Apollo 11 - 50th Anniversary thread

I watched the 3 part documentary "Chasing the Moon" recently and can recommend it to everyone interested...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chasing-moon/

"“Chasing the Moon,” a film by Robert Stone, reimagines the race to the moon for a new generation, upending much of the conventional mythology surrounding the effort. The series recasts the Space Age as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama. Utilizing a visual feast of previously overlooked and lost archival material — much of which has never before been seen by the public — the film features a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in these historic events. Among those included are astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman and Bill Anders; Sergei Khrushchev, son of the former Soviet premier and a leading Soviet rocket engineer; Poppy Northcutt, a 25-year old “mathematics whiz” who gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA’s Mission Control; and Ed Dwight, the Air Force pilot selected by the Kennedy administration to train as America’s first black astronaut."
 
I was 13 in the June of 1969 watching the Moon landing on black and white TV with my parents in Oxfordshire.
en.m.wikipedia.org

British television Apollo 11 coverage - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
Rather than the dramatic images played over and again since we were treated to middle aged men playing with Revell kits to show us what was going on.
Only when we bought Life Magazine did the impact sink in. Oh and we all looked at the Moon through Dad's enormous brass and wood telescope.
I couldnt help laughing at William Shatner's account of how he was invited to a Press call with the Apollo 11 crew. He was given the famous AMT Enterprise kit model to pose with them. Unfortunately the NASA engineers had not been expert modelmakers and it fell apart in his hands. With some Chewing Gum all was mended and the then unemployed Captain Kirk met his real heroes.
So for me that hunble 1960s treat-the plastic kit is associated forever with Apollo 11.
 

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Telescopes

Invited to design a mounting for the Isaac Newton (optical) telescope, Wallis produced a design for the whole telescope and the building to put it in, but his design was not taken up. His ideas later fed into a design for a large radio telescope, which was adopted for the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. Completed in 1961, it included a dish with a geodetic structure and a mounting of novel Wallis design, both of which are still in use today. The telescope’s “finest hour” was receiving part of the first TV broadcast from the Moon.
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Sir Barnes Wallis - Other Projects

Sir Barnes Wallis
www.sirbarneswallis.com www.sirbarneswallis.com
 

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