Apollo 11: Moon Landing
Two men landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969 and some 600 million people watched. The commitment had been made by Kennedy in May 1961, six weeks after Gagarin's flight and five weeks after the Bay of Pigs, when the United States had accumulated fifteen minutes of manned spaceflight experience. He asked Congress for a landing before the decade was out, and the programme consumed some four per cent of the federal budget at its peak and employed around 400,000 people. The Saturn V remains the most powerful rocket ever flown successfully. The landing itself nearly did not happen. The guidance computer, which had less processing power than a modern kitchen appliance, threw program alarms during the descent because it was being asked to do too much; the automatic system was taking them into a boulder field; and Armstrong flew the last portion manually with about twenty-five seconds of fuel remaining when he set down. He stepped out six and a half hours later and got the article wrong in the sentence he had prepared. Aldrin followed and took communion privately. Collins orbited alone, out of contact for forty-eight minutes on each far-side pass. They left a plaque saying they came in peace for all mankind, a seismometer, a retroreflector still used to measure the Earth-Moon distance, and some 21 kilograms of rock came back. Five more landings followed by 1972. Nixon had a speech prepared in case they could not lift off, addressed to men who would be left to die on the surface, and NASA had no rescue capability of any kind. The ascent engine had one chance to work and no backup.
- Year: 1969 CE
- Category: Technological
