We are having another what were you doing when kind of day. Forty years ago, we were still in the Cold War with our arch adversary Russia and the space race was one of the tests of supremacy. They had beaten us to the punch with Sputnik years earlier, but Kennedy promised we would be the first to reach the moon. And it was so.
Mid July of 1969 the world was waiting expectantly for America's Apollo 11 to land on the moon, that romantic round light in the night sky, and wondering if the astronauts would arrive safely and what they would find. When Neil Armstrong proclaimed "The Eagle has landed," we breathed easier but continued to stay attentively tuned to Walter Cronkite's resonant and comforting voice on our black and white televisions. He would be the one to tell the world when the spaceship hatch would open and the astronauts would get out. Around midnight in my Charlotte home, I woke my sleeping four and half year old so he could witness history with me. It was a good thing as he remembers the moment to this day. We watched as the dark screen lightened showing Armstrong stepping down and planting his foot on the lunar surface.
It was a magnificent event. Now there is talk that was all a hoax. I wasn't there and don't know. I prefer to think of it as one's of man's best scientific achievements.
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