6 ms·

Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface

106 points by stevewilhelm 14y ago

Kilimanjaro 14y ago
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. That would be me.
- ntumlin 14y ago
  I would be really scared. To be one of the only 3 people for a quarter million miles. The black sky and no one to save you if it all goes wrong.
  - carbocation 14y ago
    I suspect there is little time spent on fear once you're actually in the flow. You deal with that on the ground.
  - jaredsohn 14y ago
    >To be one of the only 3 people for a quarter million miles. That would also have been true during their flight there.
    - ColinWright 14y ago
      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.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  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.
jaredsohn 14y ago
Apparently NASA wrote over the only high quality video of the first moon landing. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1200161/Apollo-engineers-admit-taped-high-quality-video-Moon-landing.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1200161/Apoll... 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.)
- milesokeefe 14y ago
  Does anyone have another source for this story? I don't trust The Daily Mail.
  - sausagefeet 14y ago
    You are right not to trust them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
freiheit 14y ago
Transcript, videos, pictures, discussion of all the little details, etc here: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.step.html http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.step....
commieneko 14y ago
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."
ajays 14y ago
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?
- sp332 14y ago
  The camera was in one of the equipment packages (MESA) that was swung down before the astronauts stepped out of the lander. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_TV_camera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_TV_camera
wbhart 14y ago
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!)
- sausagefeet 14y ago
  And ironically the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales was one of the receivers used to get the famous TV broadcast.

106 points by stevewilhelm 14y ago

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. That would be me.

ntumlin 14y ago
I would be really scared. To be one of the only 3 people for a quarter million miles. The black sky and no one to save you if it all goes wrong.
- carbocation 14y ago
  I suspect there is little time spent on fear once you're actually in the flow. You deal with that on the ground.
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  >To be one of the only 3 people for a quarter million miles. That would also have been true during their flight there.
  - ColinWright 14y ago
    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.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
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.

jaredsohn 14y ago

Apparently NASA wrote over the only high quality video of the first moon landing. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1200161/Apollo-engineers-admit-taped-high-quality-video-Moon-landing.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1200161/Apoll... 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.)

milesokeefe 14y ago
Does anyone have another source for this story? I don't trust The Daily Mail.
- sausagefeet 14y ago
  You are right not to trust them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

freiheit 14y ago

Transcript, videos, pictures, discussion of all the little details, etc here: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.step.html http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.step....

commieneko 14y ago

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."

ajays 14y ago

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?

sp332 14y ago
The camera was in one of the equipment packages (MESA) that was swung down before the astronauts stepped out of the lander. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_TV_camera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_TV_camera

wbhart 14y ago

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!)

sausagefeet 14y ago
And ironically the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales was one of the receivers used to get the famous TV broadcast.