News You Can Bruise for 2012 July 20 (entry 1)

Fri Jul 20 2012 18:20 Apollo 11 Special: Today on my #retrorocket microblog feature, I posted some of my favorite pictures from Apollo 11, in honor of the anniversary of the moon landing. I really like these photos because each has some quirky detail that helps me connect with an event that took place ten years before I was born and was enormously mythologized even before it happened. Since the Apollo 11 pictures are among my favorites in the entire collection, I wanted to cross-post them to NYCB, along with a little extra commentary on the details that caught my eye:

• Dangerous work. (I actually posted this one on the 17th.) Detail: more like an anti-detail. You can't even see the guy this is a picture of.
• Breakfast, the day of the launch. Detail: the jam holders! I want one of those jam holders. And way over to the right, there's another table, with a place setting, and in front of the place setting a nameplate that says "Neil A. Armstrong". Why does Neil Armstrong have a separate breakfast table with a nameplace?
• Spiro Agnew and LBJ are not impressed by the Apollo 11 launch. Details: so, so many. But especially the drink in Agnew's hand, and the smile on the blonde woman standing next to Lady Bird Johnson. (I'm pretty sure that's Lady Bird Johnson, but anyway, not her, the woman standing next to her.)
• Buzz Aldrin reaches into his pocket. Details: partly the sunglasses, but mostly the look on his face. It reminds me of Janice Voss's face in this photo (which I used to illustrate part 29 of the Constellation Games author commentary), and Eugene Cernan's face in my favorite #retrorocket picture of all time. I'm saving the Eugene Cernan picture for a special occasion, but what occasion is special enough? I dunno.
• Cake cutting ceremony on board the USS Hornet to celebrate the return of the Apollo 11 crew. The astronauts are under quarantine, so they're just looking mournfully at the cake from inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility. (More quarantine fun here.)