· ·

“One small step…” The Moon Landing, the Mysterious Nature of ‘Tiny’ Actions, and the Vital Significance of Remembering Positive Historical Moments (55th Anniversary)

Bypo.smeallie

If someone says they’re “over the moon,” they of course don’t mean it literally. But…what if they do? Exactly 55 years ago today, several men could say they were “over the moon,” and it wouldn’t be proverbial. As for the rest of us…both nationally and globally…we were proverbially “over the moon” when they were literally over it.

“Boris and Natasha”

The Moon Landing. One of humanity’s greatest achievements. Let’s turn the clock back several years before we landed on the moon, though, and see what got us there! The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was of course the main catalyst for our mission. The Soviet Union shocked the United States when, on October 4, 1957, they launched the artificial satellite Sputnik 1 into earthly orbit, and, in turn, initiated the “Space Race.” Nuclear war was also of course another major precedent. What if the Soviet Union could quickly nuke us with rockets? Their subsequent, rapid-fire achievements, including the R-7 and the Lunar 1-3 spacecrafts, certainly didn’t ease any of our tensions. The U.S. knew it needed to accelerate its previously existing military space and missile projects, and, with that, the civilian agency known as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was born!

“Not because it’s easy, but because it is hard…”

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy addressed the United States Congress on “Urgent Needs” and declared:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade [1960s] is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish”1.

Kennedy elaborated further, proposing that the U.S. develop appropriate lunar space crafts, alternative liquid, engines for unmanned missions, and solid fuel boosters1. He gave another rousing speech to a crowd of football game attendees at Rice University on September 12, 1962, and then pushed forward with “Project Apollo”2. Many Americans initially opposed this so-called “moondoggle” (as Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert Wiener phrased it), and, when Kennedy met with Premier of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961 and proposed they make the Moon landing a joint project, Khrushchev declined3,4,5. Kennedy proposed the same “joint venture” idea to the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 1963, but, they also abandoned this idea after Kennedy’s death several months later6,7.

Preparation

The United States, nonetheless, continued with the moon-landing mission. In July 1962, NASA head James Webb announced that the agency would use a lunar orbit rendezvous and supply the Apollo 11 spacecraft with three major parts—a command module (CM) with a cabin for the three astronauts, a service module (SM) that supported the command module with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen, and water, and a lunar module (LM)8,9,10. The Lunar Module had two stages: a descent stage for landing on the Moon and an ascent stage to place the astronauts back into lunar orbit10. NASA developed a single Saturn V rocket that they could then launch into outer space, and Project Gemini developed other technologies and techniques for the Apollo 11 spacecraft11,12.

NASA adopted new advances in semiconductor electronic technology, including metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETS) in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) and silicon integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), for Project Apollo13,14.15. On January 27, 1967, a devastating fire aboard Apollo 1 (in which astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee died) abruptly halted the project16. Apollo 7 evaluated the command module in Earth orbit in October 1968, Apollo 8 tested it in lunar orbit in December of that year, Apollo 9 put the module through its paces in Earth orbit in March 1969, and, in May of that year, Apollo 10 conducted a “dress rehearsal” in lunar orbit17,18,19. Then July of 1969 arrived, and Apollo 11 was ready to go!

The Launch

The famous crew of Apollo 11 included Neil Armstrong (Commander), Edwin “Buzz” E. Aldrin Jr. (Lunar Module Pilot), and Michael Collins (Commander Module Pilot). The Apollo 11 spacecraft was officially known as CM-107 Columbia and Lunar Module Eagle. Their landing site was known as “Tranquility Base,” and their recovery vessels included Helicopter 66 and the USS Hornet.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins (Statues)

July 16

At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 launched from Florida’s appropriately named space station Cape Kennedy20. 2 hours, 44 minutes and one-and-a-half revolutions after the launch, the S-IVB stage reignited for a second burn of five minutes and 48 seconds, and Apollo 11 entered translunar orbit20. The command service module (CSM) Columbia separated from the stage20. The spacecraft transposed and jettisoned the Spacecraft-Lunar Module (SLA) panels on the S-IVB stage, and the CSM docked with the lunar module (LM)20. The S-IVB stage then separated from the craft into heliocentric orbit about 4 hours and 40 minutes into the flight, and the first color TV transmission to Earth from Apollo 11 occurred during the translunar coast of the CSM/LM20.

July 17-19

On July 17, the crew performed one of four scheduled midcourse corrections programmed for the flight (the launch was successful, and so the other three were not needed)20. July 18th arrived. Armstrong and Aldrin put on their spacesuits, climbed through the docking tunnel from Columbia to Eagle to check out the LM, and made their second TV transmission20.

The following day Apollo 11 flew behind the moon out of contact with Earth. The first lunar orbit insertion maneuver came, and, at about 75 hours and 50 minutes into the flight, the crew performed a retrograde firing of the SPS for 357.5 seconds20. This placed the spacecraft into an initial, elliptical-lunar orbit of 69 by 190 miles20. Later, a second burn of the SPS for 17 seconds placed the docked vehicles into a lunar orbit of 62 by 70.5 miles (which Collins calculated would change the orbit of the CSM)20.

July 20-24

July 20, 1969. The Big Day. Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM again20. They made a final check, and, at 100 hours and 12 minutes into their flight, they undocked the Eagle and separated it from Columbia for visual inspection20. At 101 hours and 36 minutes the LM went behind the moon on its 13th orbit20. The LM descent engine fired for 30 seconds to provide retrograde thrust, and it began the descent orbit insertion (changing to an orbit of 9 by 67 miles; a trajectory virtually identical to that of Apollo 10)20.

At 102 hours and 33 minutes into flight, Columbia and Eagle reappeared from behind the moon20. The LM was about 300 miles up-range, and the crew performed a powered descent initiation with the descent engine firing for 756.3 seconds20. After 8 minutes, the LM reached a status of “high gate” about 26,000 feet above the surface and about five miles from the landing site20.

Armstrong partially piloted the Eagle, and he then landed it in the Sea of Tranquility in Site 2 at 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east longitude20. The crew was about four miles down range from the predicted touchdown point, and they touched down almost one-and-a-half minutes earlier than expected20.

The “Eagle has landed.”

Armstrong then famously announced that “the Eagle has landed,” deployed the TV camera for the transmission of the event back to Earth, Aldrin followed, and the crew positioned the camera on a tripod about 30 feet from the lunar module20. They planted the American flag into the moon’s surface, and Armstrong uttered one of the most famous lines in human history: “That’s one small step for man…one giant leap for mankind!” Five days later (July 24, 1969) the crew re-entered our planet’s atmosphere, parachuted out of their spacecraft, and Apollo 11 splashed down into the Pacific Ocean20.

Lunar Trivia

There’s a lot we can say about the Moon. It likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with the Earth several billion years ago21. The Moon serves as Earth’s only natural satellite, and it significantly impacts terrestrial events like the oceanic tides21. Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610…three extra moons we missed out on21. But ours is still impressive! Our moon…the Moon… has a radius of about 1,808 miles (1,740 kilometers), is less than a third of the width of Earth (if Earth were a nickel the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean), is about 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away from Earth, and each year it slowly moves away from our planet by about an inch21.

The Moon rotates at the same rate that it revolves around the Earth (synchronous rotation) …taking 27 Earth days to make a complete orbit21. It of course goes through different “phases.” A “full moon” occurs when we see the hemisphere of the Moon that the Sun fully illuminates, and a “new moon” occurs when the side of the Moon facing us has its night and the “far side” receives full sunlight21.

View of Earth from the Moon.

The Moon has no rings or moons of its own21. It has a solid, iron-rich inner core about 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius21. A liquid iron shell about 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick surrounds it, and a partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core21. The mantle, which extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon’s crust, is likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene (which in turn contain magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms)21.

The outer crust, which is about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on its far side, is comprised of oxygen silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, aluminum, and small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen21. The Moon’s temperatures range from 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when there is full Sun to -280 degrees Fahrenheit when the Moon is covered in complete darkness21.

The Moon’s sparse atmosphere doesn’t impede impacts21. Thus, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets has filled the Moon with a lot of craters (including the 52-mile/85-kilometer-wide Tycho Crater)21. The Moon is covered in a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, rocky debris (lunar regolith), fractured bedrock (megaregolith), and plenty of dark and light areas (maria and highlands, respectively), and it is certainly very noticeable and distinctive from an earthly vantage point21. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins brought a “moon rock” with him when he returned from Earth. It can be found in a stained-glass window at Washington National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.).

Pleasant “Flashbulbs”

Of all the facts we can say about the Moon, though, its influence on us as human beings might be the most important fact. That is to say…our association with it came to a magnificent peak on that fateful day in July of 1969. Plenty of people- all of course Baby Boomers and older- remember exactly where they were when they saw the Moon Landing live on national television…when they heard Armstrong’s historical proclamation. My parents and uncles and aunts were all with their grandparents, and my dad set up his tripod so he could photograph an image of the TV screen when it featured the landing.

Those who saw it will never forget it…just like they’ll, of course, never forget where they were on 9/11 or the days in which John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were shot. Generation X will never forget where they were when the Challenger exploded, and the youngest generations will probably never forget the day the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Notice, though, that unlike 9/11, Covid-19, or any other natural or human-caused catastrophes (or near-catastrophes), the Moon Landing was a fully positive experience. People who remember it remember it with nothing but delight and joy! One of my aunts says it was one of the greatest moments in her life! It is- needless to say- very sad that our positive “flashbulb memories” are far less in number than our negative ones.

I remember when Captain Sully Sullenberger safely performed the “Miracle on the Hudson”- January 15, 2009. Let’s not forget…that very same month and year the United States inaugurated its first African American president- Barack Obama. Even with that pivotal event, though, not everyone remembers it positively. Racists, white supremacists, and other bigots certainly don’t, but those who despised his politics probably do not think back on his initial inauguration too fondly either.

Ask anyone about Christopher Columbus discovering the New World. Some will sing and praise his name. Other people, though, will spit on it…citing his violence, oppression, and cruelty towards indigenous people as a reason for doing so. The Moon Landing, though, is almost universally regarded in a positive way (we’ll set aside all the “Moon Landing conspiracy theorists”). None of the exhausting divisions that accompany many- if not most- modern events accompanied our crowning, global achievement on July 20, 1969.

Neil Armstong’s elegant, antithetical statement is also of course extremely noteworthy. “One small step…one giant leap.” It is both amazing and haunting how the tiniest actions (or those that are seemingly the tiniest) can forever alter the course of national or global history. History comes in many different layers. Think of them as concentric circles. There’s global history, national history, state/provincial history, urban history, the history of every community, the history of every family, and of course…the history of every individual. They can all overlap in a billion different ways, and, sometimes, where they overlap is not always clear.

“Big” and “Small” Actions

Earlier this morning I ate breakfast and went to a martial arts class. That obviously isn’t anything historians will take note of, but it is still technically part of “history.” If I move my index finger back and forth or turn my head from side to side, that’s extremely, historically unimportant. But one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s finger-movements on November 22, 1963 was quite the opposite. Same thing goes for Donald Trump. Had he moved his head in a slightly different direction on July 13, 2024, the course of U.S. or even global history would’ve been incredibly different!

Conclusion

This “alternative history” thought experiment- sometimes associated with the classic “butterfly effect”- can be downright frightening. But, in the case of the Moon Landing…one tiny movement of a person’s foot signified the complete antithesis…the human species reaching a clear moment of enormous, historical victory (“one giant leap for mankind!”). Let’s take some time to celebrate this amazing achievement on its 55th anniversary!

SOURCES

  1. “Excerpt: ‘Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs'”. NASA. May 25, 1961. Archived from the original on March 1, 2021. Retrieved September 16, 2018.
  2. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. p. 15.
  3. Fishman, Charles. “What You Didn’t Know About the Apollo 11 Mission”. Smithsonian. Archived from the original on February 9, 2021. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
  4. Madrigal, Alexis C. (September 12, 2012). “Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program”. The Atlantic. Archived from the original on February 27, 2021. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
  5. Logsdon, John M. (2011). John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 32.
  6. “Address at 18th U.N. General Assembly”. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. September 20, 1963. Archived from the original on March 11, 2018. Retrieved March 11, 2018.
  7. Glass, Andrew (September 20, 2017). “JFK Proposes Joint Lunar Expedition with Soviets, September 20, 1963”. Politico. Archived from the original on September 23, 2020. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  8. “The Rendezvous That Was Almost Missed: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous and the Apollo Program”. NASA Langley Research Center Office of Public Affairs. NASA. December 1992. Archived from the original on December 23, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2018.
  9. Swenson, Loyd S. Jr.; Grimwood, James M.; Alexander, Charles C. (1966). This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury. The NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. pp. 85-86.
  10. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp.  72-77.
  11. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp. 48-49.
  12. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp. 181-182, pp. 205-208.
  13. Butler, P. M. (August 29, 1989). Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (PDF). NASA. pp. 1, 11, 134. Archived (PDF) from the original on August 12, 2019. Retrieved August 12, 2019.
  14. White, H. D.; Lokerson, D. C. (1971). “The Evolution of IMP Spacecraft Mosfet Data Systems”. IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. 18 (1): 233–236.
  15. “Apollo Guidance Computer and the First Silicon Chips”. National Air and Space Museum. Smithsonian Institution. October 14, 2015. Archived from the original on May 22, 2021. Retrieved September 1, 2019.
  16. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp. 181-182, pp. 214-218.
  17. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp. 181-182, pp. 265-272.
  18. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp. 181-182, pp. 274-284.
  19. Brooks, Courtney G.; Grimwood, James M.; Swenson, Loyd S. Jr. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. NASA History Series. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, NASA. pp. 181-182, pp. 292-300.
  20. https://www.nasa.gov/history/apollo-11-mission-overview/
  21. https://science.nasa.gov/moon/facts/

Similar Posts