In the summer of 1969, something happened that I was not expecting. Two Americans walked on the moon. I knew that the United States had a moon program since the beginning of the presidency on John F. Kennedy. He wanted to put a man on the moon back in 1961. At first, it seemed like a dream. However, NASA and the space program in Houston made it become a reality. However, astronauts were going into space all the time. It was a big deal when John Glenn (1921-2016) circled the earth back in 1962. He proved that the earth was round. However, this was something different. They expected that Americans were going to walk on the moon that night. Apollo 11 had launched from the Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, headed for the moon. I was in Germany, when one of the Vincentian priests asked me if I was going to watch the Americans land on the moon after supper. It seemed so incongruous. I would have supper and then settle down to watch humans land on the moon. Of course, I said yes. I watched on this black and white 24" screen with some other German seminarians. I saw what the moon looked like, a barren wasteland, with very little if any vegetation, as far as I could see. I could hear the Americans talking on the TV set as the German announcers translated it. They were going to drop this Lunar Module (LM) on the surface of the moon with astronauts Neal Armstrong (1930-2012) and Buzz Aldrin (1930-) in it. They landed the Lunar Module Eagle on the moon, with a manual control to find a safer area. This took longer than expected. Mission Control was concerned that the LM was running low on fuel. They were confident the LM could survive a fall of up to 50 feet. When they landed on the moon, the astronauts said, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." The flight plan called for a crew rest period before leaving the module. When Armstrong and Aldrin were ready to go outside, the Eagle LM was depressurized, the hatch opened, and Armstrong made his way down the ladder. At the bottom of the ladder Armstrong said, "I'm going to step off the LM now." He turned and set his left boot on the lunar surface and said the famous words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." About 19 minutes after Armstrong's first step, Aldrin joined him on the surface, becoming the second human to walk on the moon. Armstrong unveiled a plaque commemorating the flight, and with Aldrin, planted the flag of the United States. President Richard Nixon spoke directly to them by telephone from his office. An estimated 530 million people viewed the event, 20% of the world population of 3.6 billion then. I was one of those half billion people. I grew up thinking that the moon was romantic, like Dean Martin sang in 1953, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore." Now there was these American standing on the moon, thousands of miles away in the sky. I would never look at the moon in the same way again. Something great had happened. I saw it, live on TV, as it was happening. The sounds were a little muffled, but I could still hear it. I watched as they wandered around without doing much. Eventually I got tired and went to bed. I never dreamed as a little kid growing up in Carteret, NJ, that I would see the day when Americans would walk on the moon. Movies and radio were all I knew. TV came later, and live TV in Germany, came much later. What a world we lived in. This was a true distraction from my study about Confirmation. Where were you when the first man landed on the moon?
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