Tag: Apollo 11

Living history

November 6, 2025

When you have three or four decades under your belt, you start to notice what history is for your children and later your grandchildren are things that you remember firsthand. Mom and Dad knew about World War II as actual events that they experienced both here in the Springfield, Missouri area and for Dad also in the South Pacific with the Navy. As Christians, our lives are lived by what we learn from history in the Bible, but also from life as it is experienced.

In 1972, on September 17th, a freshman at Southwest Missouri State University experienced a historical event that did not seem like such at the time. The CBS TV series MASH premiered. This program portrayed events that were historical in a dramatic and comedic way for those, like Mom and Dad, who had lived through the period, and their children who had not.

An interesting thing about MASH is that it lasted eight years longer than the war it portrayed.  Since it was only once a week, that fact was never noticed. In the reruns today it is much more noticeable. At the time, the MASH series finale was an epic event. In 1972 when the first episode aired, nobody knew what to expect. The original movie was alright, but the series surpassed it.

In July of 1969, we watched the moon landing and the walk. I was six when the first astronaut took his ride and followed the other five on the Mercury ships. Then the Gemini crafts were launched. Apollo was next, and the catastrophe of Apollo One catching fire and killing Roger Chafee, Ed White, and Gus Grissom seemed to delay or stop that.

It delayed the launches, but it did not end them. In 1967, the first manned Apollo mission was called Apollo 7. Eight took three men around the moon and nine stayed in Earth orbit to test the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). Ten went back to orbit the moon and tested the docking of the lander in moon orbit. The first landing possibility was Eleven.  

This is not mentioned by most commentators, but Neal Armstrong could have aborted the LEM setting down. During those last few moments before setting down on the surface as the commander, he had to make the decision whether he should attempt to risk the mission with a failed landing. The fuel in the LEM was at the point he had to abort or land. That is what makes a legendary pilot.

You may be asking, “How does he know these things?” I was a space nut through the sixties and the seventies. If it was published about NASA or the Astronauts, I read it. I was in front of the TV for every launch and live broadcast with Uncle Walter. You do not know Uncle Walter? Walter Cronkite was the CBS news anchor for most of my life. We only received NBC and CBS until the early 1970s.

Despite not having the internet, cell phones, satellite TV, or all the miracles of this age, we lived history. We witnessed all these things unfold before our eyes through the miracle of television, and we had real cats and dogs, without having to watch YouTube videos to see what was happening in our world.

We also watched in horror as the twin towers in New York City crashed to the ground, and our president had the guts to send troops to find the mastermind of that attack. In spite of all of that tragedy, he never once invaded American cities to make himself look good. He actually did something constructive without shutting down our government..

©Copyright 2025 by Charles Kensinger

A fourteen-year-old visits the moon.

July 20, 2022

Fifty-three years ago, my brothers and I were watching television with friends from church on Sunday evening. Our youth minister had planned this activity for us weeks before. My oldest brother was leaving that week for the Navy. This was his going away party.

Saturday, we had been watching as Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The words, “The Eagle has landed” were heard with a slight delay. I listened intently that evening to hear what would happen and when. At church the next morning my question was if there would be a television, we could watch at the home of the family that was hosting the event.

The answer was, of course. We ate, played games, and stayed alert to what was happening on the moon and at mission control in Houston, Texas. A few minutes before the door of the Lunar Excursion Module was opened, we all gathered around the TV.

We waited with Uncle Walter as Armstrong and Aldrin prepared to vacate the LEM. Mike Collins was orbiting the moon in Columbia. Viewers all around the world were watching. This had never happened before.

Apollo 8 with its three-man crew had orbited the moon the previous December. That was a first. There was no LEM on this flight. It wasn’t ready, yet. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth” was heard from the craft on Christmas Eve. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders were on board. Borman did the reading. This showed the difference between the Soviets and Americans. We saw God where we were. They never saw Him.

James McDivitt, David Scott, and Rusty Schweickart Flew the Apollo 9 with the first LEM in March of 1969. The docking and undocking of the command and lunar modules were tested. It working as expected. The only problem was that they never left Earth’s orbit. They did test the moon suits during a spacewalk.

In May Apollo 10 went back to the moon. It had a LEM and the lander undocked and went within 8 miles of the surface of the moon. They fired the ascent engine before reaching the point of no return. Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan were onboard the LEM while john Young flew the command module. The two crafts redocked and left lunar orbit to return to the Earth.

As this young man watched on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did what had never been done before. They walked on the surface of the moon. A TV camera on the lander showed us as Neil stepped off the ladder and said, “That’s one small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind.”

As we all know all three of the Apollo 11 astronauts returned home from the moon. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 Apollo missions also returned to the moon before the end of the moon missions. We all know about the problems on Apollo 13 that prevented them from landing. Some of the astronauts drove golf balls or moon rovers while on the surface.

If you hear that the Apollo 11 landing was a hoax by the government, do not believe it. Not only did U.S. astronauts land on the moon once. They went there nine times and landed six times. A total of twelve Americans walked on the surface.  

Take my word for it. I was that fourteen-year-old boy that walked on the moon with all of them through the miracle of live television. I never needed video games in the sixties and seventies because we had the space race. Watching real people explore the unknown in real-time beats any computer simulation.

©Copyright 2022 by Charles Kensinger