The Apollo 11 moon landing, in photos

I suppose this is in response to the new movie, Fly Me to the Moon.

I do love Apollo. For itself and also for the fact that my Ol' Man helped them get there while working for Raytheon. And today, with a DEI workforce and supercomputers, we can't even duplicate the feat.

I remember the Apollo 11 lunar landing most vividly on this day. My folks let us stay up late that night in 1969 to see it live. What a show. That was American Exceptionalism on display.

#2 - You won't hear the Artemis program mentioned by NASA, any other government agency, the news media, or any of the contractors involved without, "will land the first woman and first person of color on the moon." It's getting nauseating. But we are routinely visiting Mars, these days, and that's no small achievement. Which got me to thinking - with our ability to remotely operate just about anything, what is the point of sending humans anywhere?

I watched the televised coverage of many of the Apollo missions, before the country got used to them and schools stopped interrupting everything to watch them in class. I was always captivated and reinvigorated in my love for country . Now that CNN is presenting Apollo 11 as a factual event of history, it suddenly makes me have doubts about it. That's how complete has been their fall from grace -- going from being implicitly credible in their coverage of Desert Storm, to where nothing from them deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Good times. I was 11 when it happened, felt a sense of wonder not possible today.

As a kid, I watched when I could every space mission from the 60's. I gobbled up as much info and technical terms I could from the Mercury program all the way to the Apollo program. As a Christmas gift in 1969, my parents gave me the 8mm NASA film of the entire Apollo 11 mission. I have had it transferred to C/D and to USB to save it.

CNN had nothing to do with it. Walter Cronkite maybe.

#3 I suggest you research the meaning of "American exceptionalism" because it isn't what you think.

Almost totally accomplished with paper, pencil, slide rule and computers the size of a building. Couldn't duplicate that kind of know how today.

I’m slowly growing my Apollo library. My folks let me go over to my grandparents to watch Armstrong step onto the moon on their Color TV. My cellphone has more memory and processing power than the Apollo guidance computer and all the astronauts considered it to be the fourth crew member. The shuttle’s engines were more powerful than Saturn V’s. The fifth (center) engine was placed there to avoid exhaust gasses from collecting there and possibly causing an explosion. It ended up providing enough additional thrust that one launch could get the CSM and Lunar Module in orbit so no Earth rendezvous was needed. Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) was the key to successfully landing and taking off. It took NASA several years to decide that was the best, and least costly approach. The direct ascent approach had a 8 engine rocket to launch everything and the lander would have been 65 feet tall. Werner von Braun wasn’t sure he could develop and man rate the Nova booster in time to meet JFK’s deadline. LOR made von Braun’s job a lot easier.

The correct quote was "One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind." The radio cut out the A, and made 'a man' into 'man'.....which made the quote into nonsense.