Posted on 07/21/2012 12:07:34 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A thousand years from now, no one will care about the debate over Obamacare, or gun control, or Mitt Romney, or any other event or person from the last 50 years. Except the moon landing, of course.
It was 43 years ago today that Apollo 11 touched down on the moon and astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on its surface. Because it was the first time in human history we had accomplished the feat of traveling to another world and leaving our footprints on its face, as long as humans are writing history, Apollo 11 and Armstrong will be mentioned.
There was so much we didn't know about the mission at the time; Armstrong gave himself a 50-50 chance of returning home (NASA thought the odds two out of three). The landing itself was a very near thing with the spacecraft having less than 30 seconds of fuel left before an abort would have been performed.
Veteran space journalist Jay Barbree recounts the moment of Armstrong's descent to the surface of the moon:
"Forty-three years ago, Neil Armstrong moved slowly down the ladder. He was in no hurry. He would be stepping onto a small world that had never been touched by life. A landscape where no leaf had ever drifted, no insect had ever scurried, where no blade of green had ever waved, where even the raging fury of a thermonuclear blast would sound no louder than a falling snowflake."
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Thank you for reminding me...
It was a wonderful time, wasn’t it!
The actual date was July 20, 1969, my Mom’s 45th birthday, celebrated in front of the TV.
It was! Once in a while I like to go back to the streaming audio of the Apollo 11 descent. All three of that crew were born in 1925 I think, there’s something to that “greatest generation” stuff. :’)
If Von Braun hadn’t been held back by Eisenhower, the US would have orbited a satellite a year earlier than Sputnik, and would have had humans in space first, and would have been on the Moon perhaps by 1966 instead of 1969 (Von Braun built the F1 engine for the DoD to enable the missile delivery of the Teller H-bomb; a better design followed, and that million+ pound engine wasn’t needed for the H-bomb; Von Braun managed to drag it along behind him into the civilian space program; he didn’t get to green-light the all-cryo engines — the J2 — until JFK laid down the gauntlet), and would have been able to build an Apollo-based human mission to Mars during the early 1970s. By 1980 the US would have had permanent lunar colonies (rotating staff in and out of course) and somewhat regular human missions to Mars, as well as a US (not “international”) space station (or more than one).
I wish Inspector Harry Callahan was still around to give us his theories about the moon landing being fake.
For the record, Inspector Harry Callahan posted twice in August 2011 after being completely silent since 2003!
Hopefully, he’ll make it back to regular posting!
You do remember me. I know you do. So here goes again...
I was at the launch. I saw the astronauts get into the capsule. I watched it blast off. You know, as well as I do Ivan was reading the telemetry. Ivan would have said something if the lunar module didn't land on the moon.
Give it up guy. You remind me of...no, I'm not going to insult you today.
5.56mm
A bunch of us were staying at a friends house while they were out of town, B&E, but since the son gave us permission, no charges. Anyway, we did some good old Timothy Leary and watched the men on the moon......drug their TV outside so we could watch it too. What a blast! Great memories, we still laugh about it.
/commie mudslime pig speak
Yes I do, although I’ve not heard it in years. He was (as one of the reviews said on the back of one of the albums) “occasionally amusing”.
:’) Well put.
The last line of the song was quite interesting, I thought.
It was snarky, like the bulk of Lehrer’s material. My favorite is “National Brotherhood Week”, and “New Math”.
National Brotherhood Week! LOL!
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