I grew up in central Florida, so we could see the launches from our front yard. We'd watch TV till they counted down to zero, then go out in the yard and wait until we saw the fireball in the east. It was pretty amazing how long you could see the rocket. Sometimes if the wind was right we could even hear a slight rumble. I lived some 85 miles away from the coast; I can't imagine what it was like up close!

On the day of the Apollo 11 launch, I was 7 years old. I'm sure we went out to watch it, but can't really remember for sure. :)

Donna

My husband and I were returning home from a road trip around the East Coast of Australia and were stopping overnight at a friend's place in Melbourne.

We watched the Moon landing on their TV and then drove off, leaving my suitcase behind in the excitement. I didn't realise this until we stopped at a motel on the long road across the Nullabor so had to share clothes with my husband all the way back to Perth, Western Australia!

We are also remembering the Skylab falling down on us in July forty years ago.

At that time, I was living in West Virginia and my first husband was in graduate school at the University. I watched it from TV on the sofa of our old house, and it was pretty awesome to contemplate. I think I saw the moon with different eyes from that day on.

As for Skylab, I remember it only because I had a friend who was in mortal terror that Skylab would somehow fall out of the sky and target her. Talk about irrational fears!

It was the summer between high school and college for me. My best friend accompanied me from the Chicago area on a trip to check out my future digs at the University of Missouri. We watched it from our motel room, along with my parents. I remember us all huddled at the end of the beds, sitting as close to the TV as possible.

The first moon landing was the summer between junior and senior high for me, and I remember watching the fuzzy black-and-white video on our TV at home. Was it during Apollo 11 when one of the astronauts went bunny-hopping around, or one of the later missions? It looked like so much fun.

I never witnessed an Apollo launch, but I was at Kennedy for a Shuttle launch, watching from the steps of the launch control complex, only 3 miles from the launch pad. That was impressive enough, but those who witnessed both have told me that the shuttle launch was a mere firecracker compared to the Saturn V.

I was working in an old building that still had elevator operators, and I remember the next morning riding up to my floor that the elevator operator was saying it wasn't real, that it was just something "they" did on TV.

Carolyn, I was told that my grandfather didn't believe in it either as he had looked at the Moon and couldn't see them there!

I was 8 and my grandparents came over and we all watched it on our TV. (My grandparents had their own TV but we had a little “moon landing party”). I can’t remember if it was my grandfather’s birthday on the day or if it was soon afterwards, but I remember my mother had baked him a birthday cake and it fell a little. There were jokes about its appropriateness as it looked like a moon crater.

I was 10. My sister was in bed in a full-body plaster cast after a spinal fusion operation, and my parents had rented a small portable TV for her as she was stuck there for about 6 months. We sat in her bedroom to watch it, Mum having let me stay home from school for the first and only time when I wasn't sick :) I'm not sure why I didn't watch on the bigger living room TV - the excitement of being together I suppose.

Woodnymph, not quite that irrational of your friend to be worried about Skylab falling on her. It was an unguided re-entry and it was hoped that it would fall into an ocean.

It actually fell in Western Australia and bits of it are still being found! I don't think anyone was hurt as we have a lot of land here and can accommodate casual drop-ins from space!

yoyo, your comment on how people have become jaded by these feats of technical engineering rings true. Way back in 1970 I was working in a lowly job in Canada and my 'boss' allowed me a mid-morning coffee break which she took watching old re-runs of 'Bewitched' on TV. On this particular day instead of that programme a 'live' moon shot was being shown . . . and boss phoned up the TV company to complain!

Vee - Thank you for starting this thread. I'm enjoying reading our little slice-of-life stories about a shared experience. At the time of the moon landing, I wasn't aware that people around the globe were watching it as closely as those of us in the U.S.

I was on Okino island. A tiny island north of Okinawa I was chief engineer on an Army LCM boat. I remember a Japanese policeman telling me America is number one, they put a man on the moon.

Frank

Annpan, you'd be surprised how much space junk is coming in every day! Most of it burns up, but a surprising amount makes it to the surface. During my tenure as the HQ person overseeing our earth science operating missions, 3 of our satellites came in - all big enough to not completely break up in re-entry. Pieces of one landed in the Barents Sea north of Murmansk (at one point, the estimate was that it would crash somewhere in China, and my word, the White House freaked out), another one ended up mostly in the Indian Ocean, and the third I've forgotten. There's over 20,000 pieces of junk in orbit these days. Most satellites at NASA now are built to 'demise' fully on re-entry or to have propulsion systems with fuel to bring it in on a 'safe ocean disposal' re-entry (i.e. dump it somewhere in the Pacific - along with all that floating plastic I guess!), but there's a lot of older ones still on orbit (and still working!) that are huge and have fairly large 'debris casualty area' estimates.

Slightly off-topic here, I hope nobody minds....
NASA Orbital Debris Program

Donnamira, what an interesting job you must have.