Apollo 11, the first manned flight to the moon, took off on July 16th of 1969.

The Apollo 11 capsule contained Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

This sequence was taken by a very high speed 16mm camera running at 500 feet-per-second, protected by a quartz lens, and delineates what actually occurred on the launch pad.  The five F-1 engines of the Saturn V launch vehicle are absolutely awesome to watch and I found myself fascinated with the detailed narrative.

The perspective above was from Camera E-8, on the launch pad itself.

At the time, the computing power of the entire Apollo 11 rocket, capsule and LEM consisted of 64KB of memory and only 0.043 MHz of processing power.  The computer was more basic than the electronics in modern toasters that have computer controlled stop/start/defrost buttons.

Three brave men put their trust in calculations from those seemingly-prehistoric computers.

When America was brave, strong and willing to take chances.

BZ