Apollo 11 - 40 years!

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing! Alpine and I went to the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama a few years ago... if you are interested in this stuff at all, you should definitely go. And if you have a kid who might like to go to Space Camp - this is where the REAL Space Camp is located! It is real! I didn't know that until I was an adult... =( I SO wanted to be the kid that went to Space Camp and accidentally got launched into space in the shuttle... just like the movie. Alas, it wasn't meant to be.

If it interests you, there are several shows on the space program on the History Channel today - Modern Marvels, for example, is a good one. Tonight History will apparently air the newscast as it aired 40 years ago. You can also go to http://www.wechoosethemoon.org/ for a real-time computer recreation of the entire Apollo 11 mission. I believe they landed on the moon around 2p eastern, and actually stepped onto the lunar surface about 6 hours later. I may be a little off on that.

If you're like me, you probably get tired of hearing about this kind of stuff when the media gets ahold of it. It's like they can't let go until it's beaten to death... or unless something more newsworthy happens. This is pretty cool, though... to think that we can get humans from the ground into space in minutes, and usually return them safely, is amazing.

Enjoy the Apollo 11 covereage, for it will be over soon. And don't forget that we have a shuttle in space as we speak, and a record number of people in the space station. The shuttle program expires in about a year, and we've already begun the process of going back to the moon.

Hopefully it won't take another 40 years or a disaster for the media to take interest again.