Noland’s voyage began in space, landed on Walter Cronkite’s desk

Posted on November 22, 2013

On July 20, 1969, Josh Noland, like millions of others around the world, sat in his living room to watch man’s first step foot on the moon.
On his television, CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite narrated the unfolding events taking place thousands of miles away.
In space.
On a foreign and unfamiliar landscape.
But for Noland, one part of Cronkite’s broadcast was intimately familiar: the map resting on his anchor desk detailing the lunar module’s proposed landing site.
He knew this map quite well indeed, because he helped make it.

Photo: Josh Noland, before music became his full-time profession, worked for 13 years with the Army Map Service of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. During the 1960s, he and many others within the agency worked to map 18 potential landing sites on the moon for NASA’s Apollo program. The map above, which Noland helped create, shows the eventual landing site of Apollo 11 which brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface.

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