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It's been half a century since humans first landed on the moon. An estimated 530 million people around the world watched and listened on July 20, 1969, as Apollo 11's lunar module touched

down at 4:17 p.m. EDT. About six hours later, Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” as Buzz Aldrin prepared to join him, and Michael Collins waited alone

in the skies above for their return. For some famous (and later-to-be-famous) observers, the moment changed everything.

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There are plenty of things I don't remember, but I remember the moon landing vividly. I turned 22 on July 19 and was down in Cornwall, England, at the house of Roger Taylor's — our drummer's

— mum. We were still amateur musicians in those days, trying to get people to pay us 20 pounds a gig. That night we watched this tiny, little screen on the Taylors’ TV, and we were all

clustered around. What I remember most was that my dad was wrong. My dad was a pretty talented electronics engineer throughout and after World War II, and three years before Apollo 11, he

said, “Oh, we'll never get to the moon in our lifetime. It's just technically too difficult.” So to see this incredible event happening on television, something that Dad said was impossible

— it somehow made it all the more awe-inspiring.

I knew I wanted to be a rock musician, but the moon landing further confirmed that I needed to pursue astronomy, as well. I'd been hooked since I was 9 or 10 and would beg to stay up past my

bedtime to watch a program on the BBC called The Sky at Night, about the cosmos. I was endlessly fascinated. The year after the moon landing, I began the long course of study for my Ph.D.

in astrophysics at Imperial College. Through everything that happened with Queen, my interest in what's out there never faded. Some people say the space race, the moon landing — oh, that

stuff doesn't matter. But it mattered to me. It's like Stephen Hawking once said, “We explore because we are human, and we want to know,” and in a sense, that's all you need to say to

people. I just love finding out about the universe, from Earth to the moon and beyond.

emergency landing in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, 2009

I'm probably one of the few people alive from that time who didn't watch the moon landing live on TV. I graduated from high school in 1969 and, just a few weeks later, headed off to the Air

Force Academy in Colorado Springs. We started with summer basic training, and our superiors would not break protocol to allow us to watch the event. We were told the next day that it was a

success, but it would be many months before I got to see the replay. It didn't matter. I was already under the spell of Apollo 11 and everything that had led up to it.