Having grown up during the dawn of the USA space program, I would place it in the top 3 of important and meaningful events in my life.
It is so different now. As others here might have also experienced, our school teachers would bring a TV into the classroom to watch an important event like a launch or spashdown.
To the younger people that are unaware, all of our manned spaceships used to return to the Earth via an ocean splashdown and an aircraft carrier would retrieve the astronauts and their capsule. One exception to that is America's second man in space, Gus Grissom's Mercury (Liberty Bell 7) capsule.
Gus was recovered on July 21, 1961, but the hatch blew open at the wrong time and the capsule was lost 3 miles deep into Atlantic ocean until.....on July 20, 1999 the capsule was recovered. There is a great 2 hour program called "In Search Of Liberty Bell 7" on the Science channel about this recovery.
Gus Grissom was born in Mitchell, IN and graduated from Purdue. Had he not been killed along with fellow astronauts White and Chaffee in the tragic Apollo 1 launchpad fire in January, 1967, he would have likely been the first person to walk on the moon instead of Neil Armstrong. There is a crater on the moon named after him, "Grissom".
Dave
P.S. Happy birthday squirrel.