43 years ago today, the lunar module (nicknamed Eagle) of Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, fulfilling a centuries-old dream of humanity.
Too bad that the 40th anniversary of the last Moon landing is rapidly approaching. That, if you ask me, is four wasted decades of manned space exploration.
Incidentally, the book The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins, was the first English-language book I ever read, sometime in the late 1970s. It was given to me by my aunt (the one who, sadly, is no longer with us) when I complained to her that I was having a hard time improving my English. That particular book, along with several others, was lost when the post office lost a parcel from my Mom. Thanks to Amazon, I managed to replace them all, with one exception: an English-language collection of 11 science-fiction stories that was published in Soviet-era Moscow.
Reading books is a good way to learn a language. My French leaves a lot to be desired (being able to utter a meaningful sentence would be nice) but what little I know I was able to improve by trying to read Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune in French. I first read that book (in Hungarian, of course) at the age of six, in 1969… just as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon.