What do you remember from July 20, 1969,
when the first man walked on the moon?
I was thirteen years old living in Moses Lake. We didn't get to watch a lot of television in those days, but Mom told us that this was going to be history. We watched around 7:56 pm (PST) as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and planted the American flag. The pride in our country was phenomenal. We were living in the sixty's turmoil of the Vietnam War, political riots, and the cultural revolution of the hippie's. The moon landing was good news. We had accomplished something. We had beaten the Russian into space.
As a younger child, I had always thought there was a "little green man on the moon", or it was where the "cows jumped over the moon". When the television showed the surface, I remember thinking it was worst than the land around the Moses Lake Pot Holes. Nobody could live there.
Grandma Hoggan was visiting with us during that summer. She was born in 1896. Four years before the turn of the century. She commented that in her life time she had lived through the horse and buggy era, the automobile era, and now space travel. She had lived through a lot of change.
Carefree summer nights were spent sleeping outside in sleeping bags on the back lawn. We could look up into space and see the tiny red lights of satalites orbiting the night sky. The technology was amazing. The NASA scientist used computer with 37 K memory. Today, cell phones are handsize with 8 gigs or 16 gigs memory.
Last October, 2008, I went to the Johnson Space station in Houston with Jacqueline and Brigham. While there we saw the Mission Control Center where they controlled and talked to the astronauts on the moon. The rockets were humongous. As I held Brigham, I wondered what technology changes he will see in the next hundred years. Maybe he will go the Moon or Mars.
