Remembering Apollo 11 – 50 Years Ago

During this past week, I have seen many TV specials about the events from fifty years ago. Fortunately, I was old enough to remember the historic time. I was 15 years old during the summer of 1969. It is still difficult for me to think about that much time has passed in my life. I can remember when 30 years old seemed to be ancient! Not anymore. Anyway, here are my recollections and a few interesting facts of the Apollo 11 moon landing from 50 years ago.

Background

I was always quite fortunate that my family took some great summer vacations. In 1966, my dad bought a new pickup truck and a new cab over truck camper. My first experience with RVing! During that summer, we took a two month vacation out west. From Indiana we crossed the heartland of the US through the heat of the summer to California and back.

The 1966 Chevy pickup had a 326 ci engine with a 3-speed column shifter. And no air conditioning. That’s just the way it was back then and we simply enjoyed the windows down and the wind blowing through. A few years later, while traveling through a hot Texas summer, my dad took the truck to a Sears store to have a new fangled under the dash A/C installed. In a small 2-door truck cab, that was some very cold air!

Our truck camper was a 1966 Del Ray Sky Lounge. It was one heck of an innovation in that passengers could ride on a sofa in the section over the cab. What a view! You could not even see the truck many feet below. It was like you were floating down the highway. With no seat belts and no air bags. It had to be very unsafe, but my brother Keith and I would ride up there when mom and dad were down in the truck. We all survived just fine. No incidents except for the occasional sibling rivalry. Simpler times.

At the time we thought the inside was large for my family of four. Today, our rig is about 10x larger, two large A/C units, 55″ TV, etc. Times change.

July 1969

The summer of 1969, I had just finished my high school freshman year at Garfield HS in Terre Haute Indiana. Garfield was one of those classical looking, large 3-story buildings. I was beginning to know my way around and would become a sophomore next year. My world, like all 15 year old males, was spent thinking about girls and cars. Pretty simple time I guess.

The Vietnam war was still very much an issue that we would see on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite. Along with the war news also usually came updates about the upcoming moonwalk. My family was fascinated about all things about the Space Race as we called it back then. It was something that all Americans were united in being excited about and were mostly all supportive of it.

My family left on our summer vacation with truck camper to somewhere north from our Indiana hometown. I believe it was the upper part of Michigan, but not sure exactly. I do remember well that night on July 20, 1969. It was late at night and a large crowd was gathered inside of a picnic shelter at our campground.

Bugs were flying around the lights and TV and the people. The shelter was only a few yards from the campground in one direction and the lake in the other.

There were probably 30-40 people gathered around a small black and white TV set. Mission control in Houston and/or Cronkite would announce the schedule of events from the lunar descent, to the landing, to the very first time that man had walked on another planet, the moon. What a cheer erupted when the landing module safely landed! What a proud time to be an American! We had won the space race with our cold war nemesis Russia.

From that point on, I really do not remember anything particular about that summer vacation, but I will always remember where I was at that moment.

In 1961, president Kennedy had thrown out the challenge for the US to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Through two more presidents, an incredible amount of research and testing, and some tax dollars, we did the impossible. This was well before the highly computer controlled world we live in today. The small onboard computer system that Apollo 11 used for propulsion control was miniscule compared to the computing power in today’s iphone.

So many human calculations and development happened during that decade. The US space program began in 1958 with the Mercury program, the single man spacecraft. Then, the Gemini (2-man) stated in 1961 with more flights and testing to build the path to the Apollo program. An incredible decade of achievements.

So, if you were born at this time, where were you on this night in 1969 and what were you doing? What do you remember about it?