Apollo 11 lands on the Moon: July 20, 1969

Image from NASA's JSC Digital Image Collection

Thirty-nine years ago today, humans first set foot on another world.

I'd love to post a video, but YouTube appears to be down at the moment (9:37 AM, July 20, 2008). And the NASA folder of Apollo 11 movies is currently empty. What's up with that? I'd make a joke about NASA faking the moon landings, but some people take that "Moon Hoax" crap seriously. Oh, well, you can go here to see everything NASA has online about Apollo 11.

UPDATE: You can go here and select images and video from many NASA missions, including Apollo 11.

UPDATE 2, 4:40 PM: YouTube is up again. Maybe it was never down for anyone except me. Michelle has reminded me of the site http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, which I'll have to check next time. Here's one of the many relevant videos.



If I didn't make it perfectly clear in my post about Tasmin Archer's song "Sleeping Satellite", the "eagle" to which she refers in the third line is the Eagle, the Apollo 11 lander. I suppose I could have saved that post until today, except I didn't even realize that today was the anniversary until I saw it on one of my many calendars. Also, with YouTube down, there wouldn't be much to post.

I have created a new label called "The Moon" for all of my posts about the Moon. I've only re-tagged about half of the relevant posts as of this writing, but I'll keep working on it.

Phil Plait has a post commemorating this event over at Bad Astronomy.