Apollo 11 – The Bigger Takeaways from
Greatness 53 Years Ago

Took a tour of KSC a few days before launch. The bus drove by the pad and the guide stated that the cost of what we were looking at was $200 million. Will never forget his response to all the gasps of disbelief: "That's right, ladies and gentlemen. $1 for every man, woman, and child in the United States." Even more gasps. Adding to OP's comment - no calculators, either. We got to the moon using slide rules.

I was 15 and at Girl Scout (when the Scouts were Scouts) summer camp on Catalina Island. The counselors had an little portable black and white TV in their staff house. They were going to move it into the dining hall for the event. After breakfast that morning, a group of ten of us from my unit staked out the front of the spot where the TV would be placed. We stayed there all day, with two taking rotating hour breaks together. We had it all planned out. It was a long and boring wait while everyone else was swimming, sailing and canoeing but, it was it worth it! The picture was grainy and the reception was lousy, but we had the best seats in the house sitting there on the floor inches from the screen. The girls in the center were standing on benches, while the girls in the back were on the tables straining forwards. When the broadcast was over, night had fallen and the moon was up. I stood on the beach and gazed in amazement that Americans were walking on the moon! What wondrous things would I see my country accomplish throughout my life?

The Apollo 11 mission was one of the best examples of American Exceptionalism in this great nation's history. And as #1 notes, the mission's success was made possible with hand-held slide rules as evidenced in historic photos of the Mission Control Room. How cool is that. To clarify Anderson's opening sentence, the lunar module, Eagle, had landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. On a pre-dawn Sunday, I believe. It was a cloudy night where I grew up in northern Illinois, so the moon was not visible to us. But my folks got all five of us kids out of bed to watch Neil Armstrong exit the lunar module and walk on the moon. Our TV was an old black and white Zenith model complete with twenty or so vacuum tubes inside. The live broadcast images of Armstrong were fuzzy and grainy, but well worth being up in the middle of the night to see. For me as a soon-to-be high school senior and second oldest, the lunar landing was nothing short of inspirational.

I also remember that during this time, Ted Kennedy killed a woman and it was so obvious that the media was trying to gloss over that story. It was a turning point for me and I have distrusted the media since.

53 years ago I was flying my F4 back to Ubon from a night mission out on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos bombing trucks, guns and Gomers. I remember looking up at the moon that night and realizing that we’ve got folks up there right now walking around while we are still down here in the mud killing each other. The spread of human ability from high to low boggled my mind.

For anyone who is old enough to remember it, that event is one on the list that of occurrences which we will never forget where we were and what we were doing when it occurred. This was less than 6 years after the assassination of JFK and a year after the assassinations of MLK and RFK. The author writes that they all occurred in the same decade but doesn’t give the specifics. I was 16 and watched it in a dormitory at a school where I was attending a summer school arts program. After the landing we all went outside to gaze in wonder at the moon.

#5. As Apollo 11 launched, I was in an F4 300 miles north on a training sortie headed directly toward Canaveral at 20000' and listening to VOA on HF radio. We saw the most beautiful vertical contrail ever.

The entire space program was less for scientific or tech advancement than for propaganda after the US found itself second in the "Space Race". In the late-'50s Soviet Communism was on the march, and fear was a great motivator for the US population. We won the "race to the moon". It's over. And those trying to rekindle interest aren't catching the same tinder. The costs today would be prohibitive for a country one step ahead of the debt collector. The author, one notes, is "President & CEO of Paragon Space Development Corporation." American private enterprise is already stepping in without government money, delivering supplies, for example, to the International Space Station. Soon to be launching tourists into orbit. Even planning a "2001"-style hotel up there. And there is always the Russian space program for a ride.

Re #7, my father was just west of the prohibited zone at the Cape, at 40,000 ft cruising northbound in a USN F4B when they launched John Glenn. He listened on his radio, too, and said it was "the best seat in the house" to watch that rocket go by only 10-20 miles east of him. For the Apollo 11 launch we watched the launch on TV, then walked out to our dock, and looked SE across the lake. In a few seconds you could clearly see the bright white rocket and the tail of fire from the 125 miles that we were from the Cape. We had FOUR complete Saturn V rockets, Lunar Landers, and Apollo Command modules built, tested and all paid for. The astronauts had trained for years, the ground crews were in place and had likewise trained for years. We were set to land 8 more men on the moon, and one or two missions had a lunar rover that could go many miles from the landing site, much farther than any previous missions. And....our rotten, leftist, cowardly, blind, money grubbing, power hungre DEMOCRAT Congress cancelled the funding. This was only money for the fuel and the wages of the people involved, a TINY drop in the bucket of the money ALREADY SPENT to have four more lunar landings all ready to go, all built and paid for. And Congress cancelled it. As a young engineering student in college, who lived in Florida and who had already been to several Saturn launches I was as angry at those pukes in Congress as it is possible to get. Still, over half a century later, I am VERY angry at those dim, ahistoric, money grubbing little worms who preferred to hand out that money as welfare payments to try to buy them some more votes rather than make more history for all of mankind. GRRRR! Dems have been losers and wreckers my whole life.

I was at the Cape for the Apollo 11 launch. The sights, sounds, and pride at what was happening are unforgettable. It took 66 years to go from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base. After nearly that long, we have not really made that "giant leap" we all expected. The planned Artemis landings have been hyped as "putting the first woman and the first person of color on the moon." Exceptionalism has been replaced by demographic pandering.

What happened to the shower of tiny asteroids bombarding the lunar surface at thousands of miles per hour without damaging Neil Armstrong's pressurized suit?How did the astronauts nail every vertical moon landing using 1/100th the computing power of a cell phone when it took Elon Musk 5 tries to land a rocket vertically using today's supercomputers? What happened to the telemetry data of the world's most famous flight? Let's see how many inquiring minds make it through the first 14 minutes of this clip of Bart Sidel, author of Moon Man. https://www.bitchute.com/video/EtEFKUoxKciA/

It is impossible to know the feeling and the kind of world it was BEFORE the landing. To think any human could land on the Moon and return was just a dream. A dream as old as humans and then it was on the way to actually happening. Very dangerous and few know that soon after landing a pressure build up in a fuel tank almost required an abort and return to Command Module before they had a chance to walk on the Moon. Happily the residual heat from the landing rocket melted the frozen line and the alarm corrected itself. Then, while exiting, Armstrong broke the lever to a circuit breaker with his backpack as he crawled backwards out of the LEM. That circuit breaker switch was vital to firing the return rocket. Aldrin reset it by pushing it in using a felt tip pen he had. They moved that breaker on the following LEMs. #11, you make assumptions about 'facts' based on people looking to get attention. any kind of attention. Like manipulating or simply lying about photos. Some people have to believe a story that is so opposite the facts and reality that it becomes a fevered dream of 'look how exceptional I am, only I and a few really smart cynics understand the truth.' Like EVERY other 'fake Moon landing' story, it is just another hodge podge of nonsense that overlooks the screamingly obvious question of why no one from the Soviet Union ever claimed it was fake. They would have been thrilled to expose the lie, but of course they could not, because they monitored every part of every mission and compared everything to their own Moon program. A country like Russia that did put the first human object on the Moon with a probe in 1959, respects actual science. Too bad lunatics don't. https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/sept-14-1959-soviet-space-probe-is-first-human-made-object-to-reach-moon/

BTW, there aren't 'thousands' of meteorites hitting the Moon every day. It is pockmarked from millions of years total of impacts.Neil Armstrong was an outstanding pilot and test pilot. He manually took over controls as soon as he saw they were heading into a field of boulders. Using thrusters he flew the LEM horizontally during the decent until he had about 15 seconds of fuel left before they would have had to fire the return rocket and abort the landing. You see the difference wasn't between the computer on the LEM vs SpaceX booster. It was between a human brain controlling a craft vs a machine landing itself. Did the 'Moon Man' charlatan miss that detail? All the Apollo pilots flew the 'flying bedstand', a jet powered contraption using vertical mounted jet engines to simulate to some degree, the controls of the LEM. Of course it was only slightly like landing in a LEM on 1/6 Moon gravity, but it was a kind of practice. Look up Armstrong ejecting out of the thing when one of the controls stuck. Barely made it out as it was very close to the ground. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/50-years-ago-armstrong-survives-training-crash

NASA was successful, to a large degree, because when JFK announced that our goal was to put men on the moon before the decade of the 1960s was over, he also exempted NASA from a lot of normal procurement rules. NASA administrators were also given broad discretion in managing the program. And there were no diversity rules, no affirmative action,. Success was not measured with EEO reports or 'our strength is in our diversity.' Congress may have given up on NASA, but Jimmy Carter did, as well. And do not forget that we had the Skylab in orbit, but didn't know how to use it, or what to do with it, so it was allowed to crash, back around 1979.