July 20 is a summer day. While my hometown Ağrı, a northeastern remote town of Turkey, is not one of the warmest places on earth, it is still relatively warm and quite dusty in July. I was only 12 then, just finished elementary school, heading to the Middle School. There was no TV in Ağrı at that time; it was an invention not arrived my home town yet. The newspapers came daily, but usually a day late due to the time it takes to bring them from Istanbul by bus.

In the years and months leading to July 1969, I visited my father’s hardware store and some other stores or homes everyday, reading yesterday’s papers and following one of the greatest stories: The landing of man on the moon. Quickly, it became my job to inform my relatives about this story. I was the only person in town who knew what was going on. I knew the names of everyone involved in the story, from the President JFK, members of his cabinet, the director of NASA, top scientists including the amazing Wernher von Braun, engineers, and the astronauts who were locked in that uncomfortable capsule and was sent off of the earth. As much as a 12-year can claim to be an authority on the subject, I became the source of information for my family, our relatives, our neighbors and anyone else who wanted to know.

For many, this was an event to which they paid intermittent attention, and quickly forgot afterward. For me, however, it was an event that shaped the rest of my life. I decided that I wanted to become a scientist/engineer who can be involved in projects like this; the moon may have been captured, but many celestial objects are yet to be reached: Mars, Venus, maybe even Pluto. After 40 years, humanity still did not figure out an efficient way to send manned spaceships beyond the moon, but the dream remains and our robot machines are already digging the surface of the Mars. As for me, due to practical matters, I became an electrical engineer and then a computer scientist, but still a constant admirer and avid reader of space exploration.

I am grateful to those who made the landing on the moon possible; without their implicit encouragement, an unpretentious boy from a northeastern remote town of Turkey would have never received a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from University of California.