The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the news. Tonight we look back upon Apollo 11 and its legacy.
NASA50 Years Ago: One Small Step, One Giant Leap
Words such as these were emblazoned in dozens of languages on the front page of newspapers around the world, echoing the first part of President John F. Kennedy’s bold challenge to the nation, made more than eight years earlier – to land a man on the Moon. That part was successfully accomplished on July 20, 1969. The second part of the challenge, the safe return to Earth, would have to wait four more days.
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins awoke to start their fifth day in space at the end of their ninth revolution around the Moon. In Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Eugene F. Kranz’s White Team of controllers arrived on console, with astronaut Charles M. Duke serving as Capcom. After a quick breakfast, Aldrin and Armstrong began re-activating the Lunar Module (LM) Eagle, including deploying its landing gear, and donned their pressure suits. Near the end of the 12thorbit around the Moon, Duke radioed up to Apollo 11 that they were GO to undock. The event took place behind the Moon during the start of their 13th revolution, the astronauts filming each other’s spacecraft as they began their independent flights (clip 1, clip 2). After they reappeared from behind the Moon, Armstrong radioed their status to MCC saying, “The Eagle has wings.” Collins in the Command Module (CM) Columbia observed, “I think you've got a fine looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you're upside down,” prompting Armstrong to reply, “Somebody's upside down.”
From this point on, it was time to get down to business as events happened rather quickly. As the Moon landing attempt was less than an hour away, the viewing gallery in Mission Control was filling with NASA managers from across the agency, and many astronauts were present in the control room itself to witness the historic event.
CBSApollo 11 launch: Watch the most memorable moments from CBS News' coverage
Fifty years ago today, Apollo 11 began its voyage into American history. The Saturn V rocket carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969 — and just four days later, man first set foot on the moon. The moon mission was a milestone in human history. But it was also a groundbreaking moment in broadcast television, as CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite brought the frontier of space to living rooms across America.
x xYouTube Video x xYouTube VideoThe seamstresses who helped put a man on the moon
[…] How the astronauts' spacesuits were made is a story in itself. Before man could take a giant leap, they needed to solve a few giant problems: In the vacuum of space, without the right spacesuit, an astronaut could blow up like a balloon, or burn up, or maybe get drilled by a micro-meteorite. […]
What NASA needed was something more flexible, and they found out that no one knew flexible like the people who made Playtex girdles and bras.
Playtex, also known as the International Latex Corporation (ILC), of Dover, Delaware, wasn't nearly as big as the other suit makers, but they had some pretty radical ideas.
In 1967 ILC came up with a softer, more flexible spacesuit made almost entirely of fabric, and then shot film at a local high school with an employee putting the suit through its paces on the football field.
The Sydney Morning HeraldHow Australia shared the moon landing with the world
[…] NASA’s tracking stations in Australia included Honeysuckle Creek in the high country south of Canberra which was purpose built to be a hub station for the Apollo program, and the nearby deep space tracking station at Tidbinbilla. For Apollo 11, Honeysuckle would track the command module while Tidbinbilla tracked the lunar module, when they were being separately operated.
Honeysuckle was one of three key Apollo tracking stations spaced equidistantly around the world. The others were at Goldstone in California, and near Madrid in Spain. As the Earth spun on its axis once every 24 hours, these three stations could between them maintain constant two-way contact between Mission Controllers in Houston, and Apollo astronauts on the moon. Without them, Mission Control would have been deaf, dumb and blind to astronauts on the moon and vice versa.
A couple of months before Apollo 11’s scheduled launch, the radio telescope at Parkes was temporarily added to NASA’s Australian network. Although it couldn’t transmit anything, Parkes’s big dish, more than 200 feet in diameter, made it an excellent receiver, compared to the 85-foot dishes at Honeysuckle and Tidbinbilla.
The AtlanticWhat Is the Apollo 11 Landing Site Like Now?
[…] Fifty years later, of everything that remains at the cosmic campsite, the American flag has had the worst time of it.
The flag is no longer standing. In fact, it’s been flat on the ground since the moment Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lifted off. As the Eagle module ignited its engines and rose, spewing exhaust around, Aldrin caught a glimpse of the flag falling from his window.
The flag, made of nylon, was an off-the-shelf purchase. Unlike Earth, the moon lacks an atmosphere capable of blocking out the worst of the sun’s rays. It wouldn’t have taken long for the ultraviolet light to eat away at the dye and bleach the flag white. “Have you ever seen burnt newspaper from a fireplace? All the color is gone and everything,” says Dennis LaCarrubba, who worked at the New Jersey–based company that manufactured the flag. “That’s probably what the flag would look like now.”
The Moment That Made Neil Armstrong’s Heart Rate Spike
Two men were about to land on the moon, and Mission Control in Houston was thrumming with tension. In the science-operations room, Gerald Schaber, a geologist, needed something to do while he waited for the lunar module to touch down. Schaber had come from northern Arizona, where engineers had warped the desert with dynamite to make a cratered landscape where the astronauts could train. His job didn’t start until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module and began to explore the slate-colored surface. And the wait was getting to him.
“Our hearts were beating [fast], of course, everybody’s was,” Schaber told me recently. “So I figured I might as well watch theirs.”
Schaber switched his monitor to the channel displaying biomedical data for the astronauts. Armstrong seemed calmer than some of the folks in Mission Control. The commander’s heart was ticking along at 75 beats per minute, a remarkable rate for someone who was about to, you know, land on the moon. An adult’s normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 100 beats per minute. My heart rate right now, writing this story, is 75, according to a fitness tracker.
Schaber wasn’t surprised. Neil Armstrong, everyone knew, was one of the best flyers in the country.
What Will the Moon Landing Mean to the Future?
Shortly before his death in 1963, the writer and theologian C. S. Lewis wrote a speculative essay about the spiritual consequences of Project Apollo, the just-commenced mission to land human beings on the moon. In the common telling, Project Apollo is a pure triumph, its ambitions and execution framed in universalist terms, its meaning singular and plain to an implied “us.” We go to the moon because it is hard and because it is there.
Even America’s space-race rivals adopted this narrative. After the first American astronauts flew around the moon’s far side, the Kremlin released a statement congratulating the U.S. for transcending “the limits of a national achievement,” marking a new “stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.”
Lewis, for his part, did not see Project Apollo as an obvious step forward in our cosmic development. He saw it as a moral regression. To ride on a rocket tip to the “silver planet” of Artemis and Diana was an obscene a
The Guardian'We had 15 seconds of fuel left': Buzz Aldrin on the nervy moon landing
Time was running out. The Apollo 11 lunar module was on its historic descent to the moon’s crater-pocked surface on 20 July 1969 when a fuel light blinked on. Still 100ft (30 metres) above the ground, it was not what the astronauts needed. The Eagle’s tank was nearly dry.
In a new video interview about the momentous first landing on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, the mission’s lunar module pilot, describes how he held his tongue when the warning light appeared and Charlie Duke, Nasa’s capsule communicator, came on the line from Houston to inform Aldrin and Neil Armstrong they had only 60 seconds left to make it down.
“OK. One hundred feet. Sixty seconds. We’d better ease down,” Aldrin recalls thinking. But he thought better of telling Armstrong to get a move on. Dressed in a jacket and “Destination Mars” T-shirt, his fingers adazzle with rings, Aldrin’s contorted face conveys how dicey the moment was. “But I don’t want to disturb Neil by saying: ‘Hurry up, hurry up!’” he says, leaning in and dropping his voice.
x xYouTube VideoMoon buggies and bags of poo: what humans left on the moon
More than half a century of lunar exploration has left its mark on the moon. What Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin described as the “magnificent desolation” of the relentlessly grey surface is littered with clapped-out robots, spacecraft parts, moon buggies (including one with a bible on the dashboard) and technical equipment.
Scattered around the Apollo landing sites are other items that were never meant to come home: a falcon’s feather, a javelin, bags of human waste, a family photo and an aluminium figure, the Fallen Astronaut, which lies on its side near a plaque bearing the names of 14 men who died in the pursuit of space exploration. […]
More than half a century of lunar exploration has left its mark on the moon. What Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin described as the “magnificent desolation” of the relentlessly grey surface is littered with clapped-out robots, spacecraft parts, moon buggies (including one with a bible on the dashboard) and technical equipment.
Scattered around the Apollo landing sites are other items that were never meant to come home: a falcon’s feather, a javelin, bags of human waste, a family photo and an aluminium figure, the Fallen Astronaut, which lies on its side near a plaque bearing the names of 14 men who died in the pursuit of space exploration.
'Whitey's on the moon': why Apollo 11 looked so different to black America
The date was 15 July 1969. As the Saturn V rocket towered over the launchpad, about to send the first men to the moon, two dozen black families from poor parts of the south, accompanied by mules and wagons emblematic of the civil rights movement, marched to the fence of Cape Kennedy in Florida. From a bird’s eye view, they would have resembled dwarves in the wake of a colossus.
They were led by Ralph Abernathy, successor to the slain Martin Luther King as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He carried a sign that said bluntly: “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8.” He told a rally at the site: “We may go on from this day to Mars and to Jupiter and even to the heavens beyond, but as long as racism, poverty and hunger and war prevail on the Earth, we as a civilised nation have failed.”
The Apollo 11 mission has been hailed as humankind’s greatest technological achievement and, after the turmoil of the 1960s, a redemptive moment of national and international unity. Speaking to astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface in what he described as “the most historic telephone call ever made”, President Richard Nixon declared: “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one.”
Yet it was myth making then and will be again as America commemorates this month’s 50th anniversary with events, exhibitions and TV specials. The Apollo programme, motivated by the space race against the Soviet Union, cost $25.4bn, the equivalent of $180bn today; only the Vietnam war hit taxpayers harder. While Nasa warned Congress “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”, polls showed a majority of Americans opposed the “moondoggle”.
The Seattle Times… Meanwhile, many black families deliberately opted out of watching the Apollo 11 mission entirely. Neil Maher, a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, and author of the book “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius,” argued that this was done in protest as well.
“They didn’t go out in the streets and protest, but instead, (during the moon landing) they sat home and watched a baseball game. They consciously did this. This was a conscious act. I want to argue that both of those acts are political and both of those acts are very very important,” said Maher.
Maher said that at the time, critics and supporters of the space program were divided by their visions for the U.S.’ future.
DiscoverApollo 11’s “1202 Alarm” Explained
“Got the Earth straight out our front window.” As the lunar module Eagle yawed into a windows up orientation, Buzz Aldrin looked away from the computer to see the Earth nearly a quarter of a million miles away.
“Sure do,” agreed Neil Armstrong, adding, “Houston, [I hope] you’re looking at our Delta-H.” The Earth wasn’t his main concern for the moment. The mission’s commander was laser focused on getting the spacecraft down onto the Moon’s surface for the first time in history. He had just 30,000 feet to go…
“That’s affirmative,” replied Capcom Charlie Duke. The room full of flight controllers listened to the exchange while keeping a close eye on the numbers filling their screens, looking for any little anomaly that could force an abort.
Then came Armstrong’s voice over the radio again, this time marked a slight note of urgency. “It’s a 1202… What is that? Give us a reading on the 1202 Program Alarm…”
GizmodoNASA Sold an Original Moon Landing Video to an Intern in the 1970s and Now It's for Sale Again
Later this month, some of the original videotapes that captured the first Moon landing will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But they’re not being sold by NASA. Incredibly, these tapes were sold to a random NASA intern back in the 1970s who had no idea at the time that he’d purchased an important piece of history.
Back in June of 1976, NASA sold a bunch of videotapes at a government surplus auction at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Texas. Gary George, then a NASA intern at the Johnson Space Center nearby, bought 1,150 reels of magnetic video tapes for just $217.77—over $1,200 adjusted for inflation, but still a damn good deal.
Among the 1,150 reels were 65 boxes of high-quality Ampex video reels, 2-inch tapes that went for roughly $260 each at the time. George figured he could sell them to be recorded over and reused by a local TV station, and he did just that with most of the tapes. But thankfully, he held on to the historic ones.
According to Sotheby’s, it was George’s father who first noticed that these tapes might be worth hanging on to for the future. A small label on one of the boxes read, “APOLLO 11 EVA | July 20, 1969 REEL 1 [–3]” and “VR2000 525 Hi Band 15 ips.” Obviously, that was something that should be taken care of, and that’s precisely what they did.
Here Are the Bad Things NASA Thought Might Happen to the First Astronauts on the Moon
Fifty years ago this week, humankind landed on the Moon for the first time. It was one of the most impressive technological feats ever pulled off, filled with peril and uncertainty. Given that, it’s fair to wonder just what exactly NASA scientists were worried could have happened to the astronauts during and after their lunar trip. And yes, aliens (specifically, alien microbes) were on the short list.
The most pressing safety concerns about space travel during the Apollo program all had to do with the equipment used to send the astronauts there and back, according to Rod Pyle, a space historian and author of the recent book, “First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience.”
From exiting Earth to the spacesuits used for the historic brief Moon walks to the scalding temperatures the spacecraft experienced during reentry, Pyle noted, there were a million points of failure that could have ended in disaster.
TIMEHow Historians Are Reckoning With the Former Nazi Who Launched America's Space Program
Sporting a gray double-breasted suit, slicked-back curls and a slide rule, rocket engineer Wernher von Braun cuts a suave, authoritative figure in Disney’s 1955 television special Man and the Moon. Speaking with a German accent, the then-director of development at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala., uses a series of models and illustrations to explain how America will reach the moon — with the aid of an enormous nuclear-powered space station, of course.
The United States eventually planted a flag on the lunar surface, though without the help of any orbital reactors. And all through the Space Race, von Braun, a German scientist scooped up by the U.S. in the waning days of World War II, was the public face of the American space program, as well as one of its chief architects. But much of the Cold War-era coverage of von Braun downplayed the darker details of his past: before he was building rockets for America, he was building them for Hitler. Germany launched more than 3,000 missiles of his design against Britain and other countries, indiscriminately killing approximately 5,000 people, while as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling the weapons.
In the years since the original Space Race has ended, historians have begun to reassess von Braun’s legacy. Some have portrayed his time working for the Nazis as a survival strategy, but others have gone so far as to frame him as a war criminal, or something close to it. Von Braun died in 1977, so there’s no possibility of hearing him out. But as the country and the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing — a feat that might not have been possible without von Braun’s contributions — his image, as Cold War hero, whitewashed Nazi villain or something in between, is being debated more fiercely than ever, as is the extent of America’s moral bargaining in using him to propel its otherworldly ambitions.
AP NewsRestored Mission Control comes alive 50 years after Apollo
Gone is the haze of cigarette, cigar and pipe smoke. Gone are the coffee, soda and pizza stains. With only a few exceptions, NASA’s Apollo-era Mission Control has been restored to the way it looked 50 years ago when two men landed on the moon.
It gets the stamp of approval from retired flight director Gene Kranz, a man for whom failure — or even a minor oversight — is never an option.
Seated at the console where he ruled over Apollo 11, Apollo 13 and so many other astronaut missions, Kranz pointed out that a phone was missing behind him. And he said the air vents used to be black from all the smoke, not sparkly clean like they are now.
Those couple of details aside, Kranz could close, then open his eyes, and transport himself back to July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s momentous moon landing.
Apollo 11 astronaut returns to launch pad 50 years later
Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins returned Tuesday to the exact spot where he flew to the moon 50 years ago with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Collins had the spotlight to himself this time — Armstrong has been gone for seven years and Aldrin canceled. Collins said he wished his two moonwalking colleagues could have shared the moment at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, the departure point for humanity’s first moon landing.
“Wonderful feeling to be back,” the 88-year-old command module pilot said on NASA TV. “There’s a difference this time. I want to turn and ask Neil a question and maybe tell Buzz Aldrin something, and of course, I’m here by myself.”
Vanity FairTracking Down JoAnn Morgan, a Semi-Hidden Figure of U.S. Space History
The space program of the 1960s was a man’s world. In a famous photo taken in Firing Room No. 1 of Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, the day of Apollo 11’s launch, the consoles are populated by dozens of short-haired men in white shirts and skinny black ties, some of them in lab coats, many of them wearing pocket pen protectors. There is only one woman at a console, in a dark dress, her hand to her chin. Who is she?
I thought of this question again while writing about Apollo 11, the forthcoming documentary by Todd Douglas Miller that uses newly unearthed wide-screen film footage from the National Archives to tell the story of the first moon landing. During the mission’s launch phase, a pan across the firing room reveals this same very woman.
Her name, I learned, is JoAnn Morgan. At the time, she was a 28-year-old instrumentation controller and the first woman permitted to be inside the firing room—where all personnel were locked in 30 minutes before blastoff—during an Apollo launch. (There are other women in the photo, along the wall in the back, but that’s because the picture was taken nearly an hour after the launch, by which point some back-room staff members were allowed in to hear remarks by Vice President Spiro Agnew and other V.I.P.’s while awaiting the arrival of President Richard Nixon.)
SalonHow Poppy Northcutt became the first woman in the Apollo mission control room
When most people think about the Apollo space program, and the people behind those historic missions, a slew of white men might come to mind: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell — the astronauts who went to the moon. But as Frances "Poppy" Northcutt told me in our interview, just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to take someone to the moon, too. “The teamwork that was involved is one of the most incredible things about Apollo,” Northcutt told Salon. “The extent of the team — people don't understand that team wasn't just what you saw on TV.” Rather, it was about 400,000 people spread all around the world, she explains.
One of those 400,000 was Northcutt herself. As the first woman to work in Apollo's Mission Control Room — as an engineer — she was responsible for calculating return trajectories for Apollo 8, the first mission to leave Earth’s orbit and circle the moon. Among other missions to the moon that she worked on, she famously helped retrieve the Apollo 13 astronauts after a mid-flight disaster. But you would never know a woman was behind that from watching the 1995 Hollywood movie about that near-deadly mishap. Northcutt's erasure from "Apollo 13" embodies how women who were paramount to the Apollo moon missions were confined to the background for decades. […]
In June, Salon sat down with Northcutt in San Francisco to talk about what it was like being a woman and working for the Apollo Program, what has and hasn’t changed in STEM today, and what barriers women continue to face in male-dominated fields.
x xYouTube Video The Seattle TimesWomen played crucial roles in the space program. Yet we don’t know much about them. Why?
Edith Gustan’s name appears in the fourth paragraph of a Seattle Times article from 1970, a skinny strip of text above a nearly full-page ad for Sears’ Mother’s Day sale that advertises, among other things, “incontestably female … cardigans!”
Gustan was a biologist and longtime Boeing employee who conducted research on subjects at the nexus of biology and space travel. But while many stories from NASA’s Apollo program are common knowledge, hers is nearly nonexistent. Do some digging and you’ll find a 1985 Associated Press article describing her research on the viability of a space-station greenhouse under the headline “And Now, Vegetables in Space.” You might read her name in aerospace and engineering industry journals, on papers examining subjects like closed ecological life-support systems. Addresses place her in Shelton and East Wenatchee. But a Google search turns up only a two-sentence obituary from 2017. We know she worked on collaborations between Boeing and NASA, but we don’t know much about her.
This is an all too common outcome for many of the women who played crucial roles in the success of the Apollo 11 mission and, more broadly, the American manned spaceflight program. They wrote code, made complex calculations, and — in Gustan’s case — envisioned a future where astronauts might even grow their own food during space travel. But in many cases, we’re only uncovering their contributions now, half a century after humans first walked on the moon.
Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass '60s programmer who saved the moon landing
[…] Huge amounts of aeronautical and hardware engineering effort went into the Apollo program from its birth in 1961 to its completion in 1972, as NASA and its partners designed the Saturn V rocket to get astronauts out of Earth's orbit, the command/service modules that orbited the moon, and the lunar modules that actually landed on the moon. But Apollo was also a major software project. Astronauts used the Apollo Guidance Computer, which was placed in both the command module and the lunar module, for navigation assistance and to control the spacecraft, and someone needed to program it.
The software for the guidance computer was written by a team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Laboratory), headed up by Margaret Hamilton. Here's an amazing picture of her next to the code she and her colleagues wrote for the Apollo 11 guidance computer that made the moon landing possible:
xAs NASA's first-ever software engineer, Margaret Hamilton wrote the code by hand that took us to the moon .🚀🌙 https://t.co/n1NFP24cD3pic.twitter.com/exmH8XXpZ1
— MAKERS (@MAKERSwomen) July 10, 2019"In this picture, I am standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code," Hamilton says in an email. "To clarify, there are no other kinds of printouts, like debugging printouts, or logs, or what have you, in the picture." It's just her and her code.
Literally weaving software togetherThe process of actually coding in the programs was laborious, as well. The guidance computer used something known as "core rope memory": wires were roped through metal cores in a particular way to store code in binary. "If the wire goes through the core, it represents a one," Hamilton explained in the documentary Moon Machines. "And around the core it represents a zero." The programs were woven together by hand in factories. And because the factory workers were mostly women, core rope memory became known by engineers as "LOL memory," LOL standing for "little old lady."
The ConversationDid we mishear Neil Armstrong’s famous first words on the Moon?
On July 20, 1969, an estimated 650 million people watched in suspense as Neil Armstrong descended a ladder towards the surface of the Moon.
As he took his first steps, he uttered words that would be written into history books for generations to come: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”
Or at least that’s how the media reported his words.
But Armstrong insisted that he actually said, “That’s one small step for a man.” In fact, in the official transcript of the Moon landing mission, NASA transcribes the quote as “that’s one small step for (a) man.”
As a linguist, I’m fascinated by mistakes between what people say and what people hear.
Oregon Public Radio'Oregon Lava On The Moon!' How A Bend Man Got It There
…
Beginning in 1964, NASA sent astronauts in the Apollo program — including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, soon to be the first men on the moon — to train and test equipment in the high desert of Central Oregon. NASA’s theory was that the region’s volcanic terrain might be similar to the landscape astronauts would find on the surface of the moon. In 1965, when Bend hosted the State of Oregon Geological Lunar Field Conference, Oregon Gov. Mark Hatfield wrote to attendees, “we have a deep and abiding respect for science and scientists as you work with the wonders of the earth and space.”
In 1966, astronaut James Irwin was among the latest crop of lunar trainees to show up in Bend. At the time, Floyd Watson was the county building inspector.
Rick Miller remembers his grandfather as a gregarious man, a builder with a healthy sense of scientific curiosity. No wonder, then, that his interest was piqued by the visitors from NASA. The Bend Golf Club hosted a welcome party for Irwin and his colleagues.
Digital TrendsLife after launch: Inside the massive effort to preserve NASA’s space artifacts
[…] Once the Smithsonian received Armstrong’s suit, it wasn’t quite sure what to do with it beyond sticking it on a mannequin and protecting it from sticky fingers and harsh light. But the fireproof suit, built to withstand wild temperature swings, seemed like it should be indestructible. “We made a lot of assumptions that it would it would last here on Earth, since it had lasted out in space,” said Lewis.
But NASA hadn’t expected the suit to last decades into the future. When it was designed and stitched by the International Latex Corporation, parts of it, like the rubber cooling undersuit, were expected to start deteriorating in six months. ILC (now Playtex) was used to manufacturing bras and girdles, but the spacesuits included a variety of materials, three separate garments, and 21 layers. A new fireproof fabric — a Teflon-coated fiberglass material called “beta cloth” — made up the outer layer. It still had to be flexible and foldable, durable but able to fit through a slow-moving sewing machine. With the attached life support, the suit could even become a wearable spacecraft.
After Armstrong’s spacesuit had been on display for more than 30 years, Smithsonian curator Lisa Young started to notice some issues. The rubber, slowly off-gassing hydrochloric acid over the years, was affecting other materials. The brass zipper, leached of copper, turned green. The rubber itself was brittle. To stop the deterioration in its tracks, she removed the suit from display and put it in a moderately cool, low-humidity storage room. It wouldn’t go back on display for 13 years.
The Washington PostHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.
They walked on the moon, gathered rocks, planted a flag, rocketed home to Earth and splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean. After three weeks in quarantine (to prevent a purely hypothetical moon-germ contagion), the three Apollo 11 astronauts got their ticker-tape parade and eternal glory.
Why it worked — and why the United States beat the Soviet Union to the moon after having been humiliated, repeatedly, during the early years of the Space Race — remains a compelling story of managerial vision, technological genius and astronautical dash. But it was never as breezy as NASA made it look. The first landing on the moon could easily have been the first crashing.
NASA’s strategy during the 1960s was built around incremental achievements, with each mission wringing out some of the risk. Still, potential disaster lurked everywhere. Just two years before Apollo 11, three astronauts died in a freakish fire during a capsule test at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
‘They would get killed’: The weather forecast that saved Apollo 11
… Though almost no one knew it at the time, the mission had nearly ended in disaster. It was spared only at the last minute by two canny meteorologists with access to a top-secret weather satellite.
In the years leading up to Apollo 11, intelligence officials had deployed a network of spy satellites to take pictures of potential missile sites in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. After taking photos, the satellites would discharge the film in a canister outfitted with parachutes, which would be collected by a cargo plane on its descent to Earth.
Weather was a big factor in this effort. Intelligence officials did not want to waste valuable film taking pictures of clouds, nor did they want the canisters to parachute into the middle of a storm. So they deployed sophisticated weather satellites to make sure that did not happen.
The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon — while Apollo 11 was still there
As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the “fine, sandy particles” that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.
A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home.
The unmanned spacecraft’s mission would be an epic coup: get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.
That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises — before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.
VoxHumans landed on the moon 50 years ago, and it’s still freaking awesome
Fifty years ago, human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. Some 650 million people around the world watched the historic landing on July 20, 1969, and heard astronaut Neil Armstrong say “... one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” [‘…]
All the fuss is well deserved: The legacy of that mission — and all the Apollo missions — is immense.
For one, it was a huge engineering accomplishment to get humans to the moon and back. “It took around 400,000 people to land humankind on the moon,” astronaut Michael Collins, Apollo 11’s command module pilot who did not land on the surface of the moon… Those were engineers, coders, scientists, mechanics, doctors, and so many more professions working in concert to make the mission a success.