This Nasa photo shows the Lunar Module of the Apollo 11 space mission in lunar orbit on July 21, 1969. ─ AFP
"We had a few moments to look around, to look up in the black sky ─ a totally black sky, even though the Sun is shining on the surface, it's not reflected; there’s no diffusion, no reflection ─ a totally black sky and seeing another planet: planet Earth [...] You think to yourself, just imagine that millions of people are living on that planet and don't realize how fragile it is."
Alan Shepard, Apollo 14
The horizon "I was surprised by the apparent closeness of the horizon. I was surprised by the trajectory of dust that you kicked up with your boot, and I was surprised that even though logic would have told me that there shouldn't be any, there was no dust when you kicked. You never had a cloud of dust there. That's a product of having an atmosphere, and when you don't have an atmosphere, you don't have any clouds of dust.
"I was absolutely dumbfounded when I shut the rocket engine off and the particles that were going out radially from the bottom of the engine fell all the way out over the horizon, and when I shut the engine off, they just raced out over the horizon and instantaneously disappeared, you know, just like it had been shut off for a week. That was remarkable."
Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11
Read: Small step, giant memories: Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk remembered
"There's a problem on the Moon. Your ─ with depth perception, because you're looking at objects you've never seen before, so a big object far away looks very similar to a smaller object close in. You don't have any pole ─ telephone poles or houses or trees or cars to sit and judge scale like we did [...] down here on Earth."
Charlie Duke, Apollo 16
A lazy lope "There seems to be no difficulty in moving around ─ as we suspected. It's even perhaps easier than the simulations of one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground. It's absolutely no trouble to walk around."Armstrong to Mission Control shortly after descending from Apollo 11's lunar module.
"I started jogging around a bit, and it felt like I was moving in slow motion in a lazy lope, often with both of my feet floating in the air. One of the pure joys of being on the Moon was our somewhat lightfooted mobility."
Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin in his book "Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon"
"I would say that balance [while walking] was not difficult; however, I did some fairly high jumps and found that there was a tendency to tip over backwards on a high jump. One time I came close to falling and decided that was enough of that."
Armstrong during his 1969 technical debrief
The gloves "The biggest problem is that the gloves are balloons [...] to pick something up, you have to squeeze against that pressure, 3.7 psi [...] That squeezing against that pressure causes these forearm muscles to fatigue very rapidly. Just imagine squeezing a tennis ball continuously for eight hours or ten hours, and that's what you're talking about."
Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17
Hardened soil