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Comment by cmpb | Hacker News Reader

As a citizen of the United States (who came of age well after this event took place), I've only ever been told that this was an act of heroic success, something to be proud of, something that America should be proud of. I'm curious what the reception to this was outside of the U.S. Especially, e.g., to someone living in the USSR, what was it like hear that someone else had put a man on the moon?

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I'm too young to have witnessed it myself but my impression is that the US astronauts were making it clear they were representing all of humanity.

As a little boy, I went through the usual astronaut phase. There was this brilliant TIME magazine photo book of the space program up to and including the then new space shuttle that I kept renewing from the library every time. I remember at the time, that those events of 10-15 years earlier felt like ancient history.

I didn't know or care about wars, cold or hot, or any dark side. To me America was that place where they had a meteor crater and they put men on the moon.

Decades later when I got to visit Kennedy Space Center, seeing the rocket garden, the actual vehicle assembly building, a real Saturn V rocket, the actual Apollo 14 command module (!!!) in real life was an emotional experience, like that 10 year old boy teleported back into me. I felt like running around, crying, laughing, I can't describe it.

We dumped the kids with their grand parents at that Disney thing that trip. I thought they would be bored, but I'm definitely taking them next time.

If you ever find yourself in Kansas for some reason, there's an excellent space exploration & rocketry museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, of all places, called the Kansas Cosmosphere. It is very good, doubly so considering where it is. Nice collection, and very well presented. Not exactly close to other places anyone's likely to visit, but a great detour destination if you happen to be driving through.

https://cosmo.org/

It's funny that now that I don't live a 12 hour flight away from those places any more, I can't go because I don't have any vacation days.

I actually like the cosmosphere better than the Smithsonian or the rocket center in Hunstville. They have a good collection of Russian stuff, and it’s the most adult oriented, with good annotations on the displays.

Seem to recall seeing a documentary that said at first the USSR ignored the moon landing and once word leaked in, covered it in a very casual passing manner like one would a story about the wedding of a local politician. I do wonder if the genesis of the moon landing was a hoax story was some propaganda group within the Soviet government. If so, they got a lot of bang for their ruble.

I was 9 years old, living in rural Australia. My mother woke me an my two brothers to see it on tv (at about 11 pm). We were tremendously exited by it all. My father had read articles from the news paper to us about the spacecraft (eg, it burned 13 tons of fuel per second on launch). We knew all the details of the various missions leading up to it, mercury, gemini, surveyer. We also watched Armstrong step onto the moon a couple of days later on tv in my classroom at school.

"Using elephants to visualize how much fuel a Saturn 5 used per second" https://imgur.com/gallery/5Zl5NmT

Well, I'm from the UK and I definitely think that it is something you should be proud of - it was awesome and the astronauts, all of them, true heroes.

NB I apparently watched the Apollo 11 landing at the age of 4 and was utterly obsessed with it for many years as a kid.

I'm from Poland, my father told me that everyone here was excited as well and that this topic dominated conversations for weeks here.

From what I've seen in documentaries, the entired world was thrilled.

It never happened. That was my reception.

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