Eric Fischer is a man from Mars with a long-time passion for exploration of the moon.

Less than a month after he graduated four decades ago from Mars Area High School in Butler County, Mr. Fischer and his father, Robert, packed their car and drove to Florida to watch the historic launch of the Apollo 11 mission.

Four days after the launch, on July 20, 1969, the spacecraft landed astronauts for the first time on the moon.

Today, Mr. Fischer still marvels at the technological accomplishment, the significance of which he did not realize at the time.

"There had been so many Apollo missions before that it hadn't really sunk in that this was the big one," said Mr. Fischer, now 59 and residing in Hampton.

"By the time of Apollo 11, things were happening so fast that nobody had a chance to really absorb the moment. So as we drove [to Florida], we were just thinking 'another launch.' But it wasn't just another launch."

The three astronauts, their command module and lunar module, were lifted into space atop a Saturn V rocket, the largest such vehicle ever built. The rocket was about 363 feet high and was capable of producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

The historic mission and the spectacle of the launch drew the attention of most of the world and enthusiastic throngs to Florida to watch the liftoff.

"If you can imagine the Pittsburgh Penguin crowd [celebrating the Stanley Cup victory] on the Boulevard of the Allies -- only mile after mile -- [there] were just millions of people there," said Mr. Fischer, a longtime amateur astronomer who works as a senior proposal writer for Ansaldo STS USA, formerly Union Switch and Signal. "It was hard to find a viewing spot."

Mr. Fischer and his father found a clearing between some trees from which they could see the launch site about eight miles away.

"The rocket was about as long as my thumbnail at arm's length," he said. "All you could hear was the collective sound of millions of car radios and the NASA announcer announcing the countdown reverberating across the swamps around the space center."

Then came the liftoff of the powerful Saturn V.

"The rocket got up about, oh, a couple degrees and then the ground started shaking underneath my feet, and I thought, 'There must be a car behind me.' And that was the sound [from the rocket] reaching my feet before it reached my ears. And by the time it reached my ears, it was like thunder all across the sky," he said.

"When I looked back down after the rocket had gone into the clouds, there were thousands of birds in the air. They had all been scared out of their nests and were flying in huge swarms around the launch pad."

For Mr. Fischer, seeing the first lunar landing on television was a huge contrast to watching the launch in person.

"The launch was a big, spectacular outdoor event with millions of people. [We watched the landing] in the attic of my parents' house on a black-and-white TV set, just like a lot of people at the time. And we saw it -- just our family huddled around the TV set -- the landing with Walter Cronkite [on CBS]. The lander touched down; Walter was at a loss for words, after all this preparation time. And the first steps on the moon ... I didn't notice that Neil Armstrong missed a word in his famous statement, but it was just dazzling.

"And then it really hit, that we were actually walking on another world."

While manned space exploration by the United States has been limited mostly to space shuttle missions since the Apollo program, Mr. Fischer has high hopes for the future.

"The Apollo landings were kind of like Christopher Columbus," he said. "When he returned to Europe, there weren't return visitors to North America for some time. But it set the standard for exploration. And now, after a learning curve with the space shuttle, I think we are going back to the moon by 2020, this time to stay, this time to explore all sorts of interesting places."