It was incredibly exciting at the time. I went out of the house and looked at the moon and found it hard to believe someone was up there. At the time everyone was space mad and thought that people would be living there or at least doing research within a few years, but of course that didn't happen.
Living on the moon seems a little pointless, but I have heard of suggestions of using it to harness a ton of solar power, as the lack of atmosphere would make it far more efficient. As far as living in space goes, I think 2027 is the scheduled date for the first people to permanently settle on Mars. One thing that the Curiosity mission has taught me is that there are a lot of people who are really ignorant when it comes to space. I saw a picture of a Mars sunrise on Twitter, and one of the comments said "Wow I didn't know Mars had a sun!" Did you hear any people say such ignorant things after the moon landing, or are people just getting dumber?
My favourite anecdote was the Good Luck Mr Gorsky message, I know it wasn't true but still hilarious.
Luckily, Twitter didn't exist in the late 60s/early 70s. And yes, people are getting dumber.... (from a 43 year old) ...slate away! PS RIP Neil - an immortal (now) hero!
Living on the moon was never an end in itself. Reaching for other planets becomes much easier when launching from the Moon. Remember, it's all about weight at the outset, and so launching in one-sixth gravity makes the Moon an obvious place to start a mission from. That's from an early 1960's viewpoint. The method of getting there hasn't significantly changed since then. So similar are the abilities of today's technology that a mission to Mars, imagined in this last decade, was almost a carbon copy of the 1960-70's Moon missions. The concept and design of the Moon rockets were so good, that the plans for onwards missions aren't that different. As to whether people are dumber - no I don't think so. People are just not as involved, and the pioneering Space Age is yesterday. The interest is simply not there. There's a news item from the 1960's of someone suggesting that the reason the rain was pouring at that specific time [nothing changes..!] was because the Americans were punching holes in the sky. Now how uninformed is that..? Look up HG Wells and how the Eloi believed how the Time Traveller reached them. It's a similar ignorance. If today NOW was the Space Age, instead of the Information Age, almost everybody would as excited as we were when we were young. It had never been done before. So, years ago, when I was child of 10, men landed on the Moon. I thought it was utterly amazing then. Nowadays I consider it a truly staggering achievement because I understand much more how it was done, and how very much more those that were involved were basing their careers and lives on the very edge of what was possible in what was essentially 1950s-60s technology. Over a decade, they even invented new stuff just to solve the insurmountable problems. The fact is, it has been done, and because it was so long ago, it has become mundane amongst many. But there are a generation who can still look back to our childhoods and remember what it was like. It gripped the entire World like no other peacetime event before nor since, I wouldn't swap that memory and experience for anything.
For a really gripping story, you can't beat the rescue of Apollo 13. Our hearts were in our mouths about that and the relief on splashdown was palpable.
