R.I.P Neil Armostrong...What did the moon landing mean to you?

I was 9 when Apollo 11 landed. Young enough to be excited by it but not old enough to really appreciate the significance, the technical achievement, or the danger.

To be honest I don't remember watching the actual landing. I may have seen it but I live in the UK so it would have been in the middle of the night and I would have been half asleep. I do remember being glued to the TV every evening watching the updates on the missions. The astronauts were just the ultimate heroes for a young kid who was interested in everything to do with space and flight.

The older I've become the more I have come to appreciate the Moon landings, both as a technical achievement and as a feat of skill and bravery. I'm an engineer so I know how many things could have gone wrong with those spacecraft. In a broader sense they symbolise the spirit of that age - an uncynical, optimistic "can do" attitude that sadly America seems to have lost somewhere along the way.

The other day I was listening to some person on the radio defending the cost of the Apollo program by listing all the technical achievements that came out of it - better semiconductors, heat-resistant materials, etc. and I thought that was totally missing the point; the payback from Apollo is this - We, Humanity, went to the Moon. We went to the MOON! There is nothing we cannot do if we set our minds to it.

I was 11 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, and it was the greatest thing, ever.

Project Apollo was an amazing technological and human effort to expand our knowledge and abilities and the only sad thing about it is that it was stopped so absurdly, just when it was really hitting it's stride. And, it was absurdly inexpensive, $24 billion in '60s dollars. The Iraq war would have paid for at least twenty Project Apollos.

43 years later, it's just so wrong that no one's been back to the Moon since 1972.

As for me, I was watching every bit of TV coverage that I could, I was clipping articles from the newspapers (My dad working in media meant that he could bring me some papers from other cities, for free), and I still have those files. I am still a big space buff, and I finally got to see a live manned launch in 1992, STS-47. I continue to read books and watch DVDs on the topic, and it's as fascinating as it ever was.

Someone once said that with Apollo, it's as if a decade from the 21st Century was taken and put into the 1960s. And, that the 2001 that we got wasn't the 2001 (Like the film) that we should have gotten.

Farewell, Neil. With your passing, there are just eight men left who have walked on the Moon. -That's one small step for a man, one giant sadness for mankind.-

Exploration ... the future. I was six when I saw it on tele. Had a telescope when I was 12. Thought we would have a moon base easily by the year 2,000.

me too i wasn't there but i wish i was. to me it shows that humans can do great things and that's the reason i have faith in humanity. yes we can do stupid things but if we put our minds together we can and will do great things.

p.s i was shocked to hear that neil armostrong died rip neil

A good attempt but Neil Armstrong and his allies were wrong.They were unable to land on Moon.Instead, they reached an American desert.If they landed on Moon, how was the American flag wavering despite absence of air and water (complete vacuum)????

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronauts_Gone_Wild

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_moon_landing_h...