It was great to see so much space stuff on tv, in the press and at the cinema. You would imagine there isn’t much left to be said about it all, but there were new things, and certainly things forgotten.
The BBC has the regular long running The Sky at Night and it was great to see James Burke talking about his work on tv at that time.
Sadly many like Patrick Moore, Walter Cronkite, Arthur C Clarke and many others are long gone. And one of the prime movers of the USA space programme, Chris Kraft, died just the other day, as the celebrations were proceeding.
There was, of course, a space war. A war with Russia and the USA. Facts come out about what the Russians intended to do. It is always said that they intended to land a man on the Moon before the USA, but the evidence that this is a real threat is very sketchy. Certainly, the Luna 15 unmanned craft was intended to get to the Moon, retrieve samples and return before Apollo 11 succeeded, but it crashed on the Moon’s surface.
Remember, no person of any nationality other than American has walked on the Moon, and no woman has. Had the Apollo series continued, that might have happened.