Launched three days before the Apollo 11 mission, it was the second Soviet attempt to return lunar soil back to Earth with a goal to outstrip the US in achieving a sample return in the Moon race. On 21 July 1969, while Apollo 11 astronauts finished the first human moonwalk, Luna 15, a robotic Soviet spacecraft in lunar orbit at the time, began its descent to the lunar surface. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission leaves the lunar surface with these words: "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.Luna 15 was a robotic space mission of the Soviet Luna programme, that crashed into the Moon on 21 July 1969. Over the next three and a half years, 10 astronauts will follow in their footsteps. In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong calls the flight "a beginning of a new age," while Collins talks about future journeys to Mars. "Every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, 'If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault.'" In an interview years later, Armstrong praises the "hundreds of thousands" of people behind the project. Men from Earth have walked on the moon and returned safely home. The crew splashes down off Hawaii on July 24. Collins later says that "for the first time," he "really felt that we were going to carry this thing off." We came in peace for all mankind."Īrmstrong and Aldrin blast off and dock with Collins in Columbia. It reads, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. They leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and a plaque on one of Eagle's legs. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."Īldrin joins him shortly, and offers a simple but powerful description of the lunar surface: "magnificent desolation." They explore the surface for two and a half hours, collecting samples and taking photographs. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. The Eagle has landed." Mission control erupts in celebration as the tension breaks, and a controller tells the crew "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again."Īrmstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern, saying "the unknowns were rampant," and "there were just a thousand things to worry about."Īt 10:56 p.m. Armstrong radios "Houston, Tranquility Base here. When the lunar module lands at 4:18 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remain. It turns out to be a simple case of the computer trying to do too many things at once, but as Aldrin will later point out, "unfortunately it came up when we did not want to be trying to solve these particular problems." During the final seconds of descent, Eagle's computer is sounding alarms. When it comes time to set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong improvises, manually piloting the ship past an area littered with boulders. A day after that, Armstrong and Aldrin climb into the lunar module Eagle and begin the descent, while Collins orbits in the command module Columbia.įootage from the Apollo 11 moonwalk that was partially restored in 2009.Ĭollins later writes that Eagle is "the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky," but it will prove its worth. Three days later the crew is in lunar orbit. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit.Īfter one and a half orbits, Apollo 11 gets a "go" for what mission controllers call "Translunar Injection" - in other words, it's time to head for the moon. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.Īt 9:32 a.m. Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. It is only seven months since NASA's made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket. It's a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |