74 comments

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  Sarah in Chicago

  1 month ago

  Well, I'm not old enough to have been born (1974) then, but one thought did strike me ... next year will be the 40th anniversary ... and we haven't been back.
  
  I consider that a tragedy of the human spirit.
  
  Hey, but we've invaded countries!
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  Linkmeister

  1 month ago

  It's a funny thing, memory. I was on Guam; we had no television. I'm not sure there was a TV station on the island at the time. Intellectually I know I didn't see it live.
  
  But I've seen that clip of his last step off the ladder and heard those words so often that it seems as though I did see it as it happened.
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  Kathy

  1 month ago

  I was nine years old and glued to the TV. I'm really looking forward to Moonshot.
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  Coturnix

  1 month ago

  I was 3, too many time-zones away to be up and watch, but saw it on TV the next day.
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  JJohnson

  1 month ago

  I wasn't born yet (1983 here) - but its always been an inspiration to me that we said "Ya know what? We're going to the fucking moon." And we did.
  
  It shows what humanity is capable of. The only difficulty is getting us to focus on the important tasks; instead of dividing ourselves up.
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  Ab_Normal

  1 month ago

  I was two and a half, but I'm ontologically certain that the family was watching it on TV, because I come from a long line of engineers, nerds and science fiction fans...
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  ScottRS

  1 month ago

  Sound asleep on the living room floor, while the rest of my family watched it without waking me up. No, I am not the least bit bitter about it. Still ;-)
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  wiggles

  1 month ago

  I was lying in a crib or something. Probably drooling all over myself. All through the 1970s though, every boy I knew and a couple of girls, including myself, said they wanted to be astronauts when they grew up.
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  Dr. Loveless

  1 month ago

  I was 5, watching it in the living room. It's one of my earliest concrete memories.
  
  And yes, it's a damn crime that we didn't keep going.
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  watercat

  1 month ago

  Ai wer in mai kuntree
  stil bleevin in ut.
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  JoAsakura

  1 month ago

  I was about seven months old (and in pre-adoption foster care from what I've been told) - but I grew up with Apollo mission stickers all over the door of my bedroom, and MAN did I want to be an astronaut. :)
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  Ledasmom

  1 month ago

  Don't know where I was. I was old enough to focus, but not old enough to be walking.
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  Melinda

  1 month ago

  Watching! I was 13 and a nerd, and it was amazing.
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  MissyCorno

  1 month ago

  I think it was a later moon landing (I wasn't yet two when Apollo 11 landed) but I do remember watching the "men on the moon" on TV planting a flag. Later, my grandmother took me outside to look at the moon and I remember looking for the flag and wondering where it was.
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  tinfoil hattie

  1 month ago

  At the pool. There was a small black-and-white TV on in the pool office, and all of us there crowded around the little half-doorway to watch. It was really momentous. I was 8.
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  Meowser

  1 month ago

  I was almost 6. Watching it on TV, like everyone else in the burbs.
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  LS

  1 month ago

  Not born yet, but that second picture made me want to comment that I've always felt sorry for Collins. He had to know when he was assigned as command module pilot that Aldrin and Armstrong would be the ones to really go down in history, but I'm not sure he expected that no one but spaceflight history geeks would remember his name at all. Poor guy.
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  DoctorJay

  1 month ago

  I was 13 years old. It was just a few minutes before 8pm in Northwest Washington State. In summer in the North, the sun might not have yet gone down, certainly there was still light outside, visible through the large picture windows of our living room. But I wasn't looking outside. I was laying on the rug in front of the new color TV, glued to the set.
  
  I remember wondering how the camera got outside if this were the first astronaut to go outside. I remember how, in listening, you could hear the distance to the moon and the speed it took for radio waves to travel there an back by the delays between Houston speaking and the astronauts responding. I remember how the brightly lit portions of Armstrongs suit would tend to smear in the video image. Afterwards, we went outside and looked at the moon. It didn't look any different, but it meant something different now.
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  FraidyKat

  1 month ago

  At a music camp in Massachusetts, we all gathered around the little TV (small even for those times) and watched history happen. For a long time I really wanted the manned space program to do great things again, but now with the Mars rovers and Cassini and the mercury probes and so many others, I'm quite happy to wait for a long time before sending humans again... it takes a lot of equipment to keep human bodies functioning, and sometimes they don't keep them functioning and people die. If such great work can be done by remote control I'm all for putting our money into things that produce more results per buck and don't risk lives. The first lunar landing, however, was one of the great moments in human history and I'm still cheering it today.
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  PPatti

  1 month ago

  I was 12. Shortly before the landing, as everyone was gathered around their respective TV sets, all the power went out to the entire neighborhood. Our next-door neighbors rushed through the neighborhood gathering everyone into their garage to watch the landing on their small battery-powered TV set (which were almost unheard of at the time. I think it was the first one I'd ever seen). I like to tell people that I watched the moon landing the way the pioneers did - by candlelight.
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  QuakerDave

  1 month ago

  Right in front of the television, along with the rest of the world. What a sense of wonderment that whole day took on. Still gives me chills.
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  Bethynyc

  1 month ago

  I was two, so probably sleeping. Though I probably watched some of it on the news the next day.
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  Gianna

  1 month ago

  I was four. I have not memory of it whatsoever...
  I only remember it as something that happened before I was aware...
  I remember virtually none of my childhood...
  Perhaps I'm still not aware...
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  doc5467

  1 month ago

  I was in graduate school at Southern Illinois in Carbondale, and knew that was the day of the landing but had taken too long on campus to be able to get back to my room to watch, so I ran to the student center and stood transfixed in a crowd in the main hallway watching a tv up on the wall. It was Walter Cronkite narrating, I'm pretty sure. And BTW, I heard that very first original time, that Armstrong said "..."one step for A man" not "for man" as reported ever since. It's a midwestern thing, to run the sounds together as, "feruhman." The guy had it right.
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  Willem van Oranje

  1 month ago

  In the Netherlands It was in the middle of the night (on july 21) when it happened. My parents woke me and the entire family and we've watched it from our first b/w television set in the kitchen/dining/living room. It was amazing.
  
  It was broadcasted by national tv and the ‘expert on everything space’, Chriet Titulaer, became a national VIP as a consequence. He's made a decent living out of it I suspect.
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  Tapetum

  1 month ago

  I was on the road between California and Maryland, driving my parents crazy because they were insane enough to move cross-country with an infant (April 1969).
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  John

  1 month ago

  I missed it by eight years. I have seen the images many times since then, but I doubt it's really the same effect as seeing it live.
  
  I remember wondering how the camera got outside if this were the first astronaut to go outside.
  
  See, that's how you know it was all done in a television studio. ;-)
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  Angelos

  1 month ago

  I was born just 28 days later.
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  Incertus

  1 month ago

  Probably in my crib--I was 8 months old. But when I was old enough to understand what was going on, I watched every launch I could, and I still get a thrill when I see the Shuttle go up.
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  Constant Comment

  1 month ago

  I was 18 and it was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college. On a hot summer night in a western Chicago suburb, I watched it on a black-and-white tv with my family and then went outside to look at the moon.
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  Broce

  1 month ago

  I was ten. My dad was a huge space nut, and was beside himself with excitement. We were at our summer cottage in Maine, and he made sure we brought a television that week. He woke us all and got us out of bed in time to watch, as we'd watched every launch, etc from the time I could remember.
  
  My dad's funeral was one year to the day later, and I have always been grateful he lived to see men walk on the moon.
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  carol h

  1 month ago

  I was 17 and I was between my junior and senior year in high school. My family used to drive through the night to get to our home in a south Chicago suburb to Florida for vacations. We were driving and listening to it on the radio. Like Constant Comment's parents we looked up at the moon and marveled.
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  CParis

  1 month ago

  I was a tiny tyke and our family was stationed on a Air Force base in Japan. I do remember gathering with a bunch of neighbors and us kids being forced to sit down (rather than run around playing) and watch the event.
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  pbrim

  1 month ago

  I was 13 and the whole family was sitting arround watching it on a black and white TV. I remember seeing those footprints for the first time. I remember Cronkite so moved he took off his glasses.
  
  My little sister was 8 and got bored. She went outside to play. I went out during a break and warned her that if she didn't come in and watch this, she would regret it the rest of her life, but she ignored me as always. She now swears she was there, glued to the TV with the rest of us, but I know better. I think she has convinced herself she actually was, so I don't even get the satisfaction of her knowing I was right and she was wrong. (No, no issues with my sister who came along unexpectedly when I was 5 and took my crown as only daughter and pampered baby. No issues at all. Why do you ask?)
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  nothere

  1 month ago

  I was watching at home in Fussa-machi, Japan. It was late morning and I was nursing a very sore shoulder with a very large whiskey. The Tanabata festival that August was all Astronaut themes. I think the Japanese were more excited by the moon landing than the Americans were.
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  ceit

  1 month ago

  I was 3 -- I have a vague memory of it--- But when I was growing up I was a space nut -- LOL
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  HP

  1 month ago

  I was 5, almost 6. We were camping in a tent in northern Wisconsin or the U.P. (we did this every summer). There was word going around the park that there was a family that had a big RV with a generator and a TV, and they were inviting everyone to a moon-landing party.
  
  By the time we got there, the camper was crammed full of people and there was no room for any more. We were about to leave, disappointed, when my dad suddenly swept me up in his arms (the only time I can remember him carrying me), went up to the door, held me out to this motley group of drunken strangers, and shouted, "He's small!" I remember being swept up in a tangle of legs and butts and stale sweat and beer-breath. I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon and then I got the hell out of there.
  
  Today, I'm grateful to my father that I got to witness it, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was crying and running straight to Mom immediately afterward.
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  Justin Grunau

  1 month ago

  I was 8 (turned 9 in October 69). We (my mother, father, and I) were in the bedroom of a summer rental apartment above a hardware store on Main Street in Bar Harbor, Maine, watching a big color TV (a novelty in those days). We were living in Bar Harbor for the summer while my father was some summer program at Jackson Labs. Some family friends happened to be vacationing on Mt. Desert Island at the time of the landing, so they (mother, father, and three kids) were huddled up in the room with us. It's one of those things you never forget :-).
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  Bitty

  1 month ago

  I was fifteen years old and babysitting. The kids were in bed, so I had the tv all to myself.
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  RZ

  1 month ago

  I was eight and was listening to a Cubs game on the radio. Naturally, they interrupted the game to announce the landing - big cheer, of course.
  That night we stayed up late and watched Neil Armstrong's first step. I remember the image was really grainy, probably the combination of hazy image from the moon complicated by bad reception on our TV, out in the country. I've seen it again since, and it looks much clearer now.
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  MrMxyzptlk

  1 month ago

  I was 15 and living in small town northern Florida. My sister in law, an old fashioned southerner told us that the moon was going to explode in blood if a man walked on it - it was in the bible.
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  Swift Loris

  1 month ago

  I was 27 (I think I have you all beat age-wise) and in my apartment in NYC, watching on my black-and-white TV. The next day, when I saw the man I was then having an affair with, I started to gush about the landing, and he pooh-poohed it coldly, declaring it unimportant. I was flabbergasted. I broke up with him shortly thereafter, largely because of his reaction, which made it clear we were fundamentally incompatible.
  
  Another story I have to tell: Right before one of the later moon landings, they set up this huge video screen in Sheep Meadow in Central Park and invited New Yorkers to come watch. It was a beautiful clear night, with the full moon high in the sky. There were TV reporters covering this outdoor event, including a cameraman. The network broadcast was marking time by interviewing talking heads, so the park crew was feeding the local cameraman's live shots of the crowd to the video screen.Suddenly he had the bright idea to aim the camera at the moon, and there it was, the moon over Central Park in all its glory on this huge screen. And everybody broke into wild applause.
  
  (I guess you hadda be there...)
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  GOM

  1 month ago

  I was at sea off the Island of Laeso in the Northern Katagatt repairing, of all things, a rather mundane electrical cable that joins Sweden and Danmark electrically. So didn't see it but did hear it on radio. Was rather interested beyond the norm seeing as I had helped build part of it.
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  SteffaB

  1 month ago

  I was six, and my mom made sure me, my five-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister were all watching. I didn't really understand the impact of watching, but mom told us that this was something we were going to want to tell our children and grandchildren we were there for. Turns out she was right. ;-)
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  Joe Max

  1 month ago

  I can still remember it clearly - I was (almost) 13 years old and had my face glued to the TV screen (Walter Cronkite!) for the entire day - the "giant step" took place in early evening EDT if I remember right. Like most geeky boys of the time, I was obsessed with astronauts and space travel (having outgrown dinosaurs.)
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  cory

  1 month ago

  i was watching on TV with my Dad. When they were safely down and Mission Control was breathing again, he called the police and told them they should sound the town air raid sirens because we had just landed on the moon and there should be some sort of celebration.
  
  I found that very odd, because It was hard to get my father worked up about anything positive beyond getting a good parking spot.
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  Bob

  1 month ago

  My parents and I were visiting my sister, and we all sat, eyes glued to the TV for the landing and, later, Armstrong's descent to the surface. I was convinced that, by the time I got to be the age I am now, I would have been able to visit the lunar colony (and probably the Martian one, too).
  
  One of the greatest disappointments of my lifetime was when I realized that the whole Apollo program was a case of showing "the Commies" how big our national dick was.
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  Nancy W

  1 month ago

  Girl Scout camp in West Virginia. One of the staff members rounded up a small TV that day and brought it to the mess hall so we could all gather round and watch. I remember this giant luna moth on the wall out on the porch of the mess hall, beautiful green colors and feathery antenna. Then of course we went outside and slept under the stars around a campfire so that we could keep an eye on the moon all night. We kept going silent with amazement - between giggling and ghost stories - when we'd remember that there were actually people up there walking around.
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  maystone

  1 month ago

  I was 20. A group of my relatives gathered at my uncle's place, and we watched the moon landing first with silence and then with cheers. My cousins and I trooped outside afterwards to stare at the moon and try to imagine what it must really have been like to be there.
  
  Then I went to my brother's place and met up with all of our friends and we got royally high ourselves :)
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  DW

  1 month ago

  I was still in utero...
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  Burning_Prairie

  1 month ago

  I was 13 months old and probably burbling in my crib. Damn shame, that.
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  Jay

  1 month ago

  I was 9 - just - and lying on the floor in my parents' bedroom where the color TV was. In my jammies, ready to be popped into bed as soon as it was over. But we got to stay up and watch the whole thing.
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  CapnWhizBang

  1 month ago

  I was 13. My family had rented a house in Noyack, NY for a week of summer vacation by the water. Our neighbor had a big old b/w TV with a lousy picture. We all watched it on that. I thought it was very cool although I couldn't really appreciate what an enormous task it was.
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  idahovic

  1 month ago

  I was 9 at the time. I stayed up all night watching the national networks replays of Armstrong's first steps.
  It was the first time my parents let me stay up that late. I've been a science geek ever since.
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  blusilva

  1 month ago

  I was three, and I remember asking my mother why I had to watch it instead of Gilligan's Island. She said (much like SteffaB's mom) that this was history happening, I was lucky enough to see it in my lifetime and that I would remember it forever.
  
  It was pretty boring. But, I'm glad she made me watch. :)
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  JJohnson

  1 month ago

  @TheBob - I hear you there... when I was growing up I expected much the same; I figured "Well, I get why its taking awhile to get back tot he moon; but we'll go back before long, and when I'm older, I betcha well have stuff like in StarWars!"
  
  Now I grant, I'm only 24 now - but things have started to look pretty grim from my perspective. I'd definitely go into space if I ever got the chance though. Even just a short shuttle ride or something.
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  Apostate

  1 month ago

  Americans have been back on the moon several times since July 20, 1969. See here.
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  oddjob

  1 month ago

  Where was I? I was nine years old and I was asleep. My parents watched it, but we kids watched it (with some boredom, especially from my five and six year old brother and sister) the next morning when it was rebroadcast.
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  wendy

  1 month ago

  I was 12 and we had been sent home from school to watch (Australia, and probably the 21st). The picture was too grainy so despite my father trying to keep us inside, we went outside to play. The worst thing was that the TV stations played it over and over again for days on end.
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  Jean

  1 month ago

  Hmmm, '69, a very good year for all night beach parties on the south shore of Longuyland and lazy days lying in the sun. I vaguely remember my brothers being all excited by this event, but I was a blase chick working on her tan and a cure for her hangovers which I finally found in '74 (an extremely good year).
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  leap

  1 month ago

  I was working on an archaeological project in northern Israel when Apollo landed. We were not "allowed" to have radios on site, as they were distracting--not even for the first moon landing! So none of us was able to hear it live. There was a teevee in a nearby town, but we were working when it landed. That night, though, the moon shown large, and a few of us sat on a hillside looking up at it, listening to the BBC broadcast of it on a little transistor radio. That was neat.
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  laurie

  1 month ago

  I was a few days away from my 5th birthday, watching it from about 2 feet away from the old wooden console TV in my family's living room. Several neighbors were in our home watching with us and it was as if fairies had been captured or ghosts had appeared. The feeling of amazement was palpable. It is one of my strongest early memories. I remember asking my mother for a piece of paper so I could draw the astronauts. My mom saved the picture in a family photo album. What struck me the most was a giddy, rapturous feeling like anything in the world -- and out of it -- was possible. I remember my dad saying something about how now there would be no more wars, that now we would use our might to explore the heavens. He was a WW2 veteran and had been a nose gunner stationed in Okinawa. He really believed the space program meant the ultimate deterrant and best use of science.
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  SunlessNick

  1 month ago

  I wasn't alive then, but I still mist up thinking about it.
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  MR Bill

  1 month ago

  I was at my folk's house in Hayesville NC, in the little TV room, looking at the weird out of focus pics, wondering when Armstrong would go down the Ladder of the Lunar Excursion module...It was late, and it seemed to take forever for Neil and Buzz Armstrong to touchdown.
  I think we were watching CBS.
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  amish451

  1 month ago

  On-duty, sneaking down the hall to watch on the canteen TV as often as I could, finally Sarge said, "It's severe clear ( I was an Air Force Weather Observer Tech.), the tele-types can wait, this is Effin history ... save me a spot, I'll be right down!" I watched the landing surrounded by kick-ass fighter pilots and hard-ass-lifer-techs ... all of whom were visibly moved and vocally damned proud of our country that day......
  (BTW: Marilu Henner was in the shower, losing her virginity at that moment ..... ) at least that was her answer a few years ago when Dave Letterman asked her, "Where were you and what were you doing July 20, 1969 ......? " As I recall, she prefaced her answer with, "Who the *#%& told you about that?"
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  TinaH

  1 month ago

  I was 13 months old and probably burbling in my crib. Damn shame, that.
  
  Ah yep, only I was a much older 15 months. Mom says that we were on Okinawa at a friend's house watching because they had a better TV and antenna.
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  Mustang Bobby

  1 month ago

  As for me, the one who asked the question... I was sixteen, living outside Toledo and going to summer school for algebra, but spending weekends up at my grandmother's house in Northport, Michigan on Grand Traverse Bay. We had the black-and-white Zenith on the porch and we watched Huntley & Brinkley doing the live coverage (the CBS station with Walter Cronkite didn't come in that clear).
  
  The people next door were having a beach party with a rock group called Newt & the Salamanders playing, but as the time approached for the moonwalk, the band stopped playing and everyone gathered around the TV's set up on the beach.
  
  Tangentially, I was living in Miami when the last Apollo mission was launched in December of 1972. It was launched at night, and I remember going out on the balcony of my apartment in Coconut Grove and being able to see the flames of the rocket as it went into orbit.
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  mrmobi

  1 month ago

  I was 22, and living with my girfriend in Chicago. We all stayed up. The picture was terrible (it was relayed from Australia) but it was a moment I'll never fo