Massachusetts Played a Big Role in First Moon Landing

I was 11 on July 16, 1969, when NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a round-trip journey to the moon. The mission lasted eight days and marked the first time that man landed on the moon.

The world held its on July 20, 1969 as pilot Buzz Aldrin guided the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle to a safe landing on the moon's surface. At 20:17 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), Mission Commander Neil Armstrong declared, "Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Pilot Michael Collins flew the Command Module Columbia in lunar orbit.

My parents, brother and I gathered around the black-and-white Zenith TV in our living room on Brook Street in New Bedford as Walter Cronkite presided over live coverage of the historic event.

We knew it would happen because President John Fitzgerald Kennedy told us it would. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy said, "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

On September 12, 1962, JFK said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

In 1969, an average New Bedford home received three VHF television stations; there was no cable. The idea of watching men walking on the moon live on TV was almost unfathomable, but that's what happened.

Boston Public Broadcast Station WGBH reports, "The 1969 moon landing of Apollo 11 was a major TV event. When Armstrong opened the door of the lunar module – called the Eagle – the Westinghouse slow-scan camera attached to the door was rolling in black and white."

WGBH says, "To get those pictures transmitted through outer space back to Earth, the video signal needed a boost, which came from a little device developed at Raytheon in Waltham (Massachusetts). It's called the QKS-1300 Amplitron."

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) also played a vital role in the moon landing and beyond.

MIT News reports, "MIT's role in creating the navigation and guidance systems that got the mission to the moon and back has been widely recognized in books, movies, and television series."

"But many other aspects of the institute's involvement in the Apollo program and its legacy, including advances in mechanical and computational engineering, simulation technology, biomedical studies, and the geophysics of planet formation, have remained less celebrated."

Never mind the technical stuff. For an 11-year-old kid, it was pretty awesome to watch two astronauts play golf and ride a buggy on the moon on live TV.

Check out this 2021 gallery of photos from the first moon landing: