I watched the landing on TV and convinced my parents to let me stay up and watch the first step. It was an exciting time ...

And then there was that stupid movie about faking a Mars mission, which was taken as a documentary on how NASA would have faked the moon landing. Even the other day on "Tru" TV they said there's no physical evidence that men were on the moon.

Well, other than pounds of moon rocks and retroreflectors on the moon that still work, I guess not. And those moon rocks ... contain evidence that no one thought would have been there until they recognized it: lots of little tracks and impacts from cosmic rays. No Earth rocks contain that, and there was not the technology to make that stuff and give it to all these civilian geologists to look at.

The moon-landing-hoax-believers are ignoramuses, pure and simple. Even when that Japanese orbiter sends back photos of the landing sites, the twits will say they're faked.

There are telescopes on Earth powerful enough to see some of the Apollo landing sites. From here. If people don't want to believe their own eyes, that's their problem.

(Even now there are a handful of folks who believe we have never entered space at all. Neither the space station nor any of the shuttles have ever left the atmosphere. Really.)

I was not aware of any ground-based images. Here's a page with images from and imformation about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/17/lro-images-apollo-landing-sites-w00t/

Ugh, people can be such idiots:
http://dvice.com/archives/2009/07/first-pictures.php
This is what happens to people who can't do simple ratios.

Just got to keep our fingers crossed and hope they reach Mars now. That's the next big step.

Nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime, yet.  : (

There are many things this country can not afford, but going back to the moon (or to Mars) is not among them!

This might be absolute hooey since it's unconfirmed, but allegedly the lunar lander module and capsule's computers only had 64k. If so, that's another amazing bit of historical info.

I'm not sure they even had that much. Thing is, they didn't use 8-bit bytes and there was a parity bit and... well, you can convert it if you want. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

We were transfixed to our very grainy tv (the reception was lousy all the time) with both of the kids..Witchofnovember was about 5 at the time and she ran out side under the full moon, and waved and yelled "Hi Neil!! Hi Neil" and was very excited. It was truly wonderful.

I have to admit, it's a moment in history that I'm sorry to have missed. That was a special event in the course of history.

> "I look up at the Moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?"

Right now, it would be about even odds that the next human to set foot on the Moon will NOT be an American. The Chinese and the Indian space programs both have plans to make lunar attempts before our planned return.

I wonder if THAT might 'wake up' some people....

I certainly wouldn't bet against them. Both countries are making excellent strides on manned spaceflight. (And Japan has had some impressive unmanned successes, too.)

Thank you for the reminder... Thumper, myself, and a couple local furs watched Apollo 13 tonight :-)

I hadn't seen it since it was new.