Moon Day
- Thread starter anon1
- Start date
Um, actually, the moon landing WAS on July 20, 1969, but Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon on July 21, based on UTC time zone. It was shortly after 10:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time on the 20th locally.
So the precise anniversary is tonight July 20 at 10:30 eastern? I'm glad that the reminder came out today on the 20th and not on the 21st.
Pedants... gotta love them.
From wikipedia:
Apollo 11 (July 16–24, 1969) was the American spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, and Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon's surface six hours and 39 minutes later, on July 21 at 02:56 UTC.
UTC, formerly Greenwich Mean Time, is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time and four hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time.
Time for a reprint of "Good Luck, Mr Gorsky":
According to a Buddy Hackett stand-up routine, on July 20*, 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on The Moon, after he said "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind", he then said "Good luck, Mr Gorsky.".
When asked about it years later by a former NASA employee at Mission Control Houston, Armstrong said that when he was nine years old, he had been playing baseball, and a home run ball ended up in the Gorsky's backyard. When he went to retrieve the ball, through an open window he heard Mrs Gorsky say "Oral sex? You'll get oral sex when that kid next door walks on The Moon!".
*Since Hackett was American, he considered both the moonwalk and the moon landing to have taken place on July 20, when they happened in the United States.
Good Luck, Mr Gorky can be heard when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in the opening credits of the 2009 alternative history film Watchmen:
at 4:49.
url if the link is blocked in forum posts:
This gets my vote for best opening credits sequence in a feature film.
Jeffrey Daniel of Shalamar is generally credited with the first public performance of the moonwalk dance, (on the June 24, 1982 edition of the UK television show Top of the Pops), but Bill Bailey was doing it by 1955.
Who knows if he was the originator, or if he learned it from someone else.
