I was 8-1/2 years old, and had put together a scrapbook with clippings about the Apollo 11 Mission (or "misson," as I spelled it then). My folks had friends over, and we were all in the family room watching the 13" B&W TV. I fell asleep--as I recall, the stepping out onto the moon happened about 11PM or so--and my Mom woke me up to see Armstrong's famous step. Shame he muffed his line. Of course, he had the misfortune of being recorded. We have no idea what Columbus really said when he set foot on the New World.

I still have the NY Times from the next day: "MAN WALKS ON MOON." One of these days I'll get it framed.

I lived in southern Alberta, Canada, 20 miles from the closest paved road. We had a tiny house provided to school teachers by the provincial government. Black & white tv, antenna outside, rabbit ears inside. The moon was clear & close out there on the prairie. Next day the principal of the school made the remark about footprints.

I was 13. I STILL watch the launches & landings.

I wonder if this was James in the black jacket talking with Buzz?

My grandmother was in the hospital. We had come in from Cleveland to Indianapolis to visit her. I listened to the landing with my dad and brother and sister in our car in the parking lot of Community Hospital.

At my grandmother's house later that evening, we tuned the TV into Walter Cronkite to watch the first moon walk. When the momentous footstep came, nobody analyzed Neil's first words for a missing article.

A couple of weeks later, we were visiting my other set of grandparents in Fowler, Indiana. I remember sitting on the front porch with my father and my grandfather. "We'll be on Mars before I die," my grandfather said.

It's kind of sad to think back on it now. Everyone thought "this is just the beginning". Turns out we were wrong.

UPDATE: In honor of Neil, Buzz, and Mike, here's a little tribute to rockets and other things that go ZOOM.

I wasn't born yet when it happened, but I still look at the photos my parents took of the TV set during the moon landing broadcast. Since VCRs were still a ways off, that was the best way they had of recording it.

When Armstrong walked on the moon, I was at Mt. Norris Boy Scout camp in Eden, Vermont, listening to the moonwalk on a "small" (3"x2"x6") transistor radio, as they were called in those days. No TV - I doubt that Eden actually got a watchable signal anyway.

Being as the VCR (much less TVO) was decades in the future, it was nearly two years before I saw a rebroadcast of the event.

I have never really forgiven my parents for making me go to camp that week - I was far more interested in the moon landing that I ever was in crafts, archery, or swimming.

When I was thirteen, I "faked" an illness so I could stay home from school and watch the entire Apollo 8 mission on TV (I'm sure mom knew what was going on, but she went along for Dad's sake). 7 months later, I'd rigged dad's 35mm on a tripod in front of our TV so I could get pictures from the moon.

Memories:
Canaveral, freeze dried ice cream, liftoff thunder, Flash Gordon, model rockets, Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, Buck Rogers, Erwin Allen, telescope in the back yard, cold winter nights, shooting stars, "Dad, can I be an astronaut?" "Sure son, you can be anything you want to be", Star Wars, 2001, black holes, worm holes, gateways to another universe, comets, "Zur and the Kodan(?) Armada", countless books, "Hey, put the highbeams on, then the snow looks like Warp Speed!", Robotech, Star Blazers, "It would be an awful waste of space...", Skylab, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, "one giant leap"

John F. Kennedy: "We choose to go to the moon...We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do all the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Optimism.

And now...:
Over budget, "cheaper to send probes", unaware public, unsupportive public majority, humankind left the moon at 22:54:37 GMT on December 14, 1972 and did not return. 35 years. Rusting launch pads, rundown towns from the space age, all our eggs in one Shuttle, the vision seems to be gone.
If we don't get off this planet we're going to use it up.

"We have stopped looking for tomorrow's scientists. We have stopped listening to tomorrow's dreamers."

Stagnation.

But...
Burt Rutan, Bigelow, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, etc. Just maybe we've finally given up on waiting for the government to do it and taken matters into our own hands. I pray.

Our family was on vacation in Colorado, at the YMCA camp at Snow Mountain. No TV's in the rooms, but they did have one (Black and White, natch) in the main room, where everyone gathered.

I was a couple weeks shy of my ninth birthday. My biggest recollections were (1) it taking forever - it seemed they were just about to leave the LEM for a good hour there, and (2) having a hard time making out the pictures. When you're a kid you don't quite have the knack of forming coherent pictures out of wavy monochrome images beamed 180,000 miles to a dish in Australia, halfway around the world to network control in New York, and then back to whatever affiliate in Colorado we were watching.

But I did see it. And I almost never felt so old as when, as a "non-traditional" grad student in my mid-30's, I made the mistake of saying casually to a couple of classmates, "Well, you remember the moon landing," and getting the cocker spaniel look (blank expression, head cocked 30 degrees) back. Oops, right. You guys weren't born in 1969. Got to remember to take my meds....

Apropos of almost nothing, I too was an Estes Rocket Man. We lived on a farm, so I had plenty of room downrange to recover the vehicles after their orange-and-white Mylar chutes deployed. Good times. Who knew my space program was almost as ambitious as NASA's, in the end?

If you search youtube for "moon landing" nearly all you get are "it was all a hoax" and parody videos. I am just barely able to remember the real thing. I feel sorry for kids today.

It's a common misconception that he did not say the "a". He did say the "a", it was just covered up by static in the primitive communications of the time.
BTW, six and a half hours between landing and stepping out. That must have been the longest six and a half hours ever, for those guys.

We were on Cape Cod, and had gone to a clambake with my aunt and uncle. I remember two things about that afternoon. First, how torqued off I was that the people having the clambake did not have a TV at their cottage, resulting in my listening to the landing on a portable radio. Second, the nauseating taste of everything at the clambake (they were trying to do an "official" one, and had steamed everything over a fire covered with canvas bags and seaweed - every item [lobsters, clams, corn, etc.] tasted like canvas).

On the bright side, we were back at our cottage that night, and we did have a TV. The problem there was that in the pre-cable days, you ended up with the ghostly, static-filled local TV problems added to those of the transmission from the moon. Still, I did get to watch it, laying on my stomach 3 feet in front of the B&W set.

I honestly think Buzz gets miffed at any reference to Neil Armstrong. Our company hired to speak at a top producers' conference, and he went through a well prepared speech about teamwork and excellence, all based on his moon landing experience, and there was not one picture of or verbal reference to Neil Armstrong to be seen/heard. Everyone there thought that was a pretty odd (and stark) omission. How do you talk about the moon landing without mentioning Neil? Evidently Buzz can. I do admire Buzz for punching a moon landing "truther" in the face, though. Good on him!

I was not yet even a twinkle in my parents' eyes, but my older brother would be born the following month.

I wish I'd been able to see it firsthand, but instead I had the blessing to grow up immersed in the space program's wake - my best friend's father worked for the aerospace industry, and was a continual source of fascination. He enthusiastically shared with us his love of astronomy, rocketry, and computer science. We watched the first space shuttle launches (the Enterprise, the Columbia, the Challenger) on television with great excitement and awe. Coupled with heavy doses of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and all the rest of late '70s sci-fi, I was hooked on the idea of space travel for life.

In fourth grade I decided I'd have to abandon my dreams of being an astronaut (since I wasn't very good at math) and instead take up drawing and writing comics - but now I feel like I can have the best of both worlds.

I sat on the couch as a 13 year old, next to my Grandmother, who had personally known the Wright brothers, and watched the first men walk on the Moon. I was never, and have never been since, more proud to be an American, than that day. I had looked forward to that day, for most of my short life.

To me, at 13, it was like Christmas, the Fourth of July and my birthday all rolled into one. Only bigger, you know what I mean?

I wish every kid could have that kind of ....moment of human epiphany in their lives when something really dramatic and good happens in front of their eyes, to show them that life really can be great and there are really heroic things to accomplish; there are things worth living for (and living up to) and achieving.

I was 10 years old on July 20, 1969, and recall spending that Sunday evening at my grandparents' home. My younger PJ-clad brothers & I gathered with our family in front of the TV to watch the historic moment. It was a clear night in our Waukegan, Illinois neighborhood, and we later went outside to gaze up at the moon and marvel at what was transpiring.

Three weeks later, our family was on vacation in Florida. In those pre-Disney days, before Orlando was the center of the family vacation universe, we kids were most eager to visit what was then called Cape Kennedy. My most vivid memory is going inside the giant assembly building to see the under-construction Saturn V rocket that would be used for the Apollo 12 mission later that year. Those were the glory days of the space program, and there was nothing cooler than returning to school that fall with news that we had seen the next moon rocket.

Many years later, we finally made it to the Johnson Space Center in Texas with our eight-year-old son. I was expecting our next child at the time, and had been given a due date of July 20. That year, this happened to also be the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. My husband & I had chosen the name of Benjamin if the baby was a boy. Because of the due date/anniversary, however, I decided that if our boy was indeed born on July 20, we would call him Buzz. It turned out that our baby was a girl who was not born until July 28. We don't call her Buzz, but she is entertained by the notion that she might have been!

There is a ceremony available here, modeled on a Jewish Sedar, to commemorate the event.

Hopefully it won't be another 39 years before we are back there.

I was a 7 year old in Jacksonville, FL and can remember watching Walter Chronkite's coverage so well.

We all have less-than stellar moments in our early reporting years. I once asked Richard Petty what it felt like to be the "king" of NASCAR racing before NASCAR was popularized. This insinuated, I suppose, that his title meant next to nothing. Of course I couldn't see him roll his eyes at me because he wears those sunglasses ALL the time. But I also couldn't get out of the room fast enough!

If we can put a man on the moon, then why in the world can't we put a man on the moon????

Brings back memories. I had just turned 14. (Apollo 11 launched on my birthday -- best candle a kid ever had.) We were at a church picnic way out in the countryside somewhere west of the Michigan city in which I lived. About a dozen of us were huddled around a small B&W portable plugged into the pavillion's power, watching a snowy image on the screen.

My grandfather (who was there) had grown up on his family cargo ship -- a sailing barque. He thought it was even neater than I thought it was. (Will another generation ever see that type of change -- sailing ships to spaceships -- in one generation? Maybe if we develop FTL travel.)

Today I work for a major NASA contractor, on the Shuttle program. It has had fun moments, but nothing like that day in July. I started in the Shuttle program two years before its first launch. If you told me then that a quarter-century would pass without humans getting more than 300 miles from the Earth's surface, I'd have thought you were nuts. Turns out I was, I guess.

My cousins were driving up to Minneapolis from Dallas, late as usual. They arrived just moments before the astronauts emerged. I remember Aunt Evonne and Uncle Hugh and their five kids racing down the stairs to the basement "rec room," where we were watching our big TV.

Of course we took pictures of the screen. Still have 'em.

I was nine, sitting on the couch between my Mom and Dad in my pajamas. I got to stay up late, which, if you knew my parents, meant I wasn't the only one who thought something very special was going on. My Dad said he was proud because they used some GE lights and cameras on the flight, but I think he always wanted to explore the universe. I never got over the excitement of that night, and it's a great part of the reason I went into engineering. I've been in aerospace for the last twenty five years now and seen some pretty cool stuff, but nothing comes close to watching that blurry image from the Moon.

And, as for the missing 'a', one of my Aerospace Professors used to say that any English major that made it to the moon could feel free to correct the error.

T,

Great pictures! I have the Aviation Week from the first lunar landing. Even though I'm an aviation history buff, the best part of the magazine is the ads! They also covered the roll out of the first F-14 mockup. Great stuff!

Here's something ghoulish. Did you know there was a speech penned for Nixon to give in the event the ascent engine failed, leaving Neil and Buzz stranded?

It's a grim piece of prose, full of "they knew the risks, and mankind is the richer for their sacrifice" turns of phrase.

But still.

How weird would that have been, to watch Dick come on nationwide TV to begin the deathwatch? I'm sure some enterprising soul out there could find the the thing, if they were so inclined. Me, one reading is plenty.

Katpage, that's funny you should recall that you took pictures of the screen during the moon landing. Just last week, my secretary showed me a black and white print of a photo her mother had taken of the tv screen during the moon landing. She had just found it while going through some boxes while helping her mother move. We recalled where we were when the landing happened. I remembered it was July and because there was no school I got to stay up late for it. I was 7 and watched the event with my dad and sisters. Mom was too tired and went to bed before the landing and I went and woke her up with the news. Looking back, it's funny that people thought the only way to capture the event for posterity was to take a picture of the tv screen.

I was 43 days away from being born. I was fascinated by astronomy and space exploration as a child (I wanted to be an astronomer for a long time, until I realised that astrologers made ten times as much money, which rather took the gloss off). It's one of my abiding regrets that I never got to see the moon landings, And it's absolutely unconscionable that we haven't been back yet.

I was five years old, at my uncle's cabin in Northern MN, watching Uncle Walter explain the way it was. Watching that Saturn V take off was the most amazingly powerful thing I've ever witnessed.

The Johnson Space Center has unveiled a restored Saturn V rocket, which was built for the cancelled Apollo 18 mission.

Much more information can be found at the the Space Cowboy Saloon Saturn V page.

For a full NASA video archive of Apollo missions, visit the NASA History Division Fortieth Anniversary Audio and Video Clips

SATURN V SPECIFICATIONS

I was all of seven monhs old when we landed on the moon, but my mom says I watched with rapt attention.

Of course, I had cool books on all the space stuff (I had a great pop-up book on SkyLab that's long gone now). And my mom used to do that water-pressure rocket toy in our yard.

The first space event I remember was the handshake in space, the Apollo-Soyuz mission. The main reason why I remember it is that our playground swings were the hard bench types, not the slings you commonly see today. We would swing as high as we could, then stand up, and reach over to the neighbor to shake hands once we were synchronized.

It's amazing we didn't get hurt more often, but I guess you could say the same thing about space exploration.

Jacob

This is how my dad commemorated the landing. He drew a man-on-the moon cartoon complete with a face on the crescent and an American Flag stuck in it. He mailed it to himself that day and still has that envelope on his desk to this day.

I was at home, watching it on TV. I was a typical space geek - built model rockets, read Scientific American, helped a friend build a telescope. After degrees in Astronomy and Electrical Engineering, some detours into other fields, and 20 years as a support contractor at JSC in Houston, I'm now part of the team designing Orion to send us back to the Moon. Can't ask for a better job.

I watched it happen on a small, Sony portable that had a screen around 4x5 inches. I was laying on the living room floor (hardwood).

Years later I would come about 5 feet away from Michael Collins, but did not get a chance to meet him.

They say something snapped in Neil after he got back and he secluded himself for years except to go on lectures and when he was teaching. I think it drove his first wife crazy.

Buzz, on the other hand, never got a large chunk of the recongition due him, so that probably rankled. But I have no problem with anyone punching a "moon-landing-conspiracy" pr**k a good solid one in the kisser...

Because of the 19-year "metonic cycle," and since 38 = 19 * 2, the Moon will be in nearly the same place in the sky (near Spica in Virgo) and at the same phase (waxing crescent, 35% sunlit) tonight that it was on 7/20/1969.

My mom went into labor and, when she and dad arrived at the hospital, they wheeled her into a room where they had a TV going, televising the moon landing. She watched the whole thing (I'm sure being in labor and all was somewhat distracting) and I was born later that evening. So, yes, today is my birthday!

I was 15 years old, and had been a fan of space travel since Alan Shepard’s suborbital Mercury flight. I discovered model rocketry in 1967, and had a few rockets in my fleet…but not the Estes Saturn V. Not yet. I remember “the day” well. My parents and I were at my grandfather’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks. There was a black and white TV set, but since the nearest stations were 30 miles away with several hills in between, the reception wouldn’t be the greatest. But, it would do. I was excited, even during the thunderstorm that morning. Then, the power went out.

I was afraid we’d miss the whole thing, but since there were a few hours to go, there was still hope. After a while, we saw a truck from the local electric co-operative turn off the state highway onto the gravel lane, heading away from my grandfather’s house. Poppy said it looked to him like my uncle was driving. The storm had passed and the sun was out, so we all walked across the highway and down the lane. A tree limb had fallen across the power line, and sure enough, there was my uncle up on the pole, making repairs. We talked for a bit, went back to the house, and soon the power returned. What an amazing thing to watch Armstrong and Aldrin leave the LM and walk on the moon!

In 1972, I stored my model rockets in boxes, left for college, and eventurlly watched the night launch of Apollo 17 in one of the dorms. I married in 1982, and one day my wife said, “Your mom called, and she opened a box in her attic and found some rockets”. I returned to the hobby, joined the National Association of Rocketry, and most every year attended a competition in Wichita, Kansas. When my first daughter was old enough, I taught her how to build model rockets. She went with me to the launches, including a national meet where we met Vern Estes. Later, my daughter would attend Wichita State, and marry an aerospace engineer.

I sure hope to watch another moon landing in my lifetime.

I was 20 years old and had just completed basic training at Lackland AFB, TX. Being Sunday, had the day off from picking up cigarette butts, spent the whole day in the Day Room watching a B&W TV. My Grandfather was about my age at that time when the Wright Brothers first flew and he lived to see the moon landing, so I thought I'd see alot more in my lifetime. But mankind pretty much let us down.

A bunch of us went to the home of a relative who had both a color TV and room for lots of folks. I was only 5, so I got to sit on the floor really close to the set. I distinctly remember Cronkite talking, but pretty much none of what he said.

What's really striking to me is that a great many of the adults who were at that gathering grew up in homes with neither electricity or indoor plumbing.

Boy, do I feel old. I remember sitting in front of the TV and seeing the news bulletin for the Russian launch of Sputnik. For the moon landing, we had just gotten back from Cape Kennedy. I was lucky to have grown up in a community that did a lot of aerospace research and was very involved with the space program. (Tullahome, Tn) My Dad packed the whole family down to Florida to sit on the beach and watch the launch. Then we drove back to TN to watch the landing on the old B&W. My kids have a hard time imagining the excitement of the time and the effort that was needed to accomplish that feat. I’m soon to retire from the aerospace industry. It’s sad that the best efforts appear to be behind us.

I was almost 9 at the time. I remember going outside after the landing, and looking up at the moon. I knew there would be no visible difference...but I looked very closely, just in case.

In a blighted coal town in Pennsylvania, I laid on the floor in front of the 25" (!) Zenith Space Command Television set connected to cable (!)(in glorious monochrome, but so was the meat of the broadcast, kiddies)watching KYW Ch 3 out of Philly, frustrated and impatient, awaiting the open hatch and ladder descent. A great deal of moon footage was broadcast convoluted by the aspect of a mirror which had to be deployed before the image could be righted, hence my floor position so I could watch upside down, as nothing much happened. I almost fell asleep before the event of the century. Even my older than average parents were nodding off and I had the onerous job of waking them for the footfall.
Others have described an epiphany. I agree. I knew little of the real work that led to that moment but I still felt so very good about it that I think it was a human racial moment; no matter who you were, what you knew, where you were from, who you worshipped, there in front of you was a transcendant act, and you were 'there'.

As others have said, we've got to get the hell off this rock before it kills us.

In a blighted coal town in Pennsylvania, I laid on the floor in front of the 25" (!) Zenith Space Command Television set connected to cable (!)(in glorious monochrome, but so was the meat of the broadcast, kiddies)watching KYW Ch 3 out of Philly, frustrated and impatient, awaiting the open hatch and ladder descent. A great deal of moon footage was broadcast convoluted by the aspect of a mirror which had to be deployed before the image could be righted, hence my floor position so I could watch upside down, as nothing much happened. I almost fell asleep before the event of the century. Even my older than average parents were nodding off and I had the onerous job of waking them for the footfall.
Others have described an epiphany. I agree. I knew little of the real work that led to that moment but I still felt so very good about it that I think it was a human racial moment; no matter who you were, what you knew, where you were from, who you worshipped, there in front of you was a transcendant act, and you were 'there'.

As others have said, we've got to get the hell off this rock before it kills us.

Looking back, it's funny that people thought the only way to capture the event for posterity was to take a picture of the tv screen.

People didn't just think that, it was the only way to have a personal record. The only other alternative would have been a film (if somebody produced it).

Even if a movie was made, most people would only be able to project a silent 8mm version. Hardly anyone owned a personal sound-capable movie projector. Home VCRs were far in the future.

Even at that, to take a good photograph of the tv image wasn't easy. You needed to understand how to do it, and know that you had to keep the shutter open quite a long time to allow the whole CRT image to be present.

I was riding in the family car on Hwy 99 in California's Central Valley. The radio was tuned to a station that carried updates, but I preferred to crane my head back and look at the moon through the back window, where it was high in the sky. I'm still fascinated by astronomy. If you enjoy stereophotography, I have a page with multiple stereo photos of the moon. Just cross your eyes, and you'll see a round, full moon in the middle. I just uploaded a crescent moon stereo. Click HERE

I had a friend who was traveling abroad. He came across another tourist from the UK on a ferry ride, who decided to one-up the Yank, and claimed that the UK owned Antarctica based on discovery, etc. Instead of contradicting him, or explaining the various treaties and legalities of how the US does nto recognize any claims, he says, "Oh, yeah? Then we own THE MOON." The Brit apparently sulked the rest of the ride.

My parents got married that day in a brand new, faux wood-paneled church. I think they watched the landing during the reception. I don't think they planned it that way, but what an interesting day to get married!

Although they're divorced now, so it's become a 'would be' wedding anniversary. Oh well. They stayed together for thirty years though, that's a lot better than some other couples.

--
Obligatory link to my webpage! C'mooon... You know you wanna see my bad anime art.

I was a week short of my 9th birthday when Neil and Buzz landed. I remember watching the news coverage of the landing with my Mom in the afternoon--we drew the curtains so we could see the TV screen better. The "simulations" the TV networks had were little cardboard models that moved jerkily across the screen.

There was no live TV of the actual landing--the TV picture came later, after the Lunar Module was on the surface. While the LM was descending to the surface, all we had were those funny "simulations" and Buzz Aldrin's voice, calling out numbers that I didn't understand. (They were forward and downward velocities in feet per second.) So the TV audience was flying blind, as it were. We had no idea how close they were to the Moon, or if they were going to be able to land at all.

But I still remember the big moment. One of the news commentators had told us about a 6-foot long probe extending from (at least) one of the legs of the Lunar Module. When that probe touched the Moon, he said, a "contact light" would go on in the cockpit.

My Mom and I sat in suspense, listening to the strange numbers coming back from the Moon. They were close, but how close? Would they be able to land? And then I heard Buzz say, "Contact light."

"Mom, he said 'contact light!' That means---"

"SHHHHHHHH!!!!"

And then, Neil's famous words from Tranquility Base.

Happy Birthday, anonymous!

I was nine years old, and my Dad had a part in the space program. He was a government inspector at Allison in Indianapolis, where the fuel tanks for the Command Module and the LEM were built out of titanium. A number of times I heard him describe what a chore it was to make those things, subject them to tests and inspections, and then argue about whether they were good enough. I built all the Apollo models, especially the Command Module and the LEM (I had several of each in different scales).

I remember sitting on our old couch and watching the landing on black and white TV. I can't remember anything else specifically about being nine years old, but I remember building those models and watching the lift offs, and finally THE LANDING.

Yes, it is sad we have not been back.

Eric

I was driving from Kingman, Arizona to my parents house in Phoenix. I knew the landing was imminent, and I worried I wasn't going to get there in time. Only speeding just a little, I got home in time to find my family huddled around the tv. The Highway Patrolman walked in moments later, and we all shared the moment.