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Updated: Jul 19, 2019 07:01 IST

I felt sick when I learned of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967; three astronauts dead, one of whom (Gus Grissom) I remembered from his Mercury flight six years earlier. I was 14 when he died, and it felt like losing a childhood friend. When Apollo flights resumed a year-and-a-half later, it felt like a personal triumph: I was hooked on space.

On July 20, 1969, I was spending the afternoon at my best friend’s house, glued to the TV in his room, jumpy with anticipation. It was a Sunday afternoon, sunny outside. The walls of his room were green — his favourite colour then and still today — and we sat on the edge of the bed as we watched newsman Walter Cronkite and listened. There was no imagery yet, but at about 4 PM we heard the first of the two famous sentences: “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” I suppose I expected myself to jump up and whoop, but I didn’t. I could barely move, and I just grinned.

I went home later and stayed in front of the TV all evening, waiting for those first steps. I have no memory of my family being there, though they must have been: it was just me and the grainy black and white images on the TV. I remember all the news anchors saying, over and over, “What will he say? What will the quote be?” I wanted them all to shut up and let me watch the event and hear the words in peace. This was my event!

Armstrong stepped down onto the foot of the lander and started describing the consistency of the surface before actually touching it: “The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about 1 or 2 inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained, as you get close to it. It’s almost like a powder.” Those words thrilled me! The first eyewitness description of the unknown! The historic quote that followed (“That’s one small step…”) seemed like an anticlimax by comparison, scripted and tame. I felt oddly disappointed by it. But I still remember my heart racing at that first tentative description of the powdery landscape.

(Richard Isaacman is the retired vice president of the ADNET Systems which is a consulting firm that supplies space and earth science, information technology, engineering, and public education expertise to NASA)