The 50th anniversary of this great achievement
YES ! I’ll never forget that day – a much, much younger 172driver was glued to the TV and watched in amazement. It’s one of those moments in life where you will forever remember where you were.
172driver wrote:
YES ! I’ll never forget that day – a much, much younger 172driver was glued to the TV and watched in amazement. It’s one of those moments in life where you will forever remember where you were.
Indeed! My family was on vacation so we didn’t have access to a TV, but we followed it all on radio.
Not alive back then but I’ve always been very interested in this fantastic achievement. The mission control room in Houston/Johnson SC made me feel like I’m in my worship temple :).
Good motion pictures help too. Starting with „the right stuff“, going on to „apollo 13“ and many more. The movie about Neil (First Man?) was very good.
Thanks for bringing this up, the greatest adventure of human kind so far. One would think that if we could achieve this 50 years ago within a short amount of time we’d be able to find solutions to a lot of today’s problems.
Watchin* the ‘live’ broadcast on YouTube now.
The average age of the many people involved was in the mid twenties (not verified). Impressive I think.
Yes; the software and hardware people were mostly in their 20s.
I’ve just watched this
For those into software, hardware and systems generally (probably 75.3% of EuroGA 
) I recommend two books:
How Apollo flew to the Moon
Digital Apollo
These contain more detail than almost anybody can swallow.
The books by astronauts (nearly all shadow-written) vary in quality. Personally I found Gene Cernan’s Last Man on the Moon to be the best, along with Mike Collins’s Carrying the Fire. Of course Armstrong never did write one, which is a pity since he, being probably the brightest of all of them, would have been best able to do a good technical treatment.
Restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer – this is amazing!
A truly astonishing feat and I am pleased that a lot of media coverage is giving it its place. I remember as a child glued to the TV fascinated. Peter that video, The Complete Descent was extremely good. I visited the centre in the late nineties when it was tumbleweed town, very sad, but NASA was reignited later and came back to life. One of our greatest achievements?
Apparently Armstrong estimated his chance of pulling off this rather tricky back-country landing at “even money” or 50/50. 
Like many glider pilots he probably under-appreciated his own skill, but what an inspiration he and his NASA colleagues are to all of us. What a contrast to some of the desperately dull and risk-averse aviators we see in other countries today.
