1961.
At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Cosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
Just weeks later, the United States launched its first astronaut, Alan Shepherd.
‘All systems are go!’
He was welcomed home as a hero, but President John F Kennedy knew that if the United States
was to overtake the Soviet space programme, it needed a bolder mission.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this
decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
As Kennedy addressed congress, the United States had just fifteen minutes of human spaceflight
experience.
No one knew if a moon landing was even possible, let alone in just nine years.
It would be an unprecedented engineering and scientific undertaking, marked by heroism...
...and tragedy.
The incredible task of landing an astronaut on the Moon would be known as the Apollo Program.
The Apollo Program had been rocked by the tragic death of Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom,
Ed White and Roger Chaffee.
But it had recovered with the brilliant success of Apollo 7 - the first crewed test of the
Command and Service Module.
And in 1968, after seven years of intense research and development, NASA had flown three
astronauts 240,000 miles from home and into lunar orbit.
Apollo 8 flew within 69 miles of the Moon’s surface.
But crossing that final gap would be the greatest challenge of The Apollo Program.
It would require a completely new and untested type of spacecraft.
The Lunar Module.
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In the wake of Apollo 8’s daring journey to the Moon, Apollo 9 received much less public
attention.
The mission wasn’t even going to leave Earth orbit.
But within the astronaut corps, the first crewed flight of the Lunar Module was seen
as an even more exciting challenge.
The mission’s commander, Jim McDivitt, had actually turned down the chance to fly to
the moon on Apollo 8, choosing Apollo 9 instead.
Like many Apollo astronauts, he was a former test pilot, and this was a chance to test
a brand new flying machine.
[Public Affairs Officer] 2, 1, 0, liftoff!
We have liftoff at 11am Eastern Standard Time.
Before the test flight of the Lunar Module could begin, the crew had a challenging docking
maneuver to perform.
The Lunar Module was folded inside the upper stage of the Saturn V rocket, and needed to
be extracted using the Command and Service Module.
[McDivitt] Roger Houston, we’re at about 25 feet now and moving forward.
[McDivitt] Alright Houston, we’re hard docked.
[Capcom] Good show.
Leaving Command Module pilot Dave Scott to fly the CSM, McDivitt and Lunar Module pilot
Rusty Schweickart climbed aboard and undocked.
The Lunar Module was the first true spaceship - designed only to fly in the vacuum of space.
Its insect-like body was designed without the constraints of aerodynamics, but every
panel, bolt and button had to be as light as possible, so the craft could lift itself
off the moon’s surface.
McDivitt said that it looked ‘like cellophane and tin foil put together with Scotch tape
and staples.’
He gave his craft the callsign ‘Spider’.
Unlike the command module, Spider did not have a heat shield, so it would burn up if
it tried to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere.
So if the astronauts couldn’t re-dock with the Command Module after their test flight,
they would have no way of returning home.
But Spider’s test flight went perfectly.
McDivitt and Schweickart flew the Lunar Module over 100 miles from the Command Module.
They tested the ascent and descent engines and returned for a safe rendezvous.
The Lunar Module was ready to fly to the moon.
NASA had successfully tested both the Command Module and Lunar Module, and made a trip around
the moon.
Many hoped the next mission would attempt the first moon landing.
But NASA needed more experience in communications and tracking two separate spacecraft in lunar
orbit.
Plus the challenges of rendezvous and docking in the moon’s weaker gravity.
And there was another critical unknown.
In 1968, NASA scientists discovered that the Moon has a highly uneven gravitational field.
This is caused by huge lumps of high-density material in its crust known as mass concentrations
or ‘mascons’, which could exert an uneven pull on a spacecraft and throw it off course.
Before it was safe to attempt a landing, NASA would need to learn more about the mascons
by examining their effect on another Apollo flight.
Apollo 10 would be a dress rehearsal for the first landing attempt, flying every part of
the mission except for the final descent to the surface.
The Apollo 10 crew was Commander Tom Stafford, Command Module Pilot John Young, and Lunar
Module Pilot Gene Cernan.
All three men were veterans of the Gemini program, and with five missions between them,
they were the most experienced crew ever sent into space.
Stafford and Cernan flew the Lunar Module to within nine miles of the Moon’s surface.
Their successful flight proved every phase of the mission... except for the final descent.
Now, everything was in place.
It was time to attempt the landing.
Apollo 11 would be commanded by Neil Armstrong, a brilliant engineer and test pilot.
Early in his NASA career, he’d flown the experimental X-15 rocket plane up to an altitude
of 207,000 feet, at speeds of almost 4,000 miles per hour.
When he joined the space program as part of NASA’s second astronaut group, he was one
of the few astronauts to be offered a command on his first mission, Gemini 8.
Gemini 8 achieved the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit.
But the mission almost ended in disaster when a faulty manoeuvring thruster caused the Gemini
capsule to spin wildly.
Armstrong’s calm and swift piloting brought the spacecraft under control, and although
the mission was cut short, he’d proved his almost superhuman ability to remain calm under
pressure.
Joining him as Lunar Module Pilot was Buzz Aldrin.
A graduate of MIT, Aldrin wrote his doctoral thesis on piloting techniques for orbital
rendezvous, and had an extraordinary understanding of orbital mechanics.
He’d proven his expertise on Gemini 12.
When the spacecraft’s rendezvous radar malfunctioned, he was able to compute the orbital manoeuvres
himself, and guide the capsule to a successful docking with an unmanned target rocket.
The Command Module Pilot was Michael Collins.
He would remain aboard the Command Module whilst Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the
Moon.
He had no regrets about his assignment, telling reporters that he was going 99.9% of the way
there, and that was fine with him.
But years later, he would recount his greatest fear – that Armstrong and Aldrin would be
stranded on the surface, leaving him to travel back to Earth alone.
15th July, 1969.
Almost a million people were gathering at Cape Kennedy to watch the three astronauts
fly to the Moon.
But not everyone was there to celebrate.
As launch preparations were made, around 150 people, mostly African American mothers and
their children, arrived at Cape Kennedy to protest the launch.
They were led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded Dr Martin Luther King as
leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after King’s assassination the
previous year.
Their message was simple - it was inhuman to spend billions of dollars sending men to
the moon while one in five Americans lacked proper food, shelter and healthcare.
NASA Administrator Thomas Paine met with the protestors the evening before the launch.
He told Abernathy that ‘if we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the
button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button.’
Their terse meeting resolved nothing, but it ended with a handshake, and a promise by
Abernathy that he would pray for the safe flight of the astronauts.
The following day, ten of the protestors were invited into the VIP stands, to watch the
launch of Apollo 11.
10, 9, ignition sequence start, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, all engines running, liftoff, we
have a liftoff, 32 minutes past the hour, liftoff on Apollo 11.
Four days later on the 20th July, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into their Lunar Module,
callsign ‘Eagle’.
They undocked and began their descent to the lunar surface.
Armstrong - ‘The Eagle has wings!’
Years of hard work and training had led to this moment.
The descent to the lunar surface would test their skills to the very limit.
Back on Earth, in Houston, Texas, the staff of mission control watched as Eagle passed
behind the moon for a final time.
They monitored every system in both spacecraft, and guided the astronauts through the complex
flight plan.
And the success of the mission was about to rest on the shoulders of 26-year old guidance
officer, Steve Bales.
It’s a 1202 Stand by
1202 The master alarm sounded in the Lunar Module
cockpit.
Eagle’s guidance computer was trying to tell the astronauts that something was wrong.
Its simple display showed the numbers ‘12 02’, but neither Armstrong or Aldrin knew
what this meant.
‘Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm’ Flight Director Gene Kranz was seconds away
from calling an abort.
He turned to Bales for answers.
‘12 02’ meant the guidance computer was overloaded.
It had too many tasks to complete in its computing cycle, and was dropping some in order to continue
functioning.
Without a working guidance computer, the astronauts would have to abort.
But - the alarm wasn’t sounding continuously.
This meant that most computational cycles were being completed properly.
Bales decided that as long as the problem was only intermittent, the landing could continue.
‘We’re go on that, flight, if it doesn’t reoccur we’ll be go.
But then another problem: the Lunar Module was approaching the surface too fast, and
had overshot its intended landing site.
Now, the computer was guiding them towards a massive, football stadium sized crater,
surrounded by a field of car-sized boulders.
With the Lunar Module almost out of fuel, Armstong took manual control.
Mission control could only watch.
The landing rested on Armstrong’s piloting skills.
60 seconds Lights on
4 forward, drifting to the right a little Down a half
30 seconds Contact light
Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed As around 600 million people watched from
Earth, Armstrong took his first steps on the lunar surface.
‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’
The precisely choreographed Moonwalk had taken two years to plan.
For two hours and forty minutes, Armstrong and Aldrin gathered rock samples, set up scientific
experiments, and took photographs.
The Apollo 11 crew returned home as heroes, their names now amongst those of the greatest
explorers in history.
We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore
the unknown.
Buzz Aldrin Now that President Kennedy’s goal had been
accomplished, was there any point in returning to the moon?
What was left for the Apollo Program to achieve?
The new mission would be science.
The Moon’s origins remained a mystery.
Where did it come from?
Could its scarred surface tell the story of the early solar system, and in turn help us
understand the origins of our own world?
But although NASA now possessed the knowledge and technology to land on the Moon, it would
soon receive a powerful reminder of the dangers of spaceflight.
[overlapping voices] ‘Houston we’ve had a problem’
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