Gulf Oil who sponsored NBC's coverage of the moon landing.