Category: ohio

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing, the three astronauts on that mission are being honored with life-sized sculptures made out of butter at the Ohio State Fair.

How do Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin like to eat their ice cream? In floats! Your time is waning to come to the @OhioStateFair to enjoy Velvet Ice Cream and see the three astronauts commemorated in butter. #Apollo50th #OSF19 pic.twitter.com/cx7dgAEraL

— ADA Mideast (@adamideast) July 31, 2019

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon and changed the course of history. The state of Ohio has a strong kinship with space travel: Neil Armstrong was an Ohio native and so was John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. Ohio also has a long history of dairy production. Combine all those factors together and you get the magnificent butter display at this year’s Ohio State Fair.

Dairy farmers donated over 2,000 pounds of butter to help create the sculptures. An artist from Cincinnati named Paul Brooke and a team of sculptors spent 400-500 hours creating the buttery tributes in a cooler set at 46 degrees to prevent the pieces from melting.

Here’s a cool time-lapse video of the butter being sculpted:

Legen-DAIRY: This year's Ohio State Fair butter sculpture honors the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission, and we're over the MOO-n about it!
MORE: https://t.co/8xQiZavTrx pic.twitter.com/NkrJ7eDGDd

— WTOL 11 (@WTOL11Toledo) July 23, 2019

Alexander Balz, one of the artists, said, “The space suits were a real challenge, to be honest. It’s easy to sculpt things that you know. When you sculpt a human being you memorize it, so this was a challenge.”

This Ohio State Fair butter sculpture shows the three Apollo 11 astronauts — Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin — standing next to the lunar module Eagle.

Armstrong saluting the American flag and the footprint on the moon are also recreated. https://t.co/vHwWkunXw3 pic.twitter.com/FkBD0l74Ie

— CNN (@CNN) July 25, 2019

Roughly 500,000 people are expected to have attended the State Fair in late July and early August. Here’s a video with some great footage of the display.

What a unique and cool way to honor a pivotal event in American, and human, history!

And, by the way, I’m really hoping that this butter sculpting catches on more widely because it is fabulous.

The post The Apollo 11 Astronauts Were Honored with Butter Sculptures at the Ohio State Fair appeared first on UberFacts.