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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,

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.

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.