There are not a lot of times that I can tell you, without some
pondering or research, what I was doing fifty years ago that day. But today is
one of them.
I was thirteen, living in my family's home, and we were all
in the living room, crowded around the TV, waiting, and then watching, as Apollo
11 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. We then watched NASA
simulations that showed us how the spacecraft would travel to lunar orbit, and
how the LEM, or Lunar Excursion Module, would separate from the Command Module,
and how it would land, and how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would climb down its
thin ladder to walk on the surface of the moon.
There was not much else to watch on television. All three commercial
networks covered it non-stop. I am glad
that my family chose to watch the coverage of Walter Cronkite and the team at
CBS News. Occasionally we flipped to NBC or ABC to see how they were telling
the story, but CBS was our homebase. We trusted Walter and his people. He
seemed to really care about the astronauts and the mission and how important
the whole endeavor was to us. And I cannot over-emphasize what a big deal this
was for the workers at NASA, the people of the United States of America, and,
corny as it may sound to some, for the whole human race.
During the hours and days after the successful launch,
Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke were interviewed in the studio. I had
just discovered who these authors were and had barely begun to read them at the
time. CBS also chose to cut away to affiliates is every state – or, at least it
seemed so at the time. Ordinary people in every corner of the country were
shown and interviewed, to get a kind of group photo of the US at a special
moment in time. We all knew that not everyone was in favor of the billions
spent on the space program, but it seemed that the nation was united in wishing
the astronauts well. We would not breath normally until Armstrong and Aldrin had
left footprints on the glowing orb we looked up to at night, and they and
Michael Collins had returned safely to earth.
The spacecraft took off on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, and the
Eagle landed on Sunday, July 20. I must have slept for some of that
time, but I don’t remember doing that. My most salient memories are of actions
that occurred far away from me, sometimes hundreds of thousands of miles away.
I know the Apollo capsule splashed down on July 24, in the North Pacific
Ocean, and I imagine CBS and the other networks ceased the wall-to-wall
coverage they had been doing and broadcast some other programming in the days
between the liftoff from the moon and the return to earth, but I can’t tell you
anything about it.
There were, of course, other moon missions – most of them successful
– and the US and other nations have accomplished great things with manned and
unmanned spacecraft in the decades since, I don’t think these great accomplishments
brought us together and made our hearts beat in quite the synchrony that the Apollo
11 mission did.
I do hope we will go back someday. I hope we will establish
permanent colonies on the moon, maybe other planets as well. I hope I live to
see some of that. But, I feel very fortunate to have witnessed all of that,
even if only on television, and in the world of my imagination.
