Some of us remember Apollo 11 as if it was yesterday. Even though I was not quite 8 I remember it well. For those who want to relive the experience and for those who weren’t around at the time, NASA are running the entire Apollo 11 audio feed in real time over the web. Luckily they preserved these tapes but not the video! I’m listening to Aldrin and Armstrong checking out the inside of the LEM as I type.
Was this really 40 years ago? Henry Allingham would have only been 73! In some ways it seems only moments ago. Oh dear, getting old when nostalgia is comforting.
I was only 3 & a half when Apollo 11 landed, but I’m absolutely certain it was the Apollo missions that first inspired my interest in radio communications. It has only been in the past few years that I have looked into the frequencies & modes used, but the audio from those early forays into space is still more than enough to keep me fascinated.
The Tom Hanks film of the Apollo 13 mission is one of the few films I will purposely watch all the way through, but the real footage, albeit grainy at times,is better.
In an era when spaceflight seems so routine & worldwide communication equipment can be held in the palm of your hand, I sometimes wonder, what have today’s children got that could possibly inspire so much awe.
I don’t think even the first mission to Mars would come close to the drama of those days.
Well, the great event occurred one day short of one year before I was born. But it was probably the most talked about topic for the first ten years of my life, even beating a certain 4-2 footy result into 2nd place. (Fulham vs Macclesfield, FA Cup 3rd round 1968 of course).
Some of these conspiracy theories are really quite convincing, especially when the questions and contradictions remain unanswered. A certain M3EYP can be so taken with them that he finds it hard to accept that man set foot on the moon. But then he can be very suspicious about most things - even dear Julia!
I can well imagine the thrill of 20/21 July 1969 though, as in one week of my year-long school Foundation radio project, the students and I listened in to the ISS as it answered questions from a school in Cornwall. This was exciting, including for me (it was my first ever listen-in to the ISS, as well as the youngsters), so goodness knows what the euphoria was like for landing on the moon some forty years ago!
I see news that USA and China are both planning to go to the moon in forthcoming years. Will we live to see the first Moon SOTA association? If you thought you needed oxygen on Everest…!
Please call me for my birthday party Backpackers Contest effort tomorrow. It’s the big one - the big three nine
I even have a very hazy memory of looking up at the Moon knowing people were up there. That must have been during one of the later missions, as I remember it being from near the caretakers shed at Junior school.
I very much doubt that I will be active in the Backpackers contest on Sunday,or at least if I am, It won’t be for more than an hour or so. If I am near a radio though, I will happily give points away to any stations I hear.
Is it your Birthday then Tom?
If so, Happy Birthday, you young Whipper-Snapper. HI!
You make me feel so old - I was at university at the time!
I sat up to watch the events unfold with my late Grandmother - this really surprised me as she was in her late 80’s at the time as was normally an early bird. When I asked her why she had stayed up to watch the landing on the Moon she replied with one of the most observant and thought provoking comments I ever heard:
“When I was a child, Marconi had not invented wireless, the Wright Brothers had not flown and space travel was the fiction of H.G. Wells - you will never see such an advance in technology in your lifetime”
I watched the moon landing on an old monochrome 14inch Bush valve television set that I had managed to pull back from the dead. Trouble was the tube picture was so faint and fuzzy it was difficult to see anything at all from the moon!
Golly, forty years gone in a flash…it kept me off the air for several days, thats how important it was to me, and I really thought that it was only a matter of a few years to a lunar colony and at most a couple of decades to a Mars landing, in those heady days before the word technophobia was invented!
As for the conspiracy theorists, I know of no questions or contradictions that can’t be answered with a bit of research and commonsense, plus of course there are the recent photos of the landing sites that put it beyond question!
Golly, forty years gone in a flash…it kept me off the air for
several days, thats how important it was to me, and I really thought
that it was only a matter of a few years to a lunar colony and at most
a couple of decades to a Mars landing, in those heady days before the
word technophobia was invented!
although I was a youngster then, I remember it as if it was yesterday. BTW: If the administration were following some experts recommendations for a scientific exploration (first build a huge earth orbital station and THEN fly to the moon and beyond) it might well have happened like you thought and we could already have had the first manned mars flight. Unfortunately it was all about to beat the Russians in space race… a pity, but probably inevitable for the 1960s
As for the conspiracy theorists, I know of no questions or
contradictions that can’t be answered with a bit of research and
commonsense, plus of course there are the recent photos of the landing
sites that put it beyond question!
as far as I can remember the hoax theory was officially spread amongst the people in the former GDR. Whenever someone turned up with a story which was hard to believe, he was in danger to being replied “yes my friend, and the Americans landed on the moon”
