Video of the complete descent to the Luna surface including radio communication dropouts, computer overloads, seconds of fuel remaining and the coolness of both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin is the USA at its very best. Enjoy Peter vk6ysf.com
Wonderful!! I remember it all so well - I was only 8 years old, and our TV was black-and-white (but so was the video feed!) - I had a little AM transistor radio that was 5" in diameter and was a "necklace" sort of thing, with a great big "Peace Sign" on the front where the speaker grille was LOL - and I had it around my neck, with the local radio station live-feeding the audio, while Mom and Dad had the TV on in the rec room - and I remember running back and forth from the yard back to the TV and back to the yard (listening on my radio), looking up at the moon thinking maybe I could actually SEE THEM LAND LOL!! But Dad called me back in just in time and I watched the actual "one small step" part on the TV with the family... I was mesmerized!! Amazing time, that. Dave W7UUU
I was 11 and I remember that my school class were all marched up to a nearby home to watch it on a small black and white TV. There was no regular school subjects that day and I know that the claim the whole world watched such and such, but this was more than the whole world stopped to watch, it disrupted everything, wars stopped for the day etc. I feel so privileged to have witnessed as it happened one of the greatest events in history.
Let us not forget the important part Australia made in supporting ground tracking radar and communications facilities that made all the Gemini and Apollo missions possible!!
Hear hear!! ABSOLUTELY!! https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/Astronomy/Spacecraft-tracking/Apollo-11-Moon-landing Thanks so much to our friends "down under" for all of their backup, help, assistance, and sharing in this event all those years ago Dave W7UUU
I was five, just shy of six years old but I remember it well, at least the part of watching it on our black and white TV. The excitement was palpable even to me. I knew I was seeing something huge, maybe the biggest thing in human history. I was an absolute nut for space and the sky. I often say the future was so much better in the past (I expected to be vacationing on the lunar colonies by the time I was 40, if not Mars, no kidding - fully expected that to happen when I was a kid growing up during the space race) but still... following the space race in those days gave me a life long love of the sky, and astronomy, and flight, and science, which aimed me toward a more practical-for-me engineering career and being a network engineer for major ISPs during the very early days of the build out and move from dial up to broadband. Not to mention, if I couldn't go to space I could at least learn to fly so I did that and became a private pilot. The whole thing was such a positive influence on my life. Oh yeah, it probably indirectly lead me to ham radio too, through those technical interests.
Wow, maybe the best real-time video I've seen of the landing. And I've watched a lot of them! Thanks for posting it.
Especially interesting for hams -- how they change the orientation of the LEM to make use of it's various antennas.
Yah, imaging being the communications controller back on the ground, and losing them during the landing! I would have been pulling my hair out
I have watched over the last week a really great series on the moon land and the space program in general and if you are interested in this stuff I'm sure you will enjoy. See the below video, the final of a four part series. Enjoy Peter vk6ysf.com
BBC has produced a series called "13 minutes to the moon"! Just fantastic! Available as podcast too. -Jeet, kk4cca p.s.: I was a 7 yr. old kid when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and remember that day (it was night time in India) quite well as my aunt had got married on that date!
