I have a dumb question: who took the video, if Neil Armstrong was the first person on moon? The video looks like it's taken from the side; and unless they had cameras in the legs of the lander, how was the video taken?
I was 9 years old when this happened. Watched it live on TV. It's hard to describe the feeling of what things were like then. The world stopped and looked, for just a moment. The Vietnam war was in full swing, the cold war kept cold, politics continued as usual. But for the first time in human history, you could look up at the moon in the sky and think, "We've been there."
What would you do if you were the first man to step on the moon?
What would be your first reaction? Your first five minutes?
Everybody would react different, no matter how much training you have.
I would have looked around in awe, frozen, thinking what the hell am I doing here? Admiring the desolation, comparing that image with the moon of cheese from childhood memories. Nobody would have taken that moment from me. The moon, the soil I just stepped on. The vastness. I'd take a look at the sky and reach for the stars, then the earth. Contemplating. Fuck nasa, I'd say. Just admiring such a wonderful view. My heart beating a million times, in slow motion.
It is an interesting thing to wonder, what will the first person on Mars be thinking. I started reading everything I could about space after this. One of my favorite books described deriving the isp for the Saturn 5 engines and figuring out their total thrust. I memorize the cool way they put swirls in their arithmetic (it was and integral but I didn't know calculus existed yet) and the steps seemed so elegant. Once during my 5th grade class while doodling and daydreaming I recreated the entire derivation. My teacher (who was a math major it turned out) asked me what I had there and I explained it, as I had memorized it, each of the steps, each of the assumptions, the simplifying assumptions. That landed me in the principal's office. My Mom got called in and the school was trying to decide which Nobel prize I should be shooting for given my out sized intellect. My Mom or course blew it and pointed out it was just something I had read in a book :-) For a few minutes there I was the next Einstein!
That eventually lead me to a career in engineering, I was always drawn to being able to take problems no one had ever solved before and solving them. I changed me, and thousands if not millions of kids in my generation, in a way that I think SpaceX is changing people today.
No, it would never have been true, the Moon is less that 1/4million miles away. If you choose a distance like 100 thousand miles then yes, at about the halfway mark it would be true for their flight.
With recent talk of video/images from Mars, I'm wondering what is the highest quality that we have for the moon. (The above link includes a high quality photo for Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon and doesn't talk about other moon missions.)
Hilariously, the link is inaccessible from QLD rail's free wifi, in Australia. Apparently the link (nasa.gov) contains pornography, illegal content, peer-to-peer or hacking, etc. People who make these woeful, idiotic filters that filter out harmless content should be embarrassed! (It also blocks the "Your brain can be hacked" technorati link. Odd that HN itself passes muster!)
