One small step for man, one incredibly stressful day at mission control.
The 1969 moon landing was even more complicated than you think.
If there's nothing else to remember about how the Moon landing was viewed in 1969,
the important thing is this: it was a spectacle to behold.
News stations across the US had invested millions of dollars into covering the voyage
every step of the way, with NASA more than glad to provide plenty of access.
"In just 50 minutes from now, well within the hour,
the Moon is due to have visitors from another planet."
So people threw parties. Some threw meticulously planned "Moon parties", complete with Moon-themed
foods, drinks, and snacks. Other gatherings were less thematic but no less eventful.
The Guardian, for example, relays one person's account of their friends and family all packed
into the living room, and gathered around the TV, glued to the screen and barely even able to speak.
And then there were the impromptu parties. People packed together on the streets of New York, trying
to get a view of the screens in store windows as the Moon landing was about to take place.
The usual noisy bustle of the big city suddenly turned to nervous whispers and
near-silence in the moments before humankind's first steps on the Moon.
The same thing even happened way out in the woods of New Jersey.
The New York Post recounts the story of a family on a camping trip. They set up an antenna to
watch, and it didn't take long for around 50 people to appear and watch alongside them.
The Moon landing couldn't be avoided. In the middle of a baseball game,
the announcer stopped everything to say that the landing had just occurred,
and the entire stadium erupted into thunderous applause that lasted a full minute.
The same happened at a Beach Boys concert and even a wedding.
Everything came to a halt so that people could watch or listen to the Moon landing live.
The Beach Boys stopped playing, and the wedding guests stopped dancing,
because humanity's first steps on the Moon were just that captivating.
Looking up at the sky, it seemed weird that spectators couldn't see the astronauts,
but knowing they were there was simply awe-inspiring. One person reflected on this
feeling, sharing their account of when they watched the moon landing with their father.
Another account talks about how everyone on a street in London was sticking their head out the
window to stare at the Moon, imagining that they could see the astronauts there with the naked eye.
Those watching back on Earth felt like the world had either changed, or was about to change,
for the better. To the spectators, somehow, this event was a sign of a much brighter future,
and everyone watching was right in the middle of humankind’s leap.
"I thought it was fantastic, too, because I never thought it could happen, till I did see it."
The Moon landing inspired people on a smaller scale as well,
making them feel like there were no limits, like no obstacle couldn't be overcome.
Ed Charles, a baseball player for the New York Mets at the time,
said that if a man could walk on the Moon, then they could win the World Series – which they did.
A young student saw that Michael Collins had to wait all alone in
the command module while on the dark side of the moon. The student found courage to
face their own fears from the fact that Collins was brave enough to do that.
People wrote in to the New York Post and The Guardian,
talking about their experiences watching the moon landing along with their grandparents.
One person recalls that their grandfather refused to believe it was true.
Some of the people gathered around TVs and radios that night had been alive since before the Wright
Brothers made their first flight. The BBC recounts the story of a 13-year-old boy watching with his
grandfather, who was born in 1893 and had grown up riding in horse-drawn carriages.
But then, all of a sudden, there was a man on the Moon. To go from the first-ever airplane to men
on the Moon is an insane leap in technology. For all of that to happen within a person's lifetime
really says a lot about how far humanity managed to come, and in a pretty short time, at that.
"The world just became a lot bigger."
This one's pretty self-explanatory. After all,
there's video of an American flag being planted into the surface of the Moon,
hundreds of thousands of miles in space, far from the country that it represents.
According to NBC News, 93 percent of American households watching TV were watching the Moon
landing. It was 100 percent in New York City. And the New York Post recounts
stories from people who said they felt "high on America" after seeing the Moon landing.
"It's good to be an American because… first on the moon. That's all."
But the more interesting recollections are from people who weren't from the US.
A woman, Maggie, had moved to the US from Cuba
and said that she would always remember what it felt like to see the American flag on the Moon.
For her, it wasn't just general patriotic fervor but the fact that she felt lucky enough to be a
part of it now and, more importantly, that this was the country her young son would grow up in.
Another story from a Czech man mentions that the Moon
landing was broadcast in then-Communist Prague.
It was a show of human achievement at the time, but then his family was able to move to the US
by the time of the Apollo 17 mission. He remembered his father feeling a different
kind of pride watching that mission: pride for being American, and for being free.
According to NBC News, the broadcast of the
Moon landing was pretty heavily geared toward American audiences.
However, the Moon landing and what it represented went a lot further than just the United States.
"Right now, I can observe the entire continent. North America down to the Yucatan peninsula."
If nothing else, it was broadcast in a lot more than just American homes.
It was being shown across Europe, Australia, South America, and Asia. The New York Post and
The Guardian collected stories from Scotland to Portugal to Vietnam, all at different times
of day. The first moonwalk actually took place in the middle of the night in the UK.
Kids whose families didn't own TVs crowded into gyms to watch the broadcast. Some running around
while others simply remembered that night as being the longest they ever stayed up.
This was an achievement for all of humanity, one that crossed any and all divisions.
The BBC even went so far as to call it, quote,
a "genuine experience of global intimacy," and that honestly seems pretty accurate.
The 1960s weren't exactly a great time worldwide, and the US was far from an
exception. Tensions over segregation, riots, protests, and assassinations — most notably of
John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The most recent Democratic National Convention had
"descended into anarchy," as the BBC put it, and Nixon's presidency wasn't exactly well-received.
Then, of course, there was the Vietnam War and the ongoing Cold War in general.
And when it came to the Space Race in particular,
the Russians had already launched Sputnik more than a decade earlier, which had largely
disheartened the American people. So when the Moon landing happened, it really meant something.
“There weren’t enough words to express the joy,
pride, the incredibility of an adventure called, the flight of Apollo 11.”
The event was a beacon of hope in an otherwise hopeless time, a spot of good news amid the bad.
It was a chance for people to forget about the world's problems for a little while and come
together for something incredible, rather than be split apart by less savory events.
Although many accounts of watching the Moon landing are optimistic,
that's wasn’t necessarily the case across the board because of tensions in the 1960s.
The BBC mentions that civil rights leaders were upset because they didn’t
understand how the moon landing truly benefited people on Earth.
From their perspective, all of this money was being funneled into a program that wasn't
going toward, say, feeding poor children or improving lives in the inner cities.
According to them, it was a waste of money when
there were more pressing and immediate and terrestrial matters to attend to.
The Vietnam War was the other big part of this. The New York Post tells stories from people
directly affected by the war. A woman recalled the bittersweet feeling of seeing the Moon landing,
knowing all the while that her fiancé was only days away from being sent off to war.
And That feeling of resentment was just compounded by the astronauts receiving a hero's welcome,
while Vietnam veterans were treated with scorn upon their return.
Then there was a soldier in Vietnam who was listening to the Moon landing over
a transistor radio — just as his bunker came under enemy attack.
It was hard to feel joy when the US could take men to the Moon but, quote,
"couldn't figure out how to extricate half a million American kids from Hell."
"Stressful." If there was one word to describe the atmosphere at NASA's Mission Control during
the Moon landing, it's that one, without a doubt. It wasn't exactly smooth sailing.
At one point, communications disappeared, and no one knew if they should continue the mission.
Eventually, comms did come back, only for telemetry and radar to disappear.
Again, they had no information.
By the time data reappeared, the Eagle was descending 20 feet per second faster than planned,
not a fatal problem but nerve-wracking all the same. If it sped up any more,
they would lose the option to abort. The astronauts' safety net was almost gone.
The computer corrected for that problem, and then an alarm came up in the lander for
a rarely seen issue. For about 20 interminable seconds, no one could quite remember what to do.
Armstrong would have to take manual control to land in a
rocky area because they'd overshot their landing target by a few miles.
That shouldn't have been a problem, if not for the fact that fuel was running out.
Mission Control realized this once there was only
about a minute's worth of fuel left and the Eagle was still high off the ground.
If they'd run out too high above the surface ... that would have been bad.
Luckily, the fuel lasted just long enough for a safe landing, and the rest is history.
A little while after the Eagle had landed, the astronauts received a call from President Richard
Nixon — a call that Nixon himself deemed the most historic call ever made from the White House.
Nixon also added that everyone back on Earth was proud of what they'd done
and that they all hoped for their safe return.
It's emblematic of the joyful pomp and circumstance that the Moon landing is
generally known for. But there is a slightly darker side to it.
After all, it's worth remembering that space exploration is fraught with danger.
The Apollo 1 fire ended up killing three astronauts, and that's just one such tragedy.
It's why there was some fear in the air of the White House as the Moon landing approached.
Presidential speechwriter William Safire was told he should prepare a statement in case Armstrong
and Aldrin, for some reason, couldn't get off the Moon, in case they couldn't make it back home.
Safire was tasked with writing something the astronauts' families and the nation as a whole
would need to hear to commemorate these men they saw as heroes.
"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore
in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace."
The fortunately undelivered speech
is a reminder that space travel — for all its splendor — includes a lot of risk.