History of the 1st Moon Landing – Apollo 11: 57 Years Ago

Lunar landing, 1969. Image: USA Today

HISTORY OF THE 1ST MOON LANDING: APOLLO 11

Fifty-seven years ago today, at 4:17 Eastern Time, July 20, 1969, the American lunar module touched down on the Moon, and about seven hours later, at 10:56:15 pm EDT, the first human stepped out of the Apollo 11 lunar module onto the Moon. With the immortal words of the 38-year-old Neil Armstrong:

“That’s one small step for (a) man,
one giant leap for mankind.”

…the first man in history began an excursion on the moon that lasted over two and a half hours.

Five hundred thirty million people watched it on television. Roughly 65-75% of the American population, and 1 in 7 people in the world.

Everyone I knew watched it.

Moon Landing: The Mission

Eight years previously, in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy, in his Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, to a joint session of Congress, in May 1961, had uttered these galvanizing words:

“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,
before the decade is out,
of landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to Earth.”

You have no doubt heard the phrase “Space, the final frontier… its five-year mission…” first spoken in September 1966. But John Kennedy’s 29-word statement five years earlier first captured the sense of “mission” more clearly and memorably than Americans had commonly heard before.

The Apollo mission would send two Americans to the moon’s surface and return them safely.

Apollo 11 and the Space Race

When Kennedy issued the challenge, the US was in the midst of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had already beaten the US into space:

• Sputnik: 1957, first orbiting satellite
• Luna 2: 1959, first unmanned vehicle on the moon.
• Vostok 1: 1961, piloted by Yuri Gagarin, first human in space and first to orbit Earth.

It was not until May 5, 1961, that Alan Shepard became the first American to go into space and back, just 23 days after Gagarin became the first human to do so. Less than a year later, John Glenn would be the first American to orbit the Earth.

The Apollo mission followed the initial Mercury program, which had sent individual astronauts into space. Then the Gemini program sent two astronauts at a time into space. The Apollo program had three crew members and sent five more crewed missions to the moon, ending with the completion of the Apollo 17 mission.

For Apollo 11, the three men in the crew were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. However, only the first two went to the surface of the moon in the Lunar Module. Collins stayed aboard the Command Module “Columbia” and continued to orbit the moon, then piloted the craft back toward Earth.

Apollo 11 Lift Off

The journey began several days earlier, on July 16, at Launch Pad 39A, where the massive multistaged Saturn V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Everyone I knew watched it.

Five years later, during the summer of 1974, I visited the launch site in Florida, witnessing the massive Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and the crawler-transport system that moved the rocket from the VAB to the launch pad, I was told, at 4 miles per hour. I was awestruck to see the scale of the VAB, which housed the rocket assembly as I stood next to the immensity of the crawler.

The Apollo 11 launch started at the Launch Control Center. The astronauts rode an elevator up 320 feet to the ingress of the spacecraft. Altogether, it weighed 6.2 million pounds. After lift-off, it climbed:

• At 12 miles downrange, it was moving at 4,000 ft/sec.
• At 100 miles up, it was moving at 23,000 ft/sec.
• When it finally left Earth orbit, it did so at over 25,000 mph.
• It was moving at 11,000 feet/sec for its final maneuver.
• Apollo 11 arrived at the moon 4 minutes ahead of schedule.

On July 20, four days out, they undocked the Lunar Module (LM) from the Command Module. They had traveled roughly 240,000 miles in just 76 hours inside a cramped, 12-foot-diameter cabin. The LM descended to the lunar surface. As it touched down on television, these words were heard:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed”

From Mission Control came the words:

“People were blue here; they’ve started breathing again.”

Apollo 11 Mission Image – View of Moon Limb, with Earth on the Horizon. Image: NASA

There were smiling faces all over the world.

First Men on the Moon

It was hours before they exited the LM to descend the ladder to the moon. During that time, Buzz Aldrin did something not widely reported, and when it was published, it was done somewhat confusingly.

He was an Elder in his home church, the Webster Presbyterian Church. Before he left, he got special permission to take with him the elements of bread and wine to perform Communion in the Lunar Module. He poured wine into a small chalice and served Communion to himself before he donned his helmet to exit the spacecraft.

Buzz Aldrin’s Communion kit. Image: Space Relics

Ahead of him went Neil Armstrong. After Armstrong said the words:

“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.

…he continued with:

“It’s got a stark beauty all its own, like the high desert.”

Into this magnificent desolation… Buzz Aldrin followed to the surface about 20 minutes later, carefully guided down the ladder by Neil Armstrong.

You can see the location of the landing on Google Maps here.

The Apollo 11 crew received a phone call from President Richard Nixon, during which the astronauts said they felt honored to be on the mission. Before they left the Moon, they left behind two things:

Note: the font is Futura. Image: NASA

A silicon disk rests in an aluminum case on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, dropped by Buzz Aldrin as he ascended the ladder at the end of their EVA. It contained miniaturized goodwill messages from 73 countries, along with the names of congressional and NASA leaders.

Image: NASA

A plaque was attached to the ladder on the landing gear strut on the descent stage of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. It reads:

“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

It bears the signatures of Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, and President Nixon.

Meanwhile, in Space

Mike Collins flew in the Command and Service Module (CSM) above the Moon, orbiting every 119 minutes at an altitude of 69 miles for more than a day, alone in the Columbia. The AGC running the COLOSSUS flight software accompanied him.

The lunar module spent part of the “night” on the Moon to start working on science experiments and moon rock collection the next day. After completing their mission on the surface of the Moon, the lunar module lifted off to rejoin Columbia in orbit, executing an intricate docking procedure.

At 130 hours, 30 minutes into the mission, Columbia transferred back the two-man crew and jettisoned the Eagle into lunar orbit, and several hours later began its burn back to Earth.

Apollo 11 Splashdown

The USS Hornet recovered the astronauts. Image: Navy History

The American aircraft carrier USS Hornet departed from Honolulu, Hawaii, to retrieve the capsule after returning to Earth. The Apollo 11 capsule landed 2 miles off the intended landing area due to weather and seas. At 12:50 PM local time, after an 8-day voyage, the capsule, suspended by three parachutes, landed in the Pacific Ocean.

The astronauts would spend 21 days in quarantine. No humans had ever returned from an extraterrestrial body to Earth.

When they were released, there was a ticker-tape parade in New York City in front of 4 million people.

Everyone I knew celebrated it.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
–President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962. Rice University, 14 months before his assassination

Next stop, Mars?

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com