50 years ago this month Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Meanwhile, back on Earth, I still can’t get coffee in a cup that doesn’t leak out the lid - and we’ve been making cups for at least 3,000 years! But that’s the stuff of another post.
I don’t remember very much about my childhood, but I vividly remember, on my seventh birthday, watching in rapt attention Apollo 11 “blast off” on its historic trip to the moon.
Eight years prior, on May 25, 1961, President John Kennedy suggested to Congress and the American people that America make the commitment to “…achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
On July 16, 1969 Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins strapped themselves into a Saturn V rocket - the most powerful rocket ever flown by man - and set their sights on fulfilling JFK’s commitment.
The Saturn V was 363 feet tall (taller than a 36 story building) and had 7.5 million pounds of thrust. To leave Earth’s gravity the rocket had to attain a speed of approximately 25,000 MPH. On its four and a quarter day trip to the moon, it averaged about 3150 MPH - roughly four times the speed of sound!
The location of the launch was, appropriately, Cape Kennedy. Following JFK’s assassination in November of 1963, President Johnson, at the suggestion of Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, signed an Executive Order changing the name from Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy.
It only took a little over eight years from Kennedy’s speech to achieve what was previously thought impossible. I sometimes wonder how much his assassination added to the motivation to get this achieved.
To put the technology in perspective, an iPhone 5, which is currently considered obsolete (having been introduced more than six years ago), has 1300 times the computing power of the computers used at mission control. Despite this, the 400,000 engineers, technicians, and scientists, from 20,000 companies, were able to plan and complete the most complex mission in history with few or no mistakes. In fact, they had scheduled four course corrections for the trip to the moon, but only used one (or perhaps two - available information conflicts).
Once landing, Armstrong and Aldrin got to work on the surface while Collins remained in lunar orbit in Columbia.
Aldrin and Armstrong spent a total of 21 hours, 36 minutes on the surface of the moon, which included just over two and a half hours EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity - time spent outside Eagle), and a seven hour rest period.
At 124 hours, 22 minutes into the mission the ascent stage engine fired and they were on their way home. In order to make it home, though, Eagle and Columbia (still being piloted by Collins in lunar orbit) had to be in perfect synchrony in order to dock together while hurtling through space.
Docking occurred on Columbia’s 27th revolution, at 128 hours, 3 minutes into the mission.
On July 24, 1969 Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The mission had lasted more than eight days - 195 hours, 18 minutes, 35 seconds - 36 minutes longer than planned. How’s that for precision? On a mission that had never been done before (at least not with people on board), a mission that lasted more than eight days and traveled nearly a half million miles, they succeeded with a tolerance of about three tenths of one percent! And I have a hard time getting to work at the same time every day.
My hat is off to all the people involved in this miraculous accomplishment. I want to include all the people behind the scenes, but as a seven year old boy, these three incredibly brave men became my heroes. For some kids it was cowboys, or police officers, or firemen. For me it was always astronauts!
