He took us to Space. He brought Space, astronauts, rockets, spaceships and a Moon-landing into our living rooms. The Eagle has landed. May Thee rest in Tranquility.
Erik Tandberg
(1932 – 2020)
At 4:18 p.m. on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong’s voice crackled from the speakers at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston. He said simply, “the Eagle has landed.”
With those words, the dream President John F. Kennedy’s voiced in 1961–putting humans on the Moon by the end of the decade – had at last come true.
From the launch on July 16 atop a powerful Saturn rocket, Apollo 11 and its crew of three astronauts performed flawlessly. While Michael Collins orbited the Moon in the Command Module, Armstrong piloted the Lunar Lander, named the Eagle, to a safe landing in the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility. He and his copilot, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, soon became the first humans to tread on another world. They spent nearly 21 hours on the lunar surface, collecting samples of rock and soil and setting up remote instruments.
Erik Tandberg was a Norwegian engineer, author, television personality and space educator. He was born in Oslo, Norway. He was a master of science from Stanford University 1959. He did his scholarship at Princeton University in the years 1964-65.
He became technical consultant on space matters at NRK from 1960.
From that time, he wrote several books and publications on space related subjects. TV commentator at NRK on all Apollo program moon landings 1969-72, together with Jan P. Jansen. In the decades thereafter, Tandberg was by far the most widely shown space expert on Norwegian television, at the same time doing a lot of public lectures on the subject. He was connected to Norwegian Space Centre.
