INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
the Moon had gone according to plan, but just twenty minutes before landing, the atmosphere grew tense as the crew encountered a series of
problems.It was July 20, 1969, and as the world followed the spacecraft's progress, it briefly lost radio contact with mission control in
Armstrong, an alarm bell began ringing.Eagle had detached two hours earlier from the main part of the vessel, the command module, Columbia,
where the third crew member Michael Collins remained in orbit.It was an anxious moment for Armstrong, a brilliant test pilot and
They are told to keep going
Houston realizes the onboard computer is experiencing an overflow, but all systems are functional.Below them, the Moon's craters are zipping
to scope out a new landing site from his porthole
speed and altitude readings from the computer
continues to announce the number of seconds left to the "Bingo fuel call" -- the point at which Eagle will have 20 seconds left to land, or
abort the mission.It is now 30 seconds left to Bingo.Armstrong, summoning all his experience, is silent as he concentrates.The module comes
"Contact Light," says Aldrin, meaning one of the leg's foot sensors has touched down
The engines are switched off."Houston, Tranquility Base here
The Eagle has landed," announces Armstrong."We copy you on the ground
You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue
people who worked on the Apollo program was 400,000
But two figures tower above the rest for their contributions.In 1961, President John F Kennedy called upon his vice president Lyndon Johnson
to beat the Soviets in space."We are in a strategic space race with the Russians, and we are losing," Kennedy had written in a magazine the
"If a man orbits Earth this year, his name will be Ivan."Johnson reaches out to the godfather of NASA's space program: Wernher von
of the war, he surrendered himself to the Americans, who brought him and a hundred of his best engineers to Alabama, as part of the secret
"Operation Paperclip."Von Braun told Johnson that while the US was well behind, they could conceivably beat the Russians when it came to
putting men on the Moon, if they immediately started work on a giant booster rocket.Kennedy would address Congress later that year, famously
committing "to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the decade's end.Eight years later, Richard Nixon was
president when the goal was realized.In case of a tragedy, he had prepared the following remarks: "Fate has ordained that the men who went
to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace."But the extraordinary national efforts paid off.It all happened
fast, thanks to a blank check for the mission from Congress
Between October 1968 and May 1969, four preparatory Apollo missions were launched
von Braun launched with the Apollo 11 capsule at its summit on Wednesday, July 16 1969, one million people flocked to the beach across from
Cape Canaveral to watch.But many had doubts that they'd succeed in landing on the Moon on the first attempt
Armstrong confided in 1999: "My gut feeling was that we had a 90 percent chance -- or better -- of getting back safely, and a 50 percent
already nighttime, but everyone was glued to their televisions, though they could only hear crackling radio communications until Armstrong
set up his black and white camera ahead of his first step.His grandmother had advised him not to do it if he felt danger; he had agreed,
according to the book "Rocket Men" by Craig Nelson.As he climbed down to the foot of the ladder, he observed that Eagle's footpads had sunk
into the ground by only an inch or two, and the surface appeared very fine grained
"It's almost like a powder," he recalled.Then, over the radio: "Okay
mankind."According to Armstrong, the line wasn't scripted
"I thought about it after landing," he would say in an oral history recorded by NASA in 2001.One problem: without the indefinite article ("a
man"), it wasn't grammatically correct
Armstrong said he meant to say it, but agreed it was inaudible.What does the Moon look like, up close?Its color varies with the angle of the
Sun: from brown to grey to black as coal
And the lower level of gravity takes getting used to."I started jogging around a bit, and it felt like I was moving in slow motion in a lazy
lope, often with both of my feet floating in the air," Aldrin wrote in a book in 2009.Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, Armstrong
picks up piles and piles of Moon rocks and takes photographs
Aldrin installs a seismometer and two other scientific instruments.They plant the US flag, and leave behind a host of items including a
medal honoring the first man in space, Russia's Yuri Gagarin.Of the 857 black and white photos, and 550 in color, only four show Armstrong
The majority are of Aldrin
"He's a lot more photogenic than I am," he joked in 2001.Homeward boundBy the time they were set to go, the astronauts were covered in dust
In the cockpit, "It smelled, to me, like wet ashes in a fireplace," said Armstrong.Collins had been waiting up in orbit for the past 22
fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked
man for life and I know it."Happily, the lunar module's engine worked, it rendezvoused back with Columbia, and the trio began the long
journey home.By the end, shorn of its extra modules and fuel, the capsule weighs only 12,250 pounds, or 0.2 percent of the launch weight of
parachutes and splashing down safely into the Pacific.The US had dispatched an aircraft carrier to recover them
Nixon was on board.Elite divers extract the men, who are unharmed but malodorous after their journey, to transfer them by helicopter to the
their first press conference, three weeks later, reporters asked the three men, now global heroes, whether they would ever consider
returning to the Moon."In the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, we had very little time for meditation," replied Armstrong, ever to the point.None
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