July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind
Matt Ginnow
Matthew Ginnow
July 1969. It's a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.
It is only seven months since NASA's made a bold decision to send
Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the
massive Saturn V rocket.
Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins
sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space
Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds
of thrust to propel them into space and into history.
At 9:32 a.m. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit. (› Play Audio)
After one and a half orbits, Apollo 11 gets a "go" for what mission
controllers call "Translunar Injection" - in other words, it's time to
head for the moon. Three days later the crew is in lunar orbit. A day
after that, Armstrong and Aldrin climb into the lunar module Eagle and begin the descent, while Collins orbits in the command module Columbia.
Collins later writes that Eagle is "the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky," but it will prove its worth.
When it comes time to set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility,
Armstrong improvises, manually piloting the ship past an area littered
with boulders. During the final seconds of descent, Eagle's computer is sounding alarms.
It turns out to be a simple case of the computer trying to do too many
things at once, but as Aldrin will later point out, "unfortunately it
came up when we did not want to be trying to solve these particular
problems."
When the lunar module lands at 4:17 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel
remain. Armstrong radios "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has
landed." Mission control erupts in celebration as the tension breaks,
and a controller tells the crew "You got a bunch of guys about to turn
blue, we're breathing again." (› Play Audio)
Armstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern,
saying "the unknowns were rampant," and "there were just a thousand
things to worry about."
At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on
another world. With more than half a billion people watching on
television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: "That's one small
step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." (› Play Audio)
Aldrin joins him shortly, and offers a simple but powerful description
of the lunar surface: "magnificent desolation." They explore the surface
for two and a half hours, collecting samples and taking photographs.
They leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and a plaque on one of Eagle's legs. 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."
Armstrong and Aldrin blast off and dock with Collins in Columbia. Collins later says that "for the first time," he "really felt that we were going to carry this thing off."
The crew splashes down off Hawaii on July 24. Kennedy's challenge has
been met. Men from Earth have walked on the moon and returned safely
home.
In an interview years later, Armstrong praises the "hundreds of
thousands" of people behind the project. "Every guy that's setting up
the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or
woman, 'If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault.'" (› Read 2001 Interview, 172 Kb PDF)
In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong calls the flight "a
beginning of a new age," while Collins talks about future journeys to
Mars.
Over the next three and a half years, 10 astronauts will follow in their
footsteps. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission leaves the
lunar surface with these words: "We leave as we came and, God willing,
as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind."
