Apollo 11 and my summer of ’69

This summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about the summer of 1969. I was 16 then, and I felt I had waited forever for that Apollo 11 flight to the moon.

I had been a big fan of space exploration. That made me a nerd or geek, I suppose, but I don’t think we used those words. I collected all the slick NASA booklets on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. My brothers and I practically ran the local model rocket club. I even made my own 8mm animated movies of the lunar landing mission before it happened. So I knew what to look for.

The most exciting moment of Apollo 11 wasn’t the 9:32 a.m. (EST) July 16, 1969, launch of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins atop the Saturn V. Seventeen years before the Challenger shuttle disaster, we’d been accustomed to smooth launches. The most emotional moment wasn’t even Armstrong’s first step onto the moon’s surface at 10:56 p.m. July 20, 1969. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” That was easy enough once he got to it.

Sense of danger. The real heart-thumping moment was just after 4 p.m. July 20, 1969, when, with fuel running out, Armstrong and Aldrin, on the Lunar Excursion Module “Eagle,” moved in for the landing. (Meanwhile, Collins was orbiting the moon in the Command Module “Columbia.”) All of us who tuned in to this adventure wondered what kind of boulders might be in the astronauts’ way. We wondered whether the lunar dust might swallow up the L.E.M. or tilt it so badly that Armstrong and Aldrin could never return home. Suddenly, the danger felt real.

As my family watched on two TVs -- both black and white -- in our Pennsylvania living room, we didn’t see much, but we did hear Aldrin reciting altitude numbers to Armstrong. The last 10 minutes were tense. After a scary silence, at 4:17 p.m. Aldrin said:

“Contact light! OK, engine stop.”

Another pause, then Armstrong:

“Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

They were safely on the moon, and they sounded as if everything was A-OK.

‘About to turn blue.’ Back at Mission Control in Houston, Charles Duke radioed up the feeling of millions of earthlings:

“Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot!”

Lots of other things happened in the summer of 1969.  Chappaquiddick. Woodstock. “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In.” A first U.S. troop withdrawal from Vietnam. I went camping in the Poconos. I made more home movies.

But 4:17 p.m. July 20 was the moment. We had men on the moon.

Frank Warner

Comments

[Mark]

I always remember the moon landing with the fact that we kids used it to talk my Dad into buying our first COLOR TV. A used Quasar by Motorola. The idea was we did not want to miss any of the big event due to chromatic limitations. Of course all the real-time action was in black and white. LOL

[jj mollo]

I remember one of the primitive videogames, contemporaneous with Pong. The objective was to land on the moon without using up your fuel. The game always told the player exactly how big the resulting crater was after each failure.