Apollo 11

From the time of its launch on July 16, 1969, until the return splashdown on July 24, almost every major aspect of the flight of Apollo 11 was witnessed via television by hundreds of millions of people in nearly every part of the globe. The pulse of humanity rose with the giant, 363-foot-high, 6,698,700-pound Saturn V launch vehicle as it made its flawless flight from Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral), Florida, before hundreds of thousands of spectators. So accurate was the translunar insertion that three of the enroute trajectory corrections planned were not necessary. Aboard Apollo 11 were Armstrong, Aldrin and command module pilot Michael Collins. Their enthusiasm was evident from the beginning as Armstrong exclaimed, "This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride... It was beautiful!"

The three astronauts conducted their transposition and docking maneuvers, first turning the command module Columbia and its attached service module around and then extracting the lunar module from its resting place above the Saturn's third stage. The third stage of the Saturn then fired to start the crew on their 234,000-mile journey to the Moon. On their arrival the astronauts slowed the spacecraft so that it would go into lunar orbit. Apollo 11 entered first an elliptical orbit 71 by 194 miles and then a nearly circular orbit between 62 and 76 miles above the surface of the Moon.

On the morning of July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin crawled from the command module through an interconnecting tunnel into the lunar module Eagle. Toward the end of the 12th lunar orbit, the Apollo 11 spacecraft became two separate spacecraft: Columbia, piloted by Collins, and Eagle, occupied by Armstrong and Aldrin.

By firing the Eagle's propulsion system, the two astronauts changed from their nearly circular orbit to an elliptical course whose closest approach to the Moon was only 50,000 feet. At this low point they again fired their engine, this time to undergo the powered descent initiation maneuver. At about 500 feet above the surface, Armstrong began maneuvering the craft manually (although the main engine continued under automatic control) to avoid landing in a rock-strewn crater.

For about a minute and a half, Armstrong hovered the Eagle, moving it laterally with the reaction control system until he found a clear area on which to descend. Then the contact light went on inside the cockpit, as the 68-inch probes dangling below Eagle's footpads signaled contact with the ground. One second later the descent rocket engine was cut off, as the astronauts gazed down onto a sheet of lunar soil blown radially in all directions. Armstrong then radioed at 4:17 PM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

At 10:56 PM EDT on July 20, Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar soil with the words, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." (In the excitement of the moment, Armstrong skipped the "a" in the statement that he had prepared.) He immediately described the surface as "fine and powdery" and said that there was no difficulty moving about. Aldrin joined his companion about 20 minutes later.

During their moon walk of more than two hours, Armstrong and Aldrin set up a device to measure the composition of the solar wind reaching the Moon, a device to receive laser beams from astronomical observatories on Earth to determine the exact distance of the two bodies from one another, and a passive seismometer to measure moonquakes and meteor impacts long after the astronauts had returned home. They also took about 50 pounds of rock and soil samples, took many photographs and maintained constant communication with mission control in Houston, Texas. After 21 hours 38 minutes on the Moon's surface, the astronauts used Eagle's ascent stage to launch it back into lunar orbit. After various maneuvers, Eagle once again docked with Collins in Columbia, and the trip back to Earth began soon afterward.

Splashdown of Apollo 11 occurred in the Pacific Ocean about 900 miles west of Hawaii on July 24. The astronauts were immediately placed in quarantine in a van on the recovery ship. From there they were flown to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, where they were transferred into the large, 58-room Lunar Receiving Laboratory. The quarantine lasted 21 days from the time Eagle took off from the Moon; during that period the astronauts were checked for any diseases they might have picked up on the Moon, and the lunar samples were subjected to preliminary analysis.

Columbia is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

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