Speaking of Buzz and rockets, BABloggee David Hirsh sent me a link to a rare Australian video of the Apollo 11 launch. I’ve never seen/heard this before; it’s Aussie correspondent Derryn Hinch narrating while the Saturn V carrying Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins launches from Florida on Wednesday, July 16, 1969 — 39 years ago today! It’s fun to watch; I had a big ol’ grin on my face listening to him talk while the rocket launched. I was too young to remember this in person (though as a wee tot I was at the Cape when Apollo 15 lifted off), but it still gets me, every time.
Happy Anniversary, mankind.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Incredible. No matter how many times I see that, it still gives me goosebumps. One of the first memories I have from childhood is watching Armstrong and Aldrin step out of the LEM when I was just 4 years old. I started collecting everything I could about the Space Program, and have tried to follow it ever since.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Here’s a clip from BBC. I lived in England at the time. This is one of the few remaining scraps of the BBC coverage of the flight of Apollo 11. Strangely enough, I instantly remembered this broadcaster!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9BAP3cO9Bg
July 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
It shows the truly international level of interest in the whole endeavour at the time. The world was inspired by what we could do as a species, as opposed to today, when the whole world is suspicious of each other.
We just NEED to get out there, so hurry up, dagnabit!
July 16th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Holy smokes! Thanks for linking to that page Phil. Goosebumps indeed.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
So amazing to see the POV of the Australians.
Grin
July 16th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I was at summer camp (being all of 10 years old) and we were able to all squeeze into an old barn to watch the launch and the step onto the moon, a few days later.
Thanks, Phil. I needed that.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Sorry, but I got a blank screen and a red X. But, I do remember the launch,
it was noisy. The lunar landing was awesome, as Armstrong had to maneuver
the landing module to clear big boulders. (At least I think it was Armstrong).
July 16th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Wow does that bring back an old memory. We stopped haying and sat in my uncle’s pick up truck and listened to the radio broadcast from Spokane Wa. I didn’t get to see the visual until the CBC news later that night. It was only topped by the actual landing when the whole world stopped to watch.
Thanks so much for the link. That was fun.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Thirty-nine years ago and it seems like it was hardly more than thirty-eight years ago. I kid, it sure doesn’t seem anything like that long ago. I didn’t get to see the launch live because I was at work. However, I distinctly remember watching the landing live on TV. Of course, we all know now that the entire thing was faked in a cave…oh, no, but that was a very nice short story, wasn’t it. In case you haven’t read the story it’s here: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge250.html#dyson
July 16th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I was 16 when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I spent part of the day in my uncle’s bar in NJ. There was a regular customer, big alcoholic there named Johnny. All afternoon we was slurring how this was the most important day of his life. Over and over, drunker and drunker he kept saying how great it was that he was finally going to see a man on the moon. When the moment finally came, everyone was fixed on the TV as Neil made those first steps. I looked over and Saw old Johnny, head down on the bar, passed out.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
“Here’s a clip from BBC. I lived in England at the time. This is one of the few remaining scraps of the BBC coverage of the flight of Apollo 11. Strangely enough, I instantly remembered this broadcaster!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9BAP3cO9Bg”
Dude! Was that guy at the end wearing a monocle? Awesome.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
The apollo 11 landing was on my (4th) birthday, and my parents let me stay up to watch it. It’s pretty well burned into my brain.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Thanks for that! Why is it that humans so often try to limit themselves and seek excuses not to explore or even to care? This is where we belong… OUT THERE!
I don’t recall the launch, but I vividly recall the night of the landing. I live in London and it was something like three in the morning our time. My mum and dad took turns to stay up with me to watch it. I was eight. I asked them all sorts of questions they could not answer and they seemed to think I was some kind of prodigy for even asking. I’m average, always was, but even the average, given the right aspirations, can explore the stars. Why do we restrict ourselves????
July 16th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Caleb Says:
”Dude! Was that guy at the end wearing a monocle? Awesome.”
That ‘guy’, is none other than Sir Patrick Moore, I’ll have you know, laddie! For fifty years the face of British astronomy, presenter of television’s longest running program ‘The Sky At Night’, a magnificent eccentric and utter Englishman, on nodding terms with Carl Sagan and a real big mate of Brian May from Queen, although any encounters with Freddie Mercury remain untold
Plays the Xylophone too. He’s a national treasure round ‘ere, mush! :O)
July 16th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Wow, this is a real gem! Really brings the feel of that moment back to us who never got to experience it first hand, unlike much of other sterile launch footage.
Those were special times, we don’t get this kind of events and public interest anymore, sadly. I wish Walter Cronkite’s famous CBS coverage of the first Saturn V launch would surface somwhere. I really want to hear those words: “Oh my God! The building’s shaking! THE BUILDING IS SHAKING!”
July 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I watched that launch on a tiny TV with rabbit-ears antenna in a cabin way out in the Minnesota woods. The reception was terrible and I had to keep messing with the antenna to get the picture back. My cousin, a few years older than my pimply, preadolescent self, kept complaining that it was “boring” and “let’s change the channel”. He never reached for the TV to change the channel because he must have sensed that I would have bitten his arm off. Perhaps my clenching the TV with white knuckles and staring at the tiny screen without blinking tipped him off.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Wow, Phil, that was just amazing. (The player didn’t play nice with Firefox, but IE loaded it fine.) It was a few years before my time, but I get a little choked up watching it. Go, you beauty, go!
I think those renegade engineers have it right. They should take their plans over to Virgin Galactic and get us there faster and cheaper, and on top of it all, more safely. It’ll be pretty sweet to get to experience a moon landing as a live event and really be able to appreciate the significance. I can’t wait, but I guess I’ll have to.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Oh, as an aside, while searching to get the above quotes just right, I stumbled upon this gem:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4316070/1/Moonlight_Madness
It’s a fanfic of how the Doctor and Martha saw the Moon landing four times. Really, it’s quite good for a short piece.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
LOL! .. Derryn Hinch? wow. I was born in 74 and I had no idea he did that. Derryn Hinch is a slight celebrity in Aussie now as a hard-nut radio interviewer. He loves to say what he feels and is not scared of the outcome. I remember when he disobeyed a court order not to name someone on his after news TV show … but he did it anyway .. as he felt they guilty person needed to be named. Hard nut. His exposure line was “Shame, Shame, Shame” … aimed at the person he felt needed to be shamed. Last time I saw him he was doing TV advertisements for magical bowel moving cereal ‘All Bran’. He is a funny guy. (when he is not an angry man)
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/msfn_missions/Apollo_11_mission/a11_launch_Hinch.html
Funny …. I can’t see an entry about it in wiki …. shame, shame, shame.
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/msfn_missions/Apollo_11_mission/a11_launch_Hinch.html
July 16th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Thanks for the credit, Phil, and thanks also to quasidog for that link. I don’t often listen to Derryn these days, but just happened to walk into a room when it was on, and he mentioned that someone had just turned up the recording, and that it was on the 3aw website.
As for the film itself, there’s something in the emotion and excitement in it that captures the moment so beautifully. Happy 39th anniversary!
July 16th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Quasidog, pictures of the “the Beard” without a beard. Wow, the Sixties were weird.
Derryn most recently appeared in a cameo in “Underbelly” a mini-series about a recent, 1994-2004, gangland war in Melbourne where there were about 30 murders. Derryn plays himself doing talkback radio “interviews” with some of the crims involved in the war. Most recently he has been getting into some of the “scumbags” enough that one of the gangland head honchos, Mick Gatto, has set up a Facebook account called “Derryn Hinch Is A Scumbag” after a radio shouting match that ended when Gatto said to Hinch, “Hope you die very soon.” Gatto was cleared of killing an underworld hitman on grounds of self-defence.
Yes, Derryn has lead a fairly colourful life.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Another thing about the TV coverage of Apollo in Australia was that the GTV9 coverage in Melbourne was, for a long time, longest continuous live broadcast on television. From memory it was something like 36 hours. May have been less though.
We got a TV in 1969. I was about 5. We lived right out in the bush. We came home one day and the tele was sitting on the verandah. It had been delivered while we were out. Even out in the country you probably couldn’t do that these days. The first thing I remember watching on our TV was the football but I do remember bits and pieces of the moon landing as it happened. Being out in the bush and only having 2 channels that only broadcast for about 8 hours a day meant we may not have been getting live video. No way for a 5 year old to tell. My parents are fairly unsentimental when it comes to big world events but even they kept the newspapers from the time with the moon landing on the front page.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
It is my fortune that I was old enough to be sitting with my parents watching the Apollo 11 mission from the beginning. I remember it now as if I were still seven years old, watching with unbreakable attention as the Saturn V lifted off. And then, 30 years later, I went with my father on a tour of the space center in Florida. They have a left-over? Saturn V booster there.
And another one in a walk-through area where you can see the rocket close up.
Finally, 3 decades after being spellbound by the launch, I was able to see the vehicle close up.
You just can’t grasp how huge one of these rockets is unless you can see it up close and in person.
And we just stopped doing such great things. We allowed our explorations to become mundane instead of wonderous. Perhaps the next generation will correct this mistake.
PS: in 1969, Astronaut costumes outsold most others in my neighborhood for halloween.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Neat memories. For another, fictional, Australian take on the moon landing check out The Dish. The ground station for the moon landing was a big dish antenna in Australia. The Dish is a comic take on a small town’s moment in the sun, or perhaps the moon.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Great post, BA…thanks…the joy and hope and nervousness…the wonder of “look at what WE can DO!!”
Check out Cronkite’s reaction to the moon landing…he was speechless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwaA-hbvYF8&feature=related
I was 9 years old in 1969 and remember it all clearly. In December, 1972 the family watched the Apollo 17 night launch in person from a causeway on the base (My father worked for NASA and got an on-base pass..not the VIP bleachers!!). It was, by far, one of the most fantastic things I have ever witnessed. The Saturn V cleared the tower in silence, like the sun rising, then the sound came…just unbelievable….look what we can do, indeed.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I get misty every time I see a clip of that launch. I was on a Polaris launch crew at the Cape during the early 1960s and watched two Mercury launches and the first Gemini launch in person from Port Canaveral. Then in the last half of the 1960s I worked on the Apollo Command Module reaction jet control system at Honeywell. Watching the launch of Apollo 11 as it happened was one of the peak moments of my life, knowing stuff I worked on was going to the moon.
July 17th, 2008 at 1:04 am
It’s interesting to compare the raw emotion that Hinch displays in that video clip with the more measured prose he used in articles for the “Sydney Morning Herald” during Apollo 17. It was still front page news, but down at the bottom of the page.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:25 am
At the time of Man’s first steps on the Moon, I was in a 2pm Stage I Physics lecture at Auckland University in New Zealand, the subject was solenoids.
Later I remember being at the back of a crowded room at the university watching a replay on TV.
I was 18.
To say I was highly excited at the time would be gross understatement…
I really think we should have a manned base on the Moon before a manned mission to Mars.
-Nivag
July 17th, 2008 at 4:35 am
@ Michael L
James Burke! WOW! Thanks for the memory. I used to watch his science shows all the time as a kid. He was awesome! What ever happened to him?
@ Caleb
As Leeobee says that is Sir Patrick Moore. He is such a national treasure we are gonna have railings put up round him
@ Kaleberg
The Dish is a super film. I really loved it.
@ Phil
Apollo never fails to send shivers of excitement down my spine. Thanks for this
July 17th, 2008 at 8:15 am
“The Americans have really done it this time, I tell you!”
Don’t think I’ve heard that said in a positive way in my lifetime.
Awesome video.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I was sitting in the viewing room of Mission Control, and when that baby lifted off, we were all holding our breaths. There had been two other lunar orbital flights, with the same type of launch – but this was two stages more dangerous and historic. The real cliff hanger was when Charlie Duke said “10 seconds” during landing. We all knew that according to mission rules, Neil should have aborted. And then, they were down.
I knew all three of the guys pretty well. This kinda brought back a few tears. Neil was a neighbor, Buzz a social friend as well, and Mike a professional associate.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Don Wiseman said: “The real cliff hanger was when Charlie Duke said “10 seconds” during landing. We all knew that according to mission rules, Neil should have aborted.”
With the greatest of respect, but, “Pardon?”
Charlie Duke made the call “30 seconds,” which meant 30 seconds until “Bingo fuel,” which meant “land now or abort”. He never called “10 seconds”, and even if he had there was no requirement to immediately abort. So I’d be curious to know who the “we” is you refer to.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:25 am
What was the shadow just after the audio glitch? (5:26) It looked like the rocket but I can’t imagine what lighting situation would produce that since the brightest light source was the rocket itself.
AN ALIEN GHOST ROCKET???
July 17th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Greg23: Take a deep breath and calm down. It’s the shadow of the rocket on the cloud it just punched through. Look up other color TV footage of the launch and it’s clear. Not only is there the rocket’s shadow, there’s also the shadow of the condensation cloud(s) that just then appeared on the vehicle, giving the shadow a more peculiar shape.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
“The Dish” is a movie showing a (fictionalized) account of the Apollo landing from the POV of the crew at the Parkes radiotelescope in austraila. Sam Neill, Patrick Warburton. a loverly little film, funny and warm. Technically skilled people doing their jobs right–how often do you see that?
One gripe (with “Apollo 13″ too) they show the engines lighting off at zero in the countdown–actually, the engines started at “ignition sequence start”, at T-8.9 seconds, ran up to full thrust, then the clamps released at zero. All these movies do it Wrong!!
PS: I was the little kid sitting on the floor with the book on my lap (although I was 19 at the time…)
July 17th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
@ Kaleberg Says: “Neat memories. For another, fictional, Australian take on the moon landing check out The Dish. The ground station for the moon landing was a big dish antenna in Australia. The Dish is a comic take on a small town’s moment in the sun, or perhaps the moon.”
That is one of my favorite Australian movies. Besides being Aussie its a damn good movie anyway. I love Sam Niell
“Event Horizon” was my favorite movie he has been in but there are so many others. *tries to forget Jurassic Park 3* I am pretty sure “The Dish” won a few awards didn’t it? Great movie.
http://thecia.com.au/reviews/d/dish.shtml
July 18th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Thanks for the memory jogger BA. I was 13 then, and I tape recorded it from TV with a mic up to the speaker. Launch, landing and first footfall. BBC James Burke version of course (cheers Michael L). Grr, what happened to that tape?
Also:
+1 to The Dish, good fun movie
++++++++++++++etc to Sir Patrick