Ohio

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing with Nixon and the astronauts

July 20th is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and there will be loads of celebrations and commemorations around the country.  You can read about many of the events on the NASA Web site, but two events of special note are the Summer Moon Festival in Wapakoneta, Ohio (Neil Armstrong’s home town) and Splashdown 2009, on the USS Hornet, the ship tasked with plucking the Columbia capsule containing the three astronauts out of the Pacific Ocean.

The Summer Moon Festival (July 13 -20, 2009) seems especially intriguing, because in addition to the World’s Largest Moon Pie, the town is promising visitors that they’ll get to see (and nibble on?) a life-size statue of an astronaut made entirely of, you guessed it, cheese.

This “sample” cheese astronaut is “just” 40 pounds, but I’m sure you  get the picture…

Wapokaneta, Ohio - Astronaut of cheese(Photo courtesy The Cheese Lady: www.sarahcheeselady.com)

The USS Hornet’s Splashdown 2009 event (July 23-26) will be fun as well, especially if they display this photo of then President Richard Nixon telling jokes to the astronauts while they were in a quarantine capsule (in case they had “moon germs”) on the USS Hornet.

USS HORNET Nixon Telling Borman Joke RGB-1

Photo from the book Hornet Plus Three: The Story of the Apollo 11 Recovery, by Bob Fish.