Apollo 11 50th anniversary: Video, audio, and documents from 1969 and today

For folks of my age and older, watching men walk on the moon for the first time was an unforgettable thrill. Happily, through the wonders of the internet, there are many ways you can relive that experience and share it with the Gen Xers and later generations that missed out the first time.

My earliest clear memory of America in space is of Apollo 7, and I remember the names of the early command and lunar modules (Gumdrop and Spider on Apollo 9; Charlie Brown and Snoopy on Apollo 10). I have vague memories of watching launches on TV in a house we lived in in 1965-1966, which would have been during Project Gemini. Although the Gemini and Apollo launches typically happened at roughly two-month intervals, to my preschool brain it seemed like a regular TV series.

To see the Apollo 11 mission as we would have experienced it in 1969, you can watch online video of live coverage on the major TV networks. It's fascinating to see how the networks handled the absence of live video from space, playing the mission audio over animations of the lunar module in flight or video of actors in spacesuits manipulating controls in a replica of the lunar module interior.

During the long wait between the landing and the moon walk, ABC filled time with man-in-the-street interviews by Sam Donaldson, a silent movie about a trip to the moon, poetry from Poet Laureate (and author of Deliverance) James Dickey, and Duke Ellington singing a new composition, "Moon Maiden." That ABC clip includes a news report, anchored by Peter Jennings, which has a story about Ted Kennedy leaving the scene of a car accident, the event that made Chappaquiddick Island infamous.

These links have either embedded video or links to video of archived live news coverage:

• NBC coverage of launch (via It's the Minder
• CBS coverage of Apollo 11 launch
• UPDATE 2019/07/16:CBS Apollo 11 launch coverage from 3.5 hours before and 1 hour after launch, CBS News's own stream, complete with news breaks and commercials. (Via Gizmodo.)
• CBS coverage of landing and moon walk via kottke.org
• ABC coverage of launch and Trans Lunar Injection, landing and moonwalk via WAAY

(Tulsa readers will understand why I put the networks in that order.)

"Apollo 11: What We Saw," presented by Bill Whittle for the Daily Wire, provides an interesting angle on network TV coverage, contrasting the networks' animations and simulations, which he remembers seeing as a 10-year-old, with the tension in the lunar module as the guidance computer overloaded and as the pre-programmed landing site turned out to be a crater the size of a football field, surrounded by large boulders. Here is the trailer for the series of five hour-long episodes, and here's a link to Episode 1.

C-SPAN has aired contemporary NASA documentaries about the earlier Apollo missions:

• AIRBOYD playlist of NASA Apollo documentaries
• Apollo 8: Debrief: NASA documentary narrated by Burgess Meredith
• Apollo 9: Three to Make Ready: NASA documentary about the mission to test lunar module docking in Earth orbit.
• Apollo 10: To Sort Out the Unknowns : NASA documentary on the dress rehearsal for the moon landing.

In 1966, the MIT Science Reporter series visited the Grumman factory in Bethpage, Long Island, for a detailed look at new Lunar Excursion Module.

This article in the July 1969 issue Popular Science will give you an idea of what a more technically literate person would have been reading: First Men On The Moon: By Dr. Wernher von Braun, describes the landing process, moonwalk, experiments, ascent, return, and quarantine.

For a more behind-the-scenes look, NASA and the National Archives have made a great deal of mission audio and video, plus documentary films and documents, available online:

• Apollo 11 mission audio from NASA on the Internet Archive
• Restored downlink video of the complete moonwalk, including the higher-quality Australian feed from the first three minutes
• NASA high-def (720p) video of Apollo 11 moonwalk and mission highlights
• National Archives: Practice Makes Perfect: How the Apollo 11 Crew Prepared for Launch: Video of practicing low-gravity maneuvering, LEM control, splashdown, and egress
• National Archives: National Archives' Film Footage Fuels Apollo 11 Film: This story has links to digitized Apollo 11 documents online.

The recently released documentary Apollo 11 incorporates large-format, archival NASA footage, long overlooked. It appears that the film has already been and gone here, but you can stream it online and purchase it in various formats for home viewing. According to the movie's website, Kansas City and DFW are the nearest metro areas where you can still see the film on the big screen.

Now for some present-day documentaries and commemorations:

• "Chasing the Moon," a three-part series in The American Experience, is available on the PBS website for free streaming through September 10. Part 1 covers the beginnings of the space race from Sputnik to the death of Kennedy; Part 2 covers the missions leading up to Apollo 11, and Part 3 is focused on the moon landing mission. Each episode runs about 2 hours.
• NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the plan to return to the moon
• Five recommended space documentaries available for streaming
• Apollo 8 50th anniversary service at the Washington Cathedral
• Apollo 8: Discussion of 50th anniversary of first lunar orbit
• Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, NC, will rebroadcast the 1969 TV coverage of the landing, just as it did during Apollo 11
• History.com has a story on Apollo 10's near disaster
• The US Mint's commemorative Apollo 11 50th anniversary silver dollar features a spacesuit footprint in lunar soil.

In a later entry, I'll highlight commemorations and special events in our part of Planet Earth.