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Hello, Brian, 40 years ago today, my father and I were in Europe. I was a very young teenager and we had gone there to visit his brother Pierre in France. We were in Paris when the first man landed on the moon. My father was all for the Space thing. He loved all that stuff. It excited him that people could actually do that. I write this in his memory.Eugenia Renskoff

I think the lunar landing occurred on the same day of Rabbit Angstrom's mother's birthday in "Rabbit Redux."

There's a beautifully written scene when Rabbit is in the house with his parents and his child, and the TV is on, showing the lunar landing. Rabbit flashes back to his experiences at Fort Hood, TX, in 1953, and "Texas looked like the moon to him."

But the lunar landing is written as very peripheral to the mess the characters have created for themselves on earth. Which is telling, I guess.

suzanne

science in never a waste of money. the computer revolution came about because of the space program and computers save lives, right? just one example.

(also we have money to feed children etc if we wanted to. we could have Great Society if people wanted it)

I have always felt that the Moon Landing and all space exploration is a colossal waste of money. You should feed all the children, give everyone healthcare, educate, take care of your own environment before you go off on a macho mission to be the first, and to beat the Russians and Chinese to it. If we had priorities, rather than going to the moon and defeating communism in Vietnam, we could have a Great Society now. More women in positions of authority may help, as they are often more practical. Obama being an excepetion to this obsessive 'cowboy' culture. IMHO.

I disagree that we have not gone further into space since the moon walk. We've traveled all the way back to the origins of the universe! I was 15 at the time of the moon landing and found it very exciting. But in more recent years, I've also seen it more as an assertion of power during the Cold War, and an extension of a kind of imperialistic approach to national identity. It had little to do with real space exploration. I think we have gone further, and learned tremendously more, through the Hubble Telescope, about the universe and our own beginnings. But this learning has nothing to do with nationalistic power and therefore receives little attention.

I watched it on television with my then boyfriend who was moved, and a little tearful about it! We were in my little apartment in Sausalito, CA.

I was a flight attendant for Pan American at the time, and five years earlier when I was undergoing initial training for Pan Am, the company offered all of us new hires the opportunity to sign up to work as flight attendants on what they thought at that time would be their future space travel flights!

I happily signed, and have always been disappointed that it never came to pass!

I was only a few months old, so I missed this historic moment.

There seems to be a gender divide on this issue based on other shows I've heard. I agree with women who argue we need to sort out the damage we've done to this planet before we start colonizing the next one. The hundreds of millions of dollars required for further space exploration could be spent on the science of global survival. Couldn't we inspire children to be scientists and engineers by dreaming of ways they could be among those who save the planet.

The Cold War era space race was one thing. It would be more impressive to me if now we could have true international cooperation--Russia, China and other space explorers and nuclear powers--on earth first. "Dr. Strangelove" anyone?

P.S. Consider the source of the Mars next program. I'd rather the country didn't follow Bush into another black hole.

I too was at summer camp; I was 13 years old. We were not usually allowed to watch TV but my eldest sister convinced the camp director to let us all watch the landing. About 120 people crowded around a small B and W TV.

If we wait to solve all of the problems on earth, we will never go back to space. A decision I believe we will regret. There is a good chance that solutions to earth problems may come from solving problems involving space travel.

I was on a Navy ammunition ship in the Tonkin Gulf. I remember feeling there were two Americas. One state side (aka the World)and one where we were. Ironicly the moonwalk was in the World.

Mitch from Manhattan,

You are simply wrong. Armstrong has been misquoted for 40 years. Digital analysis YEAES ago proved he did not flub his line.

And for God's sake, he was in the process of risking his life and making history... a missed article could be forgiven.

Get over it. Let us know when a line you create can be quoted by billions and will be for hundreds of years.

I was not born yet to see the Moon landing, but I understand its huge significance....

to all those who say they are disappointed with our subsequent progress- I say they are crazy!

Since the Moon landing, we have sent 2 deep space probes to take the first ever pictures of the entire solar system.

We have crashed probes into Venus AND Jupiter since. We have landed probes onto a moon of Saturn to take color pictures! We even crashed a spaceship into a comet! And we currently have rovers on Mars!

The difficulty difference between getting to the Moon and getting to Mars is orders of magnitude apart- we have taken consistent steps towards reaching that goal, however, and now it is within reach. In and of itself, this fact is truly inspiring and indicative of just how far we have come.

I had just finished college. I thought landing on the moon was thrilling but also too mind-blowing. Taboo. Violation of the natural order of things, in some way.

It was also a bit too "gung-ho" for my taste. Overtones of military competition of The Cold War.

Ted Sorensen tells interesting stories about JFK deciding to ratchet up The Space Race. My impression is that we went to the moon simply because it was something we could beat the Soviets at. Also, it's appalling and also hilariously funny in a grotesque way that science/geology was an afterthought and NASA had to find crash courses in field geology for later astronauts. I just saw a program on TV about how NASA failed to plan for moon dust--it got all over the space suits and into the cabin, endangering crew and craft. Moon dust isn't like our dust; it has a static charge and sharp edges. Ha! As an engineer once said: "They should put a good housewife on every major project".......

Ah, I did hate to see the mystery and romance of the Moon come to an end. I do wish that photo of Earthrise from the moon....that small blue marble in space....I do wish we took it more to heart.

What I remember of that night is being stuck in the subway for hours on end. What I understood what that space would be for military and commercial use but not for the likes of people like me.

I was in my mom's womb on that day -- a month away from being born. She told me she was jumping up and down with excitement as Neil Armstrong tentatively put first one foot, then another down on the Moon, watching it all on TV.

We need to go out - to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and farther.

We need to take care of the Earth! But what if something happens that we have no control over --- an asteroid, a passing black hole, a problem with the sun? We need to go out, so that humanity can go on no matter what.

In response to the commitment of resources...I find it disappointing that the government stresses science and mathematics education but refuses to build the infrastructure necessary to support such a work force...the space program would and could be that work force for all the dreamers who don't want to build or expand the military/industrial complex.

my birthday is July 19th. I remember being in a large room up in the clubhouse of the Catskills bungalow colony we stayed in every summer. All the residents were crowded around the one tv in a dark room. We all got together on my birthday, and I kept telling the guys to hurry up and land on my birthday. Unfortunately they couldn't comply and waited until the 20th.

Respectfully, while I remember the moment as a powerful one at age 17, I wish the committment of time, money, science and imagination going back 40-50 years was dedicated to more important challenges like understanding the human brain and related diseases like Autism, Alzheimers etc.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it had been 42 years since Lindbergh flew solo over the Atlantic. Its now been 40 yrs since we first landed on the moon and our innovation has seemed to have been either "financial innovation" or inward focused technological innovation (internet, ipod, cell phones). A pathetic commentary.

At four and a half years old, I was mesmerized by the landing -- my first television memory and to this day, my life's most dramatic visual moment. I recall the cries of joy and wonderment in the house, the elation of my parents, cheers in the neighborhood. The astronauts were our heros -- cowboys, kings, the best this young boy could dream of.

Strangely emotional topic! What a different time.

I'm a little too young to remember Apollo 11 (I'm told I was watching with a bunch of neighbors all gathered to watch). I do remember other lunar landings.

I certainly fantasized for years about being an astronaut. Went to college thinking about studying astronomy.

Today, I have to say we have far greater needs demanding our dollars.

I think that Angela Davis may have been one of the few critical voices that day saying that we needed to devote our money to more pressing concerns.

I was gestating but I continue to be disappointed that my nation doesn't accept science as real and will not spend an appropriate amount of my taxes on scientific research!

My father worked for NASA Mission Control for over 30 years. It was an amazing accomplishment in terms of discover, but also in terms of tech developoment.

As Pops says, we went to the Moon with slide rules, but you wouldn't have a PC without the Moon shot.

I was at Camp Snipatuit in Rochester Mass in the main
room with the whole camp. I was 9 years old.
We never got to watch TV
but we had all gathered around a small
(black and white?) TV to see the landing, which I couldn't really see and had a hard time getting my mind around.
People on the moon up in the sky was very abstract. My world was really right there in front of me. The main thing I got was that this event was a huge magic and important thing that brought us all together as humans!!

Space really is the last frontier and it is our great opportunity to explore it and learn about the universe.

It's also really important for NASA to go back to studying what's happening to our home planet Earth now that the Republicans are gone.

I was 16, I remember in New York it rained almost every day that summer and the people around me were saying it was because we should not have gone to the moon.

I guess its not fair to judge what has evolved from that momentous achievement in one respect. I am sure there tons of experiments that have garnered results from the orbiter missions (space shuttle). But I am sure people feel that we should have at least colonized our solar system...

Argh! It has been bugging me for forty years!!!

Armstrong flubbed the most important line in history. He was supposed to say ...one small step for "a" man, one giant leap for mankind. And that is what it says on the plaque that sits on the moon. It doesn't make any sense the way he says it.

I was disappointed. I had read tons of sci-fi as a teenager, but the reality of space travel did not fit my expectations, influenced greatly by Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles." At 27, I was put off by the militarization of the enterprise, and the fact that Nixon was president (I was antiwar and anti-Nixon since childhood) and considered the feat in nationalistic terms ("proud to be Americans," etc.) was even more off-putting to me.

There was no YouTube, there was no TiVo, there was no VHS. How did a creative 12-year-old boy record the moment? I pulled out my trusty rangefinder camera, loaded it with Kodachrome (RIP), put the camera on a tripod, put the tripod in front of the TV and shot away. I found my old 'chromes over the weekend and I'm going to load them onto the net, probably picasa. You can search for them later in the week.

We were glued to our TVs. It was the first time since Sputnik that Americans felt safe and preeminent again. I view it as the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Always thought the decline had to do with the boredom of hanging out on a grey rock and not finding aliens or Yahweh.
As for Wolfe's "philosopher corps," I thought that was what Science Fiction writers were. They were supposed to be the ones to inspire us to think further than our mere earth--but folks considered them juvenile and ridiculous.

I was nineteen, attending college and working for the summer in a fairly menial position at ABC News. I worked that evening; ABC had the international "pool" for the moonshot, and I saw Neil Armstrong step onto the moon on 20 monitors. It was one of the most exciting nights of my life.

We need to go back into space. Science, and specifically exploring the universe, is the way that the human imagination reaches new frontiers. I am so disappointed that space travel has fizzled.

Worked at my summer job that day and watched CBS (of course!) all night until the wee hours of the morning.

I was not born to witness the moon landing. But many years ago I asked my mother what she was doing that night. And she and my father went to a party at an American friends house (they were posted in Mexico City at the time) and it was the first time she ever drank champagne.