I’m 43, and I well remember watching the moonwalk at age 9. It lasted for several hours, and somewhere in the middle, being a kid, I went out and rode my bicycle for fifteen minutes around the neighborhood -- and ran into half a dozen other kids, fresh from watching the moon, taking a break. A funny gathering there in the middle of a residential street a block above Lake Sammamish, kids leaning forward over their handlebars, talking in tones more accepting -- of course men are walking on the moon -- than awed. Which itself was the measure of our awe. We briefly searched the sky, necks craned and hands pressed over our brows to cut the glare, as though we were collectively saluting the sky itself. We well understood there was nothing to see, that was precisely the marvel and the point, deep empty blue, and then someone said, “I’m going back inside to watch some more” and then “Me too” and “Me too,” excited as we turned away to revisit our flickering living rooms and their impossible boxes of grey moonscape and bouncing Michelin men and solarized American flag.

It’s eery to read about the wonderful men and women of Columbia and to recognize my exact contemporaries, to see that Michael Anderson was just two and half months younger than me, and had talked of watching the moon landing when he was 9 and how that changed the entire pathway of his life. And I wondered: during that four-hour first moonwalk, did young Michael, in a neighborhood only a few hundred miles to the east of mine, take a brief bicycle break to consult in awed tones with the other boys in his neighborhood? And at that point the tears that had been gathered for a day behind my eyes came loose.

Later, reading about Laurel Clark, I was both stunned and unsurprised to learn that her cousin died in the World Trade Center disaster. We’re all joined together by the deep empty blue. All our lives -- all our deaths -- are ultimately, intimately, intertwined.

Ron Drummond

http://www.oz.net/~jhawk/wtc/gardensteps/journal021203b.html

Fantastic words, Ron. Thanks.

I was a space mad seven year-old in suburban Sydney. All the neighbourhood kids had collected the free plastic space ships that came in Corn Flakes – Saturn V’s, LEMs, Command Modules – and acted out the moon landings in sand pits, footpaths and back yards. When the day came, the kids went to school and waited to listen to the landing on the radio. My mother, in an inexplicable act of foresight, decided that I should be excused from school to visit a friend’s house that was close by and watch the landing on TV.

I think back to that time with the strongest sense of nostalgia I feel for just about anything. As an adult, however, I look around today at kids in their teens and early 20s and there simply isn’t the same kind of fascination for space – at least not on the scale it was 33 years ago. Despite the Vietnam War and everything else in the 1960s, space exploration seemed like “a good thing”. Now I wonder if I wasn’t absolutely indoctrinated into the ideological drive that pushed that agenda – the post-Kennedy years and beyond – and if I am – at 40 - simply a relic of that time? Are we pushing into the blue for the wrong reasons now?

I was a seven. As I remember the landing was in the evening here in the UK but the first EVA as in the early hours. I begged my parents to let me stay up and watch and, to their lasting credit, they let me. I watched, or rather heard, the BBC coverage of Eagle coming to rest in a daze of excitement. Of course not even the ebullient James Burke could keep seven year old eyes open past midnight and I fell asleep. Luckily my mother woke me up at 4am (I think it was) and I saw those ghostly images of Armstromg from the sofa wrapped in a blanket.

Looking back I remember how amazingly little we actually saw at the time. Apollo 11 TV pictures were like watching spectres in a fog, the camera broke on 12 so there was no live coverage at all, 13 we all know about and I don't think that thay had a TV camera on the golf cart for 14. But it was still all magic.

It wasn't until 15 in, what was it, late '71 that we got real live pictures from the surface (and what pictures), but by then nobody was interested. The kids at my school had moved on to Raleigh Choppers and On The Busses.

It was so compelling because those were the days of event TV. There were only three terrestrial channels, one of which we couldn't yet get on our side of the valley, one of which gave over it's entire schedule to the landing. Everybody watched it and everybody watched it the same way. It was a community thing. By contrast picking and choosing web,tv or other content made coverage of the terrible Columbia tragedy as fragmentary as those vapour trails over Texas. For me anyway.

I was born six months before the first moon landing. While a lifelong space geek, my first real memories are of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, also known as Handshake in Space. It made all sorts of sense to a kid- putting aside petty, political differences for the good of humanity.

Even then, I knew I really didn't have 'The Right Stuff.' I had ADHD, I wasn't an eagle scout and I got in trouble from time to time. Still, I'd always assumed that by this time, I'd be able to get a job in space. I figured people would need their Macs' fixed, their air conditioning repaired, or even their plumbing plunged, either on an orbital station or on a lunar resort.

A few months ago, Wired ran a list of NASAs early timelines. I was not the only one who'd assumed that thirty-six months into century 21 would find humanity playing water polo in a lunar Holi-Dome®.

Anyone else feel sort of cheated?

...of me, along with my father and older brother, watching some "live" (?) images from the Viking, all the way from Mars. A cold, dark morning. Blurry images on a color TV. I, still groggy from being woken up, on my pajamas.

A budding a sci-fi junkie, I fully expected some life form to come from behind one of those rocks and greet the camera.

Sad to say, the only other moments I recall regarding space exploration are the SkyLab's fall and the Challenger explosion. And now, Columbia's fall...

THE Coolest bicycle . Mine was metallic green.
Forget the LEM, the chopper was the best vehicle ever made by human hands.

Now there's a bike. Slick back tire, stick shift, shocks fore and aft. And that great metal flake banana seat with the Schwinn "S". Mine was stolen in front of the drug store. I never saw it again. 1973.

Space crazy as well. Remember Major Matt Mason? I loved the detail of the helmets and the little visor that flipped up.

Then as an adult, nothing has been as shocking until 9/11/01 as the Challenger. "Go for throttle up" Poom! Your heart skips a beat and drops into your stomach. Your throat closes up and tears well in your eyes.

Forteans, ho! Don't forget "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon."

http://www.moonmovie.com/

Now we're cookin'.....