Fifty-three years ago today, I saw Apollo 11 as she lifted off from Cape Kennedy and on her way to the moon.

The day was typical Florida morning coastal weather: hot, humid, with a bit of a sea breeze to only slightly temper the sun that bore its way through the sky and onto sizzling skin. The crowd around me flapped whatever papers or fans they had as they waited nervously for the launch, whose time was marked by a huge clock counting backwards.

My mother and I had been at Cape Kennedy since long before dawn, and we were seated among VIPs that included the vice president, movie stars, politicians and the well-to-do that NASA thought important. I was not important, I was just a lucky kid.

The reason we were in such an incredibly privileged position is because my Dad was working the launch, and had friends in the Public Affairs office that did him the favor of giving us the best view of any of the roughly one million civilians gathered in my small hometown (Cocoa Beach) to see the rocket off.

Needless to say, I was on my best behavior.

Slowly, the clock ticked its way to ten seconds. Time stretched, and every one of those seconds felt like ten more. Inevitably the time disappeared as voices from mission control calmly made announcements of milestones on the launch checklist.

The tension built and the crowd hushed and stared in the same direction. At around nine seconds left, a flash of light, brighter than even the bright sunshine. Smoke blasted out on either side of the towering rocket. Then, zero, and the launch pad’s support fell and she lifted slowly in silence. Loudspeakers transmitted the air-to-ground chatter between the astronauts and controllers, but in person, the sound took about 18 seconds to reach those of us watching. It was a fiery quiet.

For those of you who’ve seen the Space Shuttle launch, you saw the sports car of rockets. They leaped off of the ground and ran away into space like ocelots. Saturn V rockets were very different. Twice as large and with much more power, they slowly lifted from the ground on a pillar of fire tens of stories high. Consider that a Saturn V is taller than downtown Raleigh’s biggest building and with the same girth, and you may get an idea of the size of the best only 20,000 feet from our eyes.

The Saturn V seemed as if was angry as it clawed inch by inch off of the ground. Then, amid screams of “Go baby, GO!” from the crowd around us, the sound arrived in a deafening crash.

At first, it was like a clap of thunder from a storm just about to arrive. Instead of fading, however, the roar only increased in intensity, but not only in volume. People gasped as the ground began to vibrate and shake, as windows and the stands they were standing on rattled, adding to the already nearly deafening sound. Still, we all craned our necks and watched the firebird tear its hole in the sky as it left the surly bonds of earth behind. The loudspeakers we could barely hear — if we could hear it at all over the roar — kept telling us all was well as we silently prayed for the men aboard.

After few minutes, it was over. Apollo 11 was in orbit and we we all in awe. People had built that thing! Men had flown that thing!

“I’d like to raise a toast,” my father would say every July in mock seriousness, “to the other 400,000 people who kept the secret one more year.”

You should have heard the sarcasm in his voice. That alone made this toast hilarious.

There are idiots who say that we never pulled off this feat, that it was impossible for us to go to the moon. Wrong. We did, and some extremely intelligent people worked tirelessly to make it happen. Had they been there that day in Florida, I think their foolish opinions would be very different. That launch was awe inspiring, and it proved what a nation like America could do when it made its mind to do so.

History seems to show only the astronauts aboard the rocket along with a very few key engineers and scientists in charge of Project Apollo, but in fact, this moment was the pinnacle of many years work by hundreds of thousands of people. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins may have been the only heroes in the media, but there were hundreds of thousands of people who worked, sacrificed and contributed to the effort.

As a kid, my heroes were my father Armand, who was working this launch as the Pad Chief in charge of fire and pad safety until launch — and that job included rescuing them in case of an emergency; my uncle Jerry, who worked on the IBM computer system that was the brain of the Saturn V, and my uncle George, who was a senior project manager for Boeing’s S-1-C, which was the first stage of the Apollo 11 now flying into space above me.

I’m very glad we’re planning to go back to the moon. Apollo and all humanity have spent only about 80 hours walking on it, meaning we’ve just barely scratched the surface. Let’s go and spend a lot more time to see what’s there.