35 years ago tomorrow, I was awake long after my bedtime, sitting in front of our 13″ black-and-white television, when, at 10:56pm, Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on a planet that wasn’t his own. The picture I saw, (6.6Mb MPEG) was the same image watched by half-a-billion people around the world — probably a majority of all people who had access to a television. I remember thinking how great it was to be alive at that moment. To be alive and human and American.
NASA has a site dedicated to the anniversary, and it’s chockful of audio and video and animations covering nearly every aspect of the mission.
And over at panoramas.dk, Hans Nyberg has taken the incredibly crisp and detailed images taken by Neil Armstrong and turned them into a QuickTime panorama.
It’s strange, but, as cynical and disillusioned as I am about this country and where it has gone in those 35 years, I just can’t seem to find anything but awe, pride and that same sense of connectedness when I think about what we achieved when we let our dreams soar instead of wallow in the mud.
