I was 12 during Apollo 11. I remember using the Saturn/Apollo model I’d just built to explain the flight sequence to my mom. Normally she doesn’t care much for space, science or technology in general but this time even she was interested. That was gratifying.

I’m surprised you remember Apollo 11 at all; I don’t remember John Glenn’s flight when I was 5. (I don’t remember the Cuban Missile Crisis either, but my parents probably shielded me from it.) But as soon as I began to understand space flight I became a dyed-in-the-wool fan. I well remember our teacher rolling a TV set into the classroom so we could watch a Gemini launch. Kids are naturally impatient, and I kept wondering how the astronauts could stand all those waits and the scrubbed launches.

I vividly remember watching the Apollo 11 landing and EVA on the tiny TV set up in the corner of the lodge at Broad Creek Scout Camp in Maryland. I dog-eared our copy of the National Geographic that featured their photography.

My best friend’s father worked on the Saturn V in Huntsville. He got to go to a later launch but my mom wouldn’t let me join him. Sigh. One of these years I’ll forgive her.

What left the greatest impression on me was Apollo 8. Was listening to the broadcast of their show while they were orbiting the moon – I never missed an Apollo broadcast – and when they started reading from Genesis, it seemed so… perfect. I’m not particularly religious, certainly wasn’t then, but at the tender age of 12, that moved me. It underlined what great things we were doing then. To read the behind the scenes stories now, I’m even more amazed at the problems they solved.

Those were exciting times, when we took on great tasks to advance humanity. “We do these things because they are hard”

I did read ‘The Right Stuff’ many years ago … probably where I remembered the monkey flights from.

“Man has never been on the moon. it is all a hoax.”

I prob’ly shouldn’t feed you at all troll so I’ll make this short :

READ PHIL’s “MOON HOAX DEBUNKING ” PAGE.

Are you calling all of them liars? Yes, you are, you troll – and NOT just liars but perfect, flawless liars who never slip up at all. Now do you really expect us to believe that insulting drivel that passes as a urine-weak “Hoax Conspiracy theory” of yours..??? Sheesh!

More than that, you expect the hoaxers to have fabricated everything in a maner that the Soviet Union couldn’t detect at the time and to have fabricated all these exotic Moonrocks that have given us heaps of scientific evidence and you ignore all the photos, all the eyewitnesses, all the evidence, all the well y’know *reality* as opposed to lame-butt fever dreams of paranoid nutters like yourself .. Sheesh again.

PS. If your a Poe you’re a bad one. NOT. Funny. At. All.

What happened to Apollo’s 2 to 7? Didn’t they have any astronauts – or were they the flights with chimpanzees? Weren’t there a couple of monkey flights?

7 had astronauts – I presume you mean Apollo’s 2 to 6?

(I read in a recent issue of ‘Patrick Moore’s Sky at Night’ magazine that the Apollo 7 crew of (as noted by ‘Apollo Roll Call’) Wally Schirra, Don Eisele & Walter Cunningham apparently all had bad colds at the time of their flight and were really grumpy throughout. Apparently mission control found them so bad tempered that none of them ever flew for NASA again! )

Apollo 2-6 were unmanned test flights as already answered by others here but I will add that you may be thinking of the earliest ‘Mercury’ flights – as written about in Tom Wolfes famous -and well worth reading novelisation – “The Right Stuff.”

Before even Alan Shepherd went up the USA sent a couple of chimpanzees – ‘Ham’ & ‘Enoch’ ‘Enos’ I believe they were named – into space on sub-orbital flights first. Apparently the test pilots skeptical of the ‘Mercury’ programme jibed to those who volunteered for it that “A monkey’s gonna make the first flight!” .. & sure enough it did!

From Wikipedia’s Mercury program page :

***

Ham, a chimpanzee, launched 31 January 1961 on Mercury-Redstone 2 for a suborbital flight.

Enos, a chimpanzee, launched 29 November 1961 on Mercury-Atlas 5 for a 2-orbit flight.

***

The Russians also launched dogs into space not just “Laika” but Strelka and Belka & others too. Some of those dogs were killed when their rockets blew up.

… although when Apollo 11 set down it had only a little fuel left. In the movie ‘Destination Moon’ the ship uses too much fuel landing and have to dump everything overbord to lighten the ship for the trip home – I’m glad Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t have to do this!

(With a few small corrections from the original.)

Actually they had to throw half their ship away!

The LEM (Lunar Excursion Module thatspidery landing ship) split in two and the descent stage stayed behind while the ascent stage (which always reminds me of a Koala’s head) rose up to meet the rest of their ship.

And that’s not counting throwing away their whole ‘Saturn V’ rocket!

The Apollo rockets were absolutely awe-inspiring superluminous creations but when you think only the Command module capsule got back – and even that got singed and lost much of its heat shield (thankfully not too much!) it was pretty wasteful.

It would be so cool if spacecraft to the Moon and beyond could be like we usually imagine in SF – more like planes that take off and land intact, then get fueled up and head off to repeat the procedure again .. Maybe one day …

@ MAC 112 :

But as our country becomes ever more risk-averse, it’s good to keep in mind the words of the late “Amazing” Grace Murray Hopper, who once noted that “ships in port are safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

Great quote. Spot on.

Also not the only people killed in the whole Apollo program died in a test on the ground – while they were in harbour so to speak.

Safety anywhere is ultimately an illusion anyway. Our society has become far too risk averse, far too PC conscious, far too soft. We need to take some risks because we quite literally don’t get anywhere without doing so. A life where no risks are taken is a life that has failed and isn’t worth living anyway – in my view.

Make things as safe as reasonably possible – sure. But no safer.

Some risks are worth taking and the flying to the Moon – or Mars is one worth taking indeed.

As William Wallace said in ‘Braveheart’ :

“We all die. Its just a matter of how and why. … & dying in your bed many years from now, you would trade all your days from now to then for one chance, just one chance to come back here and say “you may take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom!”

Which to my way of thinking includes the freedom to fly and go boldly as well as the freedom to express ourslves and control our destinies.

Sometimes we really should just say – never mind the risk, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead!

I remember ever since I was about my dad’s age at the time (13), I’ve been jealous that he got to watch this stuff on TV, the launch, the ghostly images of Armstrong hopping off the LEM foot and uttering perhaps the most famous quote of the 20th century. I hope in ten years’ time I can share that memory with him. Here’s to returning to the moon!

I found it hard to believe that the American public lost interest in Moon landings so soon after Apollo 11 (even Apollo 13 didn’t rate high news coverage until the explosion occurred) and that the full programme of landings was terminated early. The space programme after that was a bit like only being able to see local pub bands after you’d been to a Led Zeppelin concert!

Congratulations Phil on a very moving post. I too am jealous of your having seen an Apollo launch.

It was a jewel…a guiding star.

But I want desperately to see us go back to the Moon, to prepare
for the Long Leap to Mars.

We HAVE to go back….!!!!

All of this constant drumbeat of fear in society makes me ill

It was a time when it seemed the whole country was pulling together for the same goal, and there was an almost palpable sense of excitement surrounding the space program and the audacity of actually trying for the Moon. The entire world stopped that day; wherever they were, people in every country with television paused to watch, and even those who weren’t big fans of the U.S. grudgingly acknowledged that historical moment.

Cut to today, and we’re on a merry-go-round to nowhere in space. Those who weren’t alive then or were too young to remember may not realize how a shared adventure can galvanize people from every culture and background. As cool as the ISS is, it can’t inspire those feelings any more than a crosstown bus can. Buzz says our next big jaunt should be to Mars, and I agree. It will have to be an international effort this time, and it will certainly be more fraught with danger than Apollo.

But as our country becomes ever more risk-averse, it’s good to keep in mind the words of the late “Amazing” Grace Murray Hopper, who once noted that “ships in port are safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

I’m more speechless now than when I was 12 years old in ’69.

Must return to Earth.

Thanks for sharing such a wonderful story. Your father sounds like quite a guy. I was only four and a half, but my Mum sat me down infront of the telly anyway. One of those, “you’ve got to remember this, even though you don’t quite get it yet”. I was so impressed I went and cut the long hair off my sweet baby girl doll, so I could call her ‘Neil’.

Once my parents got over the dismay of this act of vandalism to a (not that cheap) doll, they found the funny side of it…

My husband and I are really trying to give a love of science/astronomy by exposing them to all we can (including copious space docos and Cosmos DVDs), but mainly through modelling our love of science and astronomy, despite the facts that we are just ‘ordinary Joes’ with no particular degrees or education. Just for the love of it.

I am so glad that you have that magazine. A fabulous momento of just one of the contributions your Dad made.