'One small step': Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11He flew 78 combat missions during the Korean War, tested high-speed aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, and served as command pilot for the Gemini 8 mission. Then, on July 20, 1969, this Purdue alumnus set foot on the moon and held the world spellbound. In this thirtieth-anniversary year,
Quotation from Neil Armstrong"We were three individuals who had drawn, in a kind of lottery, a momentous opportunity and a momentous responsibility."
To view the moon landing dialogue download here.
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy, shaken by Soviet Yuri Gagarin's orbit of Earth, issued Americans a challenge: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." NASA's Apollo program sprang up to meet the challenge.
Apollo 11, of course, was the mission that put men on the moon, and its astronauts Neil Armstrong (BSAE '55), Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins became the three most visible actors in an ensemble including tens of thousands of engineers, scientists, and support staffers.
Armstrong, 38 years old at the time, was flight commander; Aldrin, pilot of the lunar module, the Eagle. Collins piloted Columbia, the command module, which would orbit the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface. Sitting in the Apollo 11 spacecraft atop a Saturn V rocket at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, the three shot off for the moon at 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969.
Quotation from Neil Armstrong"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
The 238,000-mile trip to the moon took four days. Apollo 11 fell into orbit 60 miles above the moon's surface, and on July 20 at 1:45 p.m. EDT, the Eagle with Armstrong and Aldrin inside separated from Columbia. The Eagle crew then put themselves into a 60-by-9-mile orbit. The low point 9 miles, or 50,000 feet was the place from which they would begin the powered descent. NASA transcripts (condensed here) record the verbal exchange among Mission Control's Charlie Duke, Armstrong, and Aldrin, with commentary for the public by NASA public affairs officer Douglas Ward:
Quotation from Neil Armstrong"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
As soon as Armstrong and Aldrin touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, they began to check out the Eagle for malfunctions, in case an emergency getaway was required. The best times to abort the mission were just three minutes and 12 minutes after landing, so the two worked furiously. Then, assured that all was well with the machinery and that no immediate escape was needed, Armstrong and Aldrin prepared for their EVA, or extravehicular activity: the moonwalk.
Six hours after landing, Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface, uttering words that have become among the 20th century's best-known: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
Armstrong and Aldrin spent two hours on the lunar surface. They set up a passive seismograph experiment and a laser ranging retro-reflector. They collected 46 pounds of lunar rocks, judged to be 3.7 billion years old.
They raised an American flag and left
a plaque, signed by the Apollo 11 crew and President Richard Nixon, reading
Quotation from Neil Armstrong"I believed that a successful lunar landing could, might, inspire men around the world to believe that impossible goals were possible, that the hope for solutions to humanity's problems was not a joke."
Twenty-one hours after landing, the Eagle, with Armstrong and Aldrin on-board, left the moon to reunite with Columbia. "We were not distracted by the question of whether the ascent engine would light," recalled Armstrong later, "but we were surely thinking about it." The docking was a success. The crew jettisoned the Eagle, and on July 22, the command module left lunar orbit.
For a fuller account of the mission, told in the Apollo 11 crew's own words, the Apollo 11 Web site.
The Apollo 11 crew: Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin.
Liftoff. From the tip of the command module to the base of the mighty Saturn V rocket,
the Apollo 11 vehicle ranged 363 feet in height.
Descending the ladder of the lunar module, Armstrong prepares to become the first
human being to step onto another celestial body. (This view is from a telecast by
the Apollo 11 lunar surface camera. The black bar running through the image is an
anomaly in the television ground data system.)
Leaving the moon, the lunar module returns Armstrong and Aldrin to the command module
and is then jettisoned into space.