Dear Reader,

Where were you on July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 made its improbable landing and two U.S. astronauts stepped foot on the moon for the first time? I was 11 years old, in Girl Scout camp. The counselors gathered us all into the dining room, and we craned our necks to look up at a tiny, square black-and-white television (that's all there was at the time) mounted high on the wall. It was scratchy and grainy, and I still sort of wanted to be outside, but then Neil Armstrong descended the ladder from the lunar lander and suddenly the images were imprinted on my mind forever.

 

Our radio and online stories this month capture this moment in history, a moment extraordinary in itself and even more so when you realize that, at the time, no one had a home computer; no one even had a pocket calculator; our black-and-white televisions had four channels and needed several minutes to warm up; and, as you learned if you saw Hidden Figures, we didn't have the math to figure out how to get out of Earth's atmosphere and propel ourselves across space.

 

This week, David Perlman remembers going to Mission Control in Houston for the San Francisco Chronicle and Chabot astronomer Ben Burress tells us why we might bother going back to our lonely, pale satellite. Coming up: the Bay Area's NASA rock stars and the fascination with moon rocks.