The moon landing 50 years ago was a worldwide event, and now you can celebrate 50 years since the colossal achievement in Reno.
"I think the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, coupled with all of the excitement of space right now, it's the perfect time for people to re-engage with that sort of enthusiasm around space exploration," Vice President of Marketing and Communications for the Discovery Museum Patrick Turner says.
The Discovery Museum has multiple exhibits to learn about space and Apollo 11. Turner says it's a chance to look back at the history of space travel and look ahead to how technology has changed with the missions.
"One of the displays we have from the Sierra Nevada Corporation is a device they call the Veggie," Turner says. "It's actually designed to grow plants in space, which is definitely key to being able to live on another planet."
The National Automobile Museum is holding events starting at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, July 20, exactly 50 years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. They will show the film Apollo 11, and they will have three guest speakers. One worked on the problem-solving team that worked on Apollo 13 following the famous, "Houston, we have a problem," alert to mission control. The other two worked on Apollo 11.
Jenny McFarlane is an Associated Flight Director with the Challenger Learning Center of Northern Nevada and the Nevada Space Center, and she helped organize Saturday's events.
"They were doing science that had never been done before," McFarlane says. "Figuring out what they needed to do to get the astronauts there, how to keep them protected, how to be able to walk around on the moon."
She says there were so many spin-offs from what NASA was trying to do that humans use constantly here on earth.
"Heart pumps, food stabilization, baby food," McFarlane says. "The micro-miniaturization of computer chips … It used to be that computers were huge warehouses, and now we hold in our hands more computing power than they used to send the astronauts to the moon."
The value of technological advancements is incredible, but you could argue the Apollo 11 mission did just as much to lift the human spirit.
"It brought people together on Earth in a very special way," McFarlane says. "It wasn't just the United States landed two men on the moon, it was humanity, we landed men on the moon."
You can check out the schedule for the National Automobile Museum events here.
The Spark Lab at the Discovery Museum has displays about women in space, the motivations for space travel, and fact-checks on space movies, which Turner says are often inaccurate. That display will be taken down at the end of summer.
Turner says the dark room exhibit called "Under the Stars" will be open until next July, thanks to grant funding.
