When America Went to the Moon
The cold war inspired it, big bucks backed it and Yankee ingenuity made it happen; 25 years later, the footprints in the lunar dust still inspire awe
The men who answered the call to become astronauts knew the dangers and relished them. Most were the best-of-the-best test pilots with egos to match, and the NASA public relations machine worked hard to make them heroes. Life magazine paid each astronaut $16,000 a year in exchange for exclusive rights to his story, nearly as much as Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's 1969 salary as an Air Force colonel.
The astronauts' effect on the public was electrifying. Recalling the day the Apollo 13 crew visited a TRW facility where he worked at the time, current NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin says: "The excitement was unbelievable. People just wanted to touch them. When I touched one of the astronauts, I felt I had touched a god."
By the time the Apollo program was ready to deliver on Kennedy's promise in 1969, however, the world had been starkly transformed. Kennedy was long since dead, and Johnson had not stood for re-election. America was mired in a divisive war in Vietnam, riots had shaken major cities, campuses across the land were in turmoil and young baby boomers were preparing to converge on a farm near Woodstock, N.Y. By then, astronauts had made 10 orbital flights in two-man Gemini spacecraft. Two Apollo missions had circled the Earth, and two had circumnavigated the moon. A moon landing was to be attempted on the fifth Apollo flight. In an otherwise awful year, it would be a singular event that brought Americans together, however briefly.
Nearly a million people gathered along the Florida coast on the morning of July 16 to watch the launch of the three-stage Saturn V rocket. The three Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, strapped into the command module atop the 363-foot-tall rocket, thundered skyward from Pad 39A at 9:32, propelled by five gigantic engines that generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin, with barely 20 seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the fragile lunar excursion module with the call sign Eagle, touched down on the surface of the moon. "Houston, Tranquillity Base here," Armstrong radioed. "The Eagle has landed." By some estimates, a half billion people--perhaps 15 percent of the entire global population at the time--watched the events on live television. When the crew splashed down in the Pacific on July 24, fulfilling JFK's commitment with a safe return, the big screen in Mission Control flashed the classic understatement: "TASK ACCOMPLISHED, July 1969."
Five more Apollo flights landed on the moon through the end of 1972, but the spell of Apollo 11 was never to be matched. Three more missions that had been scheduled were canceled. And one mission didn't make it: Apollo 13, which aborted spectacularly when an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the moon (box, below).
Apollo's accomplishments were--and were supposed to be--political. But there was scientific gold as well. The 841 pounds of rocks that the astronauts brought back shed enormous light on the surface composition of our nearest neighbor, although the experiments never conclusively resolved the questions of where the moon came from or how it evolved. In more down-to-earth applications, medicine was the biggest beneficiary. Digital image-enhancing techniques pioneered at NASA in its quest for accurate satellite pictures of prospective lunar landing sites are now used in scanners to peer into the body without invasive surgery. Biomedical telemetry originally developed to keep Mission Control doctors apprised of the astronauts' condition is now used to beam patients' vital signs to nurses' stations. The rigors of space flight also triggered the development of strong, light materials such as Teflon-coated beta-fiber weave refined by Owens-Corning for spacesuits. A heavier version of the same fabric is now used to roof stadiums--and, most recently, the terminal building of the new Denver International Airport. Even the cordless drill used to recover lunar soil samples has grown into a wide range of cordless tools, including the Dustbuster.
advertisement
