Showing posts with label 60's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 60's. Show all posts

Monday, July 20, 2009

The Eagle has landed!

On this day 40 years ago, when I was in my teens, a man made a small step which was in fact a giant leap for mankind. I remember seeing it on television then going outside, looking up at the moon and thinking about Armstrong and Aldrin standing there so far from home. It was moment in history that every person on earth shared, and made us realize how small we really were in the cosmos.
Like many kids in the 60's I grew up with the NASA space program. It was exciting and grandiose and I remember watching John Glen take off during breakfast, the first space walk in Gemini, and of course Armstrong's first step off the lunar lander. Since then the earth has pretty much abandoned manned exploration and the world is a bit less exciting for it.
As Dickens once wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..."
That pretty much sums up those years.



First Moon Landing 1969