I was in the family room, watching it all on our family's first color TV, which the previous owners of the house left behind for us. I was not quite 6 at the time, but i remember it some.

What i do have a very vivid memory of is when i went to see "Apollo 13". In the lobby afterwards i heard someone say "I was on the edge of my seat. I didn't know if they were gonna make it or not! What a great story." I was thinking, "i knew how it came out. I saw it when it happened, live."

I was invited to a dinner in Santa Barbara at the house of a friend of a friend.

We had a great time talking about all kinds of things, then after a few hours I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. "Through that door, down the corridor, second door on the right." OK.

Entering the corridor, I forgot all about my urgent needs. The walls were packed with photos from all parts of the Apollo project, and from some of the photos I saw that my host was the guy who led it. I was amazed that he hadn't said a peep about it during dinner, and I was surprised that my friend hadn't told me either.

Looking at all the photos with so many people involved, I thought that with the electronic and computer technology available at the time, a roundtrip journey to the moon with a landing and takeoff simply had no right to expect to be successful.

It just wasn't reasonable to think that so many clunky components would all work.

So was the landing all luck? No.

Looking at all the people in these photos, I thought the success came from the fact that every single human in the project, from the toilet cleaner to the lead engineer, wanted it to work.

There is an enormous power in having a simple and clear vision that is shared by 100% of the team.

This is of course missing from NASA today (due to organizational rot that happens in every organization), and I don't see anything coming short term to fix it.

We should send a thank-you telegram to Putin as a living representative of the old Soviet era, with appreciation for getting their Sputnik up first, which provided the impetus for the U.S. educational system to be rebooted to provide a good scientific education (from a state of "whatever").

Today, a poll shows that 6% of the U.S. population believe the whole moon landing was faked.

Time to reboot the science education again...

I'm kind of unimpressed with the conversion so far. Probably very low resolution to begin with?

Here is a clip from BBC comparing before and after of a few clips:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8154686.stm

Someone working with Pink Floyd got some footage and, oops, forgot to return it. Interesting stuff, though. Sorry, a friend sent me this, don't have time to pretty it up:


A REEL of film held for 20 years in a Sydney vault could unlock the mystery of what happened to the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The reel belongs to Australian film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton, who had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimetre film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue.Mr Clifton had ordered the reel in 1979 for a rock film he was making about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon but forgot he had it until seeing a news report on television recently.The footage of Neil Armstrong's "one small step" is considered among the most important artefacts of the 20th century but the original NASA tapes have been mislaid somewhere in the US.It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist.The grainy black-and-white television images broadcast to 600 million viewers on July 20, 1969, were a photocopy of a photocopy of the original images captured on the moon's surface by a specially built camera.Few people ever saw the high-quality original images shot at 10 frames a second and beamed back to the Australian tracking station at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory.When the images reached the tracking station they were transferred onto a one-inch, 60-frame-per-second tape and sent to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, at Maryland near Washington, DC, for safekeeping.The footage broadcast to the world was shot by a television camera pointed at a monitor receiving the images from the moon."What was broadcast to the world was nowhere near as good as what was received," said John Sarkissian, an engineer at the Parkes Observatory.All the Apollo mission flights and moon landings were captured in this way and transferred onto one-inch tapes at Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek in Australia and the Goldstone Observatory in California. The tapes were stored in 2614 boxes containing five reels of tape each and held for years in the US National Archives.By 1984 most boxes were recalled and sorted at the Goddard Centre, but only two of 700 original Apollo 11 tapes have been found.NASA announced last week it was launching a formal search and is recalling all the paperwork associated with the tapes.In 1979, he ordered the film for $US180 from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, for use in The Dark Side Of The Moon.Mr Clifton said: "On a visit to Washington I went to [the] Smithsonian and asked if they had any shots of rocket ships travelling. They said, 'Well, we can give you highlights of the moon shot.'"A week later a delivery came to my film studio in Los Angeles with the can of film. When I opened it up I was gobsmacked because instead of getting a couple of minutes I got nearly half an hour of a complete film."So I took a couple of shots out of it and cut it together with the Dark Side Of The Moon demo for the Floyd film. But I was so busy I never got a chance to finish it and the film just went into the vaults."I didn't think another thing about it until a few nights ago when I was watching television and it came on the news. And I thought, 'I have got that stuff.' "Mr Clifton's business partner and catalogue manager Drew Thompson said their 16-millimetre film version of the Apollo 11 landing contains images never released to the public.http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-small-step/2006/08/19/1155408073519.html

> Since this will undoubtedly turn into a "Where were you then?" discussion,

Actually, I was hoping it would turn into a, "What have we done in the last 40 years" discussion and the answer is almost NOTHING! If you polled people 40 years ago and asked where man would be almost 1/2 a century later, I would imagine most would say that the moon and Mars would probably be colonized by now and we would be into deep space travel. We haven't even been back to the moon in 40 years and forget about a Mars landing. IMHO, it is a sad, sad, state of affairs that man has gone no further than where we were in 1969. Shame on us.

BTW, at the time, I was in my bedroom watching on a small TV and recording the audio live off of the TV speaker on my reel-to-reel tape recorder. I still have the tape around here somewhere (probably stored next to my Apple ][+ computer which I still have). ;-)

~jr

The newspapers today reported that NASA erased the tapes (200,000) for use on other projects to save money. A NASA representative said they are not in the historical business and their primary goals have changed.
JJK

I was on Cocoa Beach with my Dad, watching the launch. Very, very cool watching the launch as well as the network cameras (great huge beasts back then). Also got to see Apollo 13 lift off, but this time, my Dad and I were right in on the NASA grounds. My Aunt's brother-in-law worked for NASA and we were able to get in nice and close.

Al

Video folks tend to be old-timers, it seems.. I also remember this, I was a scholar and sat up all night (Norway) to watch this. The only TV station we had, public service, broadcasted all night, which probably was the only occasion, for decades.

JR:
>We haven't even been back to the moon in 40 years and forget about a Mars landing. IMHO, it is a sad, sad, state of affairs that man has gone no further than where we were in 1969. Shame on us.

Agreed. I remember they figered 1985 would be the year man would land on Mars, back then.
When it comes to Mars, I have the feeling Arthur C. Clarke had a valid point: "Man will not go to Mars until a totally new, revolutionary propulsion system has been developed" (As I remember it)

So we are stuck with Sony Vegas, and will only visit Mars in the virtual worlds we create there :-)

ingvarai

A former girlfriend's father told me that the weather was going to be forever changed after the Apollo 11 flight, as we had now opened up a "tunnel between the earth and the moon" (no, his last name was not Gore) and her mother said it was all a fake, and that she "knew somebody who could prove it".

We never got married :-)

My Dad, an engineer and astronomer, and I watched it from the control room of a TV station. I worked at the radio station side of that facility at the time.

I kind of like the Dec 21, 2012 deal where all the planets are lined up in a straight line with the sun pointing at the center of the galaxy, and the concentrated gravitational pull on the sun in one quadrant causing the resultant sun spot to toast the Earth into oblivion.
JJK

I watched it at home with, as always, camera in hand. This was one of three photos I took, in color, no less (I normally shot B&W since it was cheap and easy to develop and print). I only shot color for "big deals," and this was the biggest deal imaginable.

I remember even more clearly the Apollo 8 mission, with the Bible readings on Christmas Eve. Amazing memories.

Wow - nice picture!
Maybe you managed to get a photo of Neil Armstrong, it turned out that almost all pictures were of Buzz Aldrin, since Neil was carrying the Hasselblad.

> remember even more clearly the Apollo 8 mission, with the Bible readings on Christmas Eve. Amazing memories

Yep- actually, I have met William Anders in person. In 1976 he was US ambassador to Norway, and spent the whole evening as honoured guest when we at the Norwegian Association of Astronautics celebrated our 25th anniversary.
I have about 45 minutes of audio recorded on tape, from his speech (my own equipment). Wish I also had captured his slideshow!
Recently I digitalized and cleaned it, using Sony Sound Forge, and iZotope, Voxengo and other VST effects. Already then I was a multi media enthusiast, and was working in the factory making the famous Tandberg tape recorders. Guess what tape recorders NASA used ;-)

ingvarai

Tandberg tape recorders were excellent. Remember when gear was always made of metal, and had proper controls that said "clunk, clunk" as if to confirm what you were doing?

NASA didn't want to use up valuable onboard space for a moon landing video camera, they thought "it would make a public spectacle out of what should have a purely scientific focus."

Fortunately, Captain Kirk, er, the module commander said, "We'll bring a video camera!" and the rest is history.

They only had a few hundred kbps for the data transfer via radio, so they had to give the camera (which cost back then a cool $1M in 1969 USD!) a non-standard resolution that was quite a bit less than NTSC.

TV signal receiving stations were set up in multiple locations in the U.S. and Australia (using radio telescopes of course). Initially the signal was picked up from the U.S., then that signal quickly got bad, so they switched to picking up the Oz signal.

Later it was found that the reason the U.S. receiving station signal was so bad was that the equipment was operated by an engineer who was using the gear for the first time, and he screwed it up (video was not given any kind of priority or importance...).

Standing on the moon and looking up at the earthrise must have been the most incredible human experience of the mind...

Especially since they couldn't be all that sure that they would be able to kickstart the moon lander to get back up into orbit with the Apollo capsule again....

Oooh, getting nostalgic...

I was 11 years old, my mom woke me up at 2 am (German time) and I was seeing it all LIVE. Well, simply unforgettable...

How much I'd loved to be on board...

Cheers

darkframe

I kind of like the Dec 21, 2012 deal where all the planets are lined up in a straight line with the sun pointing at the center of the galaxy, and the concentrated gravitational pull on the sun in one quadrant causing the resultant sun spot to toast the Earth into oblivion.

When Gor-Al errr Jor-El builds the escape ship I am on it. Cannot wait to be Superman.

Has anybody else here seen the documentary "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To The Moon"? I won't go so far as to say that I believe it was faked, but I will say that they present some convincing arguments. Some of the unreleased footage they show is quite astounding : like the one shot where the American flag is fluttering "like an air conditioner duct is blowing on it". The music is horrible and the narration is just too "oh so serious", but the arguments but the case they make is pretty convincing. If nothing else, it is worth watching with the sound turned down for all the extra otherwise unreleased footage ;-)

"like the one shot where the American flag is fluttering "like an air conditioner duct is blowing on it"

Mythbusters busted this myth wide open.