47 years ago today, the first manned space craft landed on the moon. Most people who are old enough to remember can tell you what they were doing that day, and watched the live broadcast on television.
July 1969. It’s a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.
It is only seven months since NASA’s made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket.
Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.
At 9:32 a.m. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit. (› Play Audio)
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Over the next three and a half years, 10 astronauts will follow in their footsteps. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission leaves the lunar surface with these words: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.”
Stella's Place 
Yeah, I was at Weber State (then) College having coffee and a cigarette in a place called The Cave, a place reserved for the non-LDS gentiles who dared consume tobacco and caffeine. We were packed in shoulder to shoulder puffing and drinking and watching in amazement. For the first time since life began on earth it left its home and landed on another planet, and America did it. Wouldn’t it nice to have an America that we could be that proud of again, not led by some POS who daily reminds us how evil, racist and undeserving of our accomplishments we are?
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Back when you could still get a “piece” dollar as change or a silver certificate.
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or peace
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is your spellcheck not working or are you setting me up on a straight line?
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Bravo!
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I’m on a ‘POtuS as an ass’ jag today.
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Speaking of the cave,
POTUS will never, ever,
be an Alley Oop; nor
one of The Rivingtons,
although he strongly
resembles one without the
benefit of their costume.
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All I want him to be is GONE
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today…and every day…
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Some more than others for me
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The summer of Woodstock.
Woodstock happened; not
so sure about the other.
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I was busy with two kids and trying to live on the GI Bill, not sure what happened else.
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My apologies if you’ve heard this but when you hear the recording of the tape as they’re landing you hear a countdown. Generally it’s left to the listener’s imagination as to what the countdown is, most propel think it’s time until landing while it’s actually time until they run out of fuel and crash. The amount of fuel allocated to a landing was cut close but as the original site was not usable they had to maneuver to a new one and that ate up a lot of fuel. What we were listening to was a countdown on how close they were becoming to being the first dead/stranded men on the moon. That’s why they picked the guys they did.
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And don’t forget the lander computer about the size of a shoebox, had 10 functions programmed. Your watch has more functions now that that computer. Yeah I’m not talking about your Timex……
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Yeah, and the alarms going off were the result of the computer trying to do its job while trying to do a new landing calculation.
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I remember my parents getting us up to watch the first step on the moon. Very exciting.
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