Vale Neil Armstrong: memories of the moon landing

“When I was ten, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Kennedy landed on the moon and `the world’ watched with bated breath, fuzzy grainy pictures in which very little happened over what seemed hours and hours cramped five in a double desk in the grades five and six classroom at Yarra Glen State School.

      That year in the schoolyard, boys were encouraged to make balsa wood rockets powered with bulbs from soda fountains. And then everyone, from the bubs right up to the sixth graders, would be herded out of the classrooms to watch them being launched.

      The rockets flew along a piece of wire strung up from the top of the bell to the monkey bars at the end of the playground. Sometimes they fizzed and only went a few feet. Sometimes they were wildly successful and shot the whole length of the wire in a flash.

      Either way, it was over fairly fast. The girls never got to make rockets. But we got to watch.”

— From the story ‘A Lover of Space’
in How to Conceive of a Girl