Forty years since Apollo 11
The Desert Sun takes me to the moon and back
For the past few weeks, I've been pretty consumed by moon-related things as I've been talking with Coachella Valley residents who contributed to the space program back in the 1950s and 1960s as America prepared to send three men to the moon.
The fruit of all that labor is featured on the front page of Sunday's edition of The Desert Sun. And of course, all the stories are also available on mydesert.com, which I updated tonight during my usual Saturday-night Web shift. I'm not gonna lie; it was slightly weird posting my own stories to the site. But there was plenty of other stuff to post that I didn't write, so I didn't have too much time to dwell on the coincidental timing of it all.
Anyway, be sure to check out my mainbar story on the valley folks who had various ties to the first manned moon landing, "Valley residents recall roles in race for moon." Also, I spun off into a sidebar the story of where I met two of the sources for the mainbar — in a weekly gathering of aerospace retirees.
Online, we have first-person recollections from three local folks who had memories of to the Apollo 11 mission ranging from being a part of the launch countdown, catching a glimpse of the astronauts just after their return and seeing a son receive personal correspondence from Neil Armstrong. Also, a colleague from The Desert Sun wrote a reflection on growing up in Armstrong's hometown.
And if it's wire stories you're looking for, we've got some of them as well over at mydesert.com/moon.
Yeah, we kinda went all out.
What's more, in Saturday's Desert Sun, I wrote about a lecture at the La Quinta Museum in which a guy from the Jet Propulsion Lab's outreach team outlined NASA's current moon missions. I was surprised to learn that both of these latest unmanned trips to the moon are scouting out spots for a permanent manned base. Anyway, you can read more about that in "Ihde discusses current NASA missions."
And in Monday's paper, we plan to look back at another big event from 40 years ago — one that's decidedly more local but arguably just as memorable as the moon walk.