Okay, I'm late to the party on this thread, but I'd like to share my small experience with our space program. I lived in Hawaii in July of 1969, and I was so thrilled, as was most everybody, to witness this historic trip to the moon. I watched the launch of the Apollo rocket and then after it got in orbit, it circled the earth for one and a half rotations, then it fired rockets and left earth's orbit and headed for the moon. Well, in Hawaii, everyone was gathering in different places, because we were going to be able to see the rocket burn (I hope I'm using the right terminology here...) Anyway, I was up sometime in the middle of the night...2 a.m or something like that, and went and sat on the stairs to my apartment building and waited and waited, not knowing what it was going to look like. This was before I had a decent camera, before we recorded every darn thing in our life, so I don't have a photo of this. Darn!! Suddenly there was a bright light in the sky, and it spread out into a V formation and because it was following the curvature of the earth, that V, which grew in size and practically filled 1/4 of the sky, did not go "up", but went "down" and just looked like it was plunging back to earth. It was breathtaking. I thought I'd see some little light in the sky, but it was a pretty big, exciting light show. Then, days later, I watched the whole thing on my neighbor's bigger TV set and sat in utter fascination as our species walked on another world. And, of course, after splash down, the astronauts came to Hawaii first. With that going on, and the Viet Nam war, Hawaii was a pretty busy place in those days. I felt like that was the center of the known world for a while.
