At 3:17 p.m. on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, the Eagle, landed safely on the moon. The world watched, live, mostly on black and white television sets. The module had only a bit of fuel left as it nestled on the moon’s surface.
“Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon close to 11 p.m. local time,” Dean John Kiss recalls.
He was nine years old, at his home in New Jersey. “The pictures were in black-and-white and were very grainy and ghost-like ‒ but it was exciting and momentous! Plus, it was pretty cool for a 9-year-old to stay up late.” He’s been interested in space ever since.
As a space biologist, Dr. Kiss has had eight plant experiments on space missions and has served as president of the American Society of Gravitational and Space Biology. He has earned NASA’s prestigious Outstanding Public Leadership Medal “for exceptional contributions in spaceflight research in the fundamental biology of plants in support of NASA’s exploration mission.” 
His research will help astronauts survive in future journeys to Mars or beyond. He has talked with a number of astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin (who is seen in the photo above), who walked on the moon that evening with Neil Armstrong.
“Apollo showed that the USA can do anything if it has the will,” says Kiss, who had emigrated from Hungary as a preschooler. “I believe that all of us can achieve great things if we put all of our efforts into it.”
Professor emeritus of astronomy Steve Danford also has a vivid memory of the event.
“I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon’s surface from the day room of an army barracks where I was stationed,” Danford says. “The entire effort seemed so difficult, so technically challenging, that it was hard to imagine traveling that incredible distance to the moon, slowing down, landing, and safely returning. Once it had been done ‒ especially when Apollo 8 completed the simplest part of the trip and returned ‒ everything changed and the distance seemed so much less. I don’t think students today even think of the vast distance to the moon as the extreme barrier it seemed to be in the early 1960s.”
He laments that after a decade of commitment and six lunar landings by 12 humans in the two years of Apollo landings, the focus turned in other directions. “I would never have guessed that a half century later not one single human would have returned to the moon.”
UNCG Department Head of Physics and Astronomy Edward Hellen was at a family reunion, that day. “A bunch of us were in the living room watching it on TV,” he recalls.
When asked about the broader context of the moon landing, he explained, “I’m sure most of the adults had some understanding of the significance of the space race to the cold war and global politics.” But he enjoyed what he was seeing.
“I was a little kid and didn’t understand the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I assumed it was normal to be constantly sending astronauts on space missions. Ten manned Gemini missions from 1964 to 1966, then the Apollo program gets to the moon in the summer of 1969. It was very cool to me as a kid watching all those missions on TV.”
He has a physics professor’s perspective. “The idea of replacing the nuclear warhead on top of an ICBM with a capsule containing one or two people sounds a bit crazy still. But it worked.”
See Dean John Kiss’ recent TedX Greensboro talk, in which he shares his NASA experiences as a space biology researcher. https://youtu.be/waRqJoehQ6I
See recent UNCG Research Magazine feature on Kiss’ space-related research.
See related article on a pioneering “human computer” in NASA’s earliest days
By Mike Harris
Photography of Apollo 11 mission courtesy NASA
