45 years ago

[Opcom]

45 years ago today the first man set foot on the moon. I was 8. I remember a TV set being brought into the classroom and we watched this for the entire hour.

This was also the first time voice was transmitted from another heavenly body. The distance was 240K miles?

The voice and telemetry was, if I recall, sent from the lander to the orbiting command module then relayed home using the more powerful radio gear in the command module. I don't think the S-band Deep Space Network then in place was enough for this, although it had been used to relay information from probes. Wikipedia seems to indicate it was used. I'd like to know the path of the signals anyway just for history sake.

People talk about space shuttle audio. good or bad? it worked well then..

What was the frequency and modulation type for the orbiter to lander, and from the lander to Earth? How was the DSN used for the voice and pictures? I am thinking UHF or SHF and AM (because of static heard). Can anyone answer?

So let's have a tribute to that space shuttle audio!

[AJ1G]

Saw it happen on the TV in the Clarkson College Rathskellar while I was up there attending a summer program they ran for high school juniors interested in majoring in engineering. Also remember that by coincidence, on the 20th anniversary of the landing, I was at the Historical Electronics Museum just south of the BWI airport, where I was killing time before a flight home from a business trip.  They had on display one of several spares of the video camera used on the mission to transmit what we saw down here.

As I recall the landing touchdown occurred during the middle of the day Eastern time, and Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface from the LM around 9 PM Eastern time. 

[W3RSW]

Susan and I were newlyweds in '69 and watched the landing in the den of my parents house.  I took an "instant" Polaroid picture of Armstrong's descent down the ladder from the TV screen.  -Really grainy, low resolution TV signal. Wasn't sure exactly what we were seeing.  "Yes, that's his boot and, yes, that's a ladder," kind of excited dialog as we watched.  Thrilling!

 A summer thunderstorm was rumbling and we were afraid that we'd loose power and miss all the action.

I think everybody on Earth that had healthy access to a TV was watching at that moment.
And... Except for what, an on-board four bit microcomputer? ; we were watching the last great analog adventure of mankind.

The audio was comm quality ok, but had a lot of preceding syllable truncation, swallowed words, etc. that coupled with acronyms and abbreviations made listening difficult for me.
--Similar to a non-pilot listening to air traffic control I guess. But super exciting anyway thinking of the distances and momentous event unfolding.

[W1ITT]

As I recall, there was a small group of hams who played with 2304 mhz stuff who changed the LOs in their down converters and used 3 or 4 meter dishes to monitor the S-band transmissions from the moon.  If memory serves, they were down closer to 2.2 ghz.  My recollection is that NASA was a bit miffed that anyone other than them was monitoring, although I'm sure the Soviets were listening too.  Cool stuff in those exciting days.
I was headed for orientation at the University of Maine and we stopped off at my uncle Norman's place to watch the landing.  

[Tom WA3KLR]

My recollection of watching man step on the surface of the moon live here on the east coast it was around 3:30 - 4 a.m.  My parents were in bed sound asleep.  I couldn't miss out on this event.

Yep, a number of hams did pick up the S band telemetry signal with their directional dish antennas pointed at the moon.  I like to quote this fact when I hear conspiracy theorists talk about the faked mission.

* I researched the times on the NASA website and the lift-off is stated as 9:32 am EDT on July 16th.  Stepping on the moon is stated as "about 109 hours and 42 minutes" into the mission.  This would be 11:14 PM EDT.  The 4 a.m. recollection is probably when I went to bed.  I graduated from high school that year and was working a summer job until I started college.  Most people at work did not care to watch into the early hours of the morning as I did.

[W3RSW]

Yeah Tom. Conspiracy and cover ups.
S-band reception by others, Not to mention the ignored, un-researched millions of documents from fabricators, designers, contractors, and operators including NASA's from just about every scientific and aerospace company in the country.

Entire cities, bases, launching facilities arose" out of the swamps, deserts and suburbs"  to facilitate the fantastically expensive and extensive bloom in technology. Magazines, Hollywood, newspapers, and mass communications of the time followed the step by step progress of the three major programs to get us there, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo and the Astronaut heroes therein.  Ticker tape parades, Presidential receptions, paparazzi constantly...

The new paradigm, of course in this day and age of spite, is to denigrate any sort of grand achievement, particularly American.

Innumeracy reigns supreme in the land of the ignorant, easily swayed masses who relish their ignorance, actively ignoring History.

Well.
Everybody knows zombies invaded Cape Canaveral.  
There's money to be made in promoting ignorance as truth rather than entertainment.

[K1JJ]

Ahhh.... the lunar landing.

There I was, a young 17 year old sitting in my red '64 GTO convertible, looking at distant Avon Mountain.  We were parked behind the LP Wilson school in Windsor chilling out. Next to me sat my Cherie Amour - a long-brown-haired, blue-eyed girl from Canada whom I had just met the previous day at a carnival. She spoke French and knew little English. What a lunar fox she was!

We listened to the AM radio as they landed. Later, I stayed up until 3AM to watch the ghostly images of the first disco duck on the moon.   What a time in history that was.

T

[W1RKW]

I was 9. For this event my father bought our first Zenith 24" color TV. I remember the launch in color but the walk was in B&W.  The excitement of the walk negated the B&W.  I vaguely remember the walk happening in the evening time.

[AJ1G]

Ahhh.... the lunar landing.

There I was, a young 17 year old sitting in my red '64 GTO convertible, looking at distant Avon Mountain.  We were parked behind the LP Wilson school in Windsor chilling out. Next to me sat my Cherie Amour - a long-brown-haired, blue-eyed girl from Canada whom I had just met the previous day at a carnival. She spoke French and knew little English. What a lunar fox she was!
T

Three deuces and a four speed and a 389? I actually saw a red 64 Goat convertible the other night in downtown Westerly, I think he must have been heading for the Thursday night classic car meet up they have every week during the summer down in Misquamicut Beach at the Windjammer parking lot.  Some thing tells me you were not looking all that much at Avon Mountain!

I was about 4 years away from meeting my brown haired (half) French Canadian Cherie Amour, but Diane tells me that she was watching the landing up at the family summer cottage in Charlestown RI with her parents and grandparents and a bunch of her French Canadian uncles and cousins from Montreal.  Apparently much Lablatt was being consumed at the time.  At the same time, up at Clarkson, I celebrated with several mugs of Genny myself, the first time I was ever served in a bar.  I was a little short of 17 at the time, apparently they were pretty casual about carding there then.

[W2NBC]

Actual recording of young Tom VU at 17 in his Goat..

[Tom WA3KLR]

Very good Jeff 

[K2PG]

A few years after the lunar landing, someone from a novelty outfit who sold his wares in the back pages of the now-defunct National Lampoon magazine sold a poster showing a photograph of one of the astronauts descending the ladder from the LEM on the moon's surface...about to step into a little pile of dog poop! Classic Lampoon!

1969 was 45 years ago, as the title of this thread states. We Americans can indeed be proud that no other country has succeeded in landing a man (or woman!) on the moon. Will we ever see a landing on Mars within our lifetimes (I am 61.)? Will we ever be able to get our space program back on track while taking care of other domestic needs?

[K1JJ]

Actual recording of young Tom VU at 17 in his Goat..

 

You are possibly the funniest stiff on the band, Jeff.   

T 

[n1ps]

I have enjoyed reading everyones stories of that fateful time.  I of course have no memory of the landing.  I was too busy at the time being a teenager I do believe.

Looking at the NASA project with 20-20 vision in the rearview mirror, It was a bold mission with a capital B.  The men in the spacecrafts knew they were taking an enormous gamble...with little hope of survival if something went wrong.  Even the training missions were extremely risky.  But all those thousands of people made it happen, one of the great achievements of mankind to date and since. 

I always feel sad for those brave men when the conspiracy geniuses speak.

BTW...if you have not seen it already, watch the movie "The Dish".  An Australian account of one of the tracking stations down under during the Apollo 11 mission.  Some of it is fictitious, but much of the story is based on actual events.

~ps

[Steve - K4HX]

  On the floor!

[W2JRO]

 I was seven...my parents rousted me out of bed north of 10:30pm (my summer bedtime was 9pm) to see Neil Armstrong make that historic hop off the LEM..
I was much like a lot of the boys back then...the space program was it.. I had a 4 foot Saturn V model, with individual stages that my dad painstakingly painted, in my bedroom. That xmas, one present was a CBS News LP narrated by Walter Cronkite covering the Apollo program up to that point.. The rocket model is long gone. the LP I still have.
Hard to believe it's been 45 years

[Pete, WA2CWA]

I was down the rented shore house in Ortley Beach, NJ with 6 other guys. We had a B/W TV and a rigged a TV antenna to the ceiling. Also invited a bunch of female friends from two other houses. I think we went through a case or two of beer before the famous words were spoken. Of course by that time most of us didn't care. But, it was Sunday night at the Jersey Shore and the Surf Club in Ortley Beach had a hot band and we needed meditation (or was it medication).  Watching a fuzzy B/W TV too much longer wasn't much of a draw so off we all went.

45 years later and post Sandy; the place still rocks

[AJ1G]

I just checked  the 1969 calendar...it actually was on a Sunday.  The comment in the first post on this thread about having a TV brought into the class room so the students could watch, along with a line from Jimmy Buffet's song about the event  "The Rocket That Grandpa Rode", which said "...we all got to stay home from school..." seems kind of odd, given that it happened on a Sunday in the middle of the summer.  Maybe they were remembering earlier space missions, I can recall hearing and watching real time TV coverage of Gemini missions in science class in junior high school.

You tube of the Buffet song, form "Songs from Saint Somewhere":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CXDRdmY4pw

[KA3EKH]

Everything you may have ever wanted to know about the S Band system used during Apollo:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/TM-X55492.pdf

Great document explaining the equipment, limited bandwidth issues resulting it the video only being 320 lines at 10 fps on the early stuff and the Westinghouse and RCA work in making all this possible:

  http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf

[KB2WIG]

The old man loaded us into the car... went to the Aunts house. She had a Color TV!!!

After they landed,   "What's taking so long? I thought they were going to have this on TV?"
and                         "How hard is it to open the door? I've got to go to work tomorrow!"
along with                 "If Bobbie were President, this thing would be over by now"
interspaced with          "Are they outside yet?"
and finally                    "What the ##%*%  is wrong with the picture? "
and after 5 min.             "OK get in the car, were going."

So, after ~40 years, I've seen the "step part" of the original landing, Apollo 15 dropping of the feather/hammer, and the Hershey's commercial.


KLC

[W1ITT]

The NASA links provided by KA3EKH are informative.  I was on Ascension Island, one of the sites mentioned, a couple months ago on a job.  On a day off we drove up to the defunct NASA site, where it was proudly pointed out on a plaque that it was one of the sites used for moon landing links.  The dishes are removed and the building is occasionally used for Boy Scout meetings for the small troop on the island.   The only currently used setup I saw was a passive reflector used to calibrate some UK university's satellite radar. Vegetation grows slowly on that part of the island, atop volcanic debris, but it's trying to retake the site.
Ascension still has cool stuff going on but nothing that catches the imagination as much as the moon landing mission.

[KE5YTV]

I was eighteen at the time of the landing. I was at East Texas State University for freshman orientation the next morning. We were all watching in the dorm common room. There was probably fifty or so of us that night. When Armstrong stepped on the moon we all went crazy. The 60's was a tough decade. But I always felt that on that one night we were all just citizens of the Earth looking to the moon and knowing that mankind had made it. To me that was America's finest hour.

Now we've sank to paying the Russians to carry our astronauts to the I.S.S. It's sad.

[AJ1G]

www.firstmenonthemoon.com

Very cool site with comms in stereo lander Eagle and orbiter Columbia left Houston right. Site won a Webby award last year.

[w1vtp]

I remember sitting spell-bound on the edge of my couch watching the whole thing. 

Anyone remember the live takeoff of the lunar lander when they literally blasted off for a docking with the command module?  I recall it being much faster than the current slo-mo videos that is shown everywhere.  That certainly could not be duplicated on earth as some of the conspiracists say.

What an exciting experience for me.  I was 32 at the time.

Al

[W1RKW]

after watching and listening to that link, what is amazing is the team work on the comms.  I can only imagine the training all involved had to go through to make this well oiled machine do what it did.