Douglas R. Dechow remembers in an excerpt from Generation Space:

My first conscious memory: a flickering image of a single man clambering down the ladder of an insect-like spaceship and planting his oversized boots on the Moon, with the deep black of the universe beyond the white spacesuit. Now in my late forties, I wasn’t yet three years old when Apollo 11 made it to the Moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969. My mother had plunked me in front of the family television set in the den that would become my bedroom a few years later. I sat in the middle of the carpeted floor with my parents, one of them cradling my brother behind me on the green upholstered couch, to watch the event along with an estimated five hundred million other viewers worldwide. Somehow, I knew that the hazy black-and-white images of two men in gleaming spacesuits were important. There were people inside those bulky, bouncing spacesuits; I listened to their crackling voices. The Moon seemed a place I might visit someday. Upon that image of the Moon landing, everything I have experienced and know has been built.

#IAmGenSpace