[Ezekiel]

"Yes, it's authentic," NASA spokesperson John Yembrick told Space.com. "It was a little joke at the time."

[Responsibility2nd]

I feel like pinging a notorious FReeper who rants on and on often about how this and all other Moon landings were faked. Shot on a Hollywood back lot.

But I’ll just leave it alone.

[COBOL2Java]

I was watching this on TV with my family. My grandmother was with us. I remember Nana telling us all to say a prayer as the craft was coming down.

[Psalm 73]

I remember. I was 11 years old, Nixon was President, America was still that “shining city on a hill”, and possibilities were endless.

[Jan_Sobieski]

Lost footage of flag plant first take

[Blueway]

We were at Hickam AFB when they brought in the isolation trailers containing the astronauts.
As I recall, President Nixon was there to welcome them home.
I think the trailers were loaded onto C-141s to take them back to the mainland.

[Fiji Hill]

Rocket to the Moon--Moon Mullican (1953)

Rocket to the Moon--Tony Perkins (1957)

Rocket to the Moon--Lenny Welch (1958)

[Paal Gulli]

What these pinheads don't get is the hardest part of the whole show was the launch vehicle itself. Saturn V was the most powerful, most complex (>3 million parts) and most expensive machine ever built (to that time). The biggest part of the moon program was the hundreds of baby steps (and dozens of failures) from Von Braun's V2 to the Saturn Rockets. Six million pounds of rocket burning 20 tons of fuel per second to propel a 110,000-lb package to escape velocity. Each first stage engine had to have its own gas turbine engine driving its fuel pumps so the monster F1 rocket engines never had to wait for fuel.

Once NASA had a reliable launch platform, the rest was a doodle. And the tens of thousands of observers who were in Central Florida for the event were eye-witness to its success.

From: https://www.fastcompany.com/90375425/apollo-11-landed-moon-how-you-can-be-sure-sorry-conspiracy

"...If the United States had been faking the Moon landings, one group would not have been in on the conspiracy: The Soviets.

The Soviet Union would have revealed any fraud in the blink of an eye, and not just without hesitation, but with joy and satisfaction.

In fact, the Russians did just the opposite. The Soviet Union was one of the few places on Earth (along with China and North Korea) where ordinary people couldn't watch the landing of Apollo 11 and the Moon walk in real time. It was real enough for the Russians that they didn't let their own people see it.

That's all the proof you need. If the Moon landings had been faked - indeed, if any part of them had been made up, or even exaggerated - the Soviets would have told the world. They were watching. Right to the end, they had their own ambitions to be first to the Moon, in the only way they could muster at that point.

And that's a kind of proof that the conspiracy-meisters cannot wriggle around...."

Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings#Independent_evidence

[MD Expat in PA]

I was 8 years old in 1969. My dad was a huge fan of the US/NASA space program. One of my earliest memories was watching an early Gemini launch with him and the many others that followed. He’d get me up early or let me stay up way past my bedtime so we could watch them together.

We had a subscription to National Geographic back then and we got a big map of the Earth and a big map of the Moon as part of our subscription. I also got, IIRC from a box of Captain Crunch cereal, a plastic model of the Saturn rocket and the Apollo 11 orbiter and lunar lander. I also “borrowed” the “ships” from my older brother’s Battleship game.

My dad got a big kick watching me play.

I laid the map of the Earth on the floor on one side of the living room, and the map of the Moon on the opposite side and “practiced” the launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, I even put my transistor radio on the map near Huston TX to represent Huston Control and I’d do Mission Control voices that I had memorized from all the previous Apollo missions.

Then I’d circle the Earth map several times to represent the initial orbit then walk over to the Moon map, circle around that several times and then separate the lander from the orbiter and land on the exact spot on the Moon map where Apollo 11 was going to land.

Then I’d blast off from the Moon, dock with the orbiter and make the long journey back to the other side of the living room and splash down in the Pacific where my brother’s “Battleship” navy was waiting to pick our astronauts up. I’d also yell, “Take that you Commie Ruskies!” My dad got an especially big kick out of that.

My “practice” ended up being pretty accurate to the real thing.

I only saw my dad cry twice in my life – when my mother died in 1996 and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in 1969.