Timothy Birdnow

Fifty one years ago today Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

In one of Mankind's greatest moments in our history two men set foot on the Earth's faithful companion.

The Moon landing is fascinating for a variety of reasons. First, it was done in just nine years; the first satellite was put in orbit by the Soviets in 1959, and the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) in 1961. Gagarin actually orbited Earth while the American Alan Shephard merely did a suborbital flight one month later. But the implications were obvious at the time; the Soviets had superior launch capabilities, meaning they had superior missile capabilities and so could probably nuke us and we couldn't respond.

President Kennedy instituted a catch-up program with the intention of putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade - what today would appear to be an impossible timetable. We were different people back then.

At any rate, we moved swiftly and surely with developing our capabilities, through the one-man Mercury program, then the two-man Gemini (where we worked a lot of the kinks out of space flight, including docking and space walks etc.) And finally to Apollo. (Many Apollo missions were merely hardware tests, so you have to get to Apollo 8 before anything interesting happened.)

Apollo One was the heartbreaker. A ground test saw the astronauts (Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee) died when a fire broke out and the pure oxygen atmosphere made it impossible to stop. Also, the hatch wouldn't let them out. The men died entombed in their tiny capsule.

But we didn't stop and Apollo 8 did the incredible; orbited the Moon. In fact, it was the first time anyone had ever seen the far side, the so-called "dark side" of that body. (The lunar far side is rather uninteresting insofar as it has few dramatic features as in the visible face, but these were the first people to look at it!)

That led to Apollo 10 (Apollo 9 was a test of the Lunar Module) which passed very close to the surface. Then came the big day.

Armstrong got the most coveted role in NASA history; he was chosen to command The Eagle and to be the first guy to set foot on another world.

Michael Collins, who was stuck playing nursemaid to the command ship Columbia) is fairly forgotten, although he was an accomplished astronaut. He was perhaps the loneliest man in human history, having been left alone in lunar orbit and being cut off from NASA when Columbia went behind the satellite.

Collins said he never felt lonely or annoyed by being stuck in Columbia; he was too worried about his friends. He had a nail-biting job, for sure. HE was there to go fetch the other two if they made back into orbit.

Collins would likely have gone had the program not been cancelled. Actually, Collins retired before that; had he stayed he may have been chosen commander of Apollo 17, the last flight; he was on the duty roster for that (based on the rotating system NASA used.)

At any rate, it was Armstrong and Aldrin who got the honors.

What wasn't told to the public at the time was that there were serious problems with the landing.

They had a major computer malfunction, giving them a code that suggested total computer failure as they were descending. This was serious as a heart attack; Eagle needed the guidance computer to get the angle and velocity correct. The failure came at a critical moment, too, when they were reaching the "point of no return" and the decision had to be made whether to abort or land. Given the position they were in it was determined that landing was probably the safer course of action, so they proceeded with the landing.

But what did they find? Boulders the size of cars strewn all over the landing site. These weren't visible from Earth and they posed a HUGE problem. Armstrong had to scramble to find another LZ and quickly, because his fuel was running out. He flew a couple of miles from the target and found a clear spot - and touched the bird down. Score one for human piloting!

At any rate, The Eagle had landed.

Now, the Eagle was a tiny thing, just barely large enough for two men to stand in (they couldn't fit seats and couldn't afford the extra weight) but standing in lunar gravity is easy, so the astronauts had to forego the luxury of sitting. And the thing was flimsy; the skin of the LEM was no thicker than a beer can.

Not exactly luxurious accommodations, but who cares when  you get to be the first guy on a new world - and have so very much to see.

At any rate, Armstrong stepped off the LEM'S pad onto the surface with the famous words "that's one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind". He - and NASA - claimed this was impromptu, but I've never believed it; they wouldn't leave so momentous a thing as the first words of a man on the Moon to chance. Also, notice Armstrong didn't say "for A man"; it was as though it was scripted and he flubbed it.

Be that as it may, he could have clucked like a chicken and nobody would have cared; we had a human being standing on another world!

The rest is history.

Armstrong never did like his fame. He quit NASA after the landing and hid out at a rural university, where he tried to duck his stardom. His wife, bored by the rural life, left him. He eventually died at the age of 82 (August 25, 2012).

Michael Collins has also passed away. Now only Buzz Aldrin remains.

It really is too bad we gave up the space program and especially the Moon; we should have tried to establish permanent bases, and eventual mining and research colonies. We needed to exploit the Moon for her resources and use them to build space structures to allow us to do more deep space exploration. An L4 or L5 space station would be nice (L4 and L5 are short for Lagrangian Points, which are stable points equidistant from one another in Earth's orbit. They lie 33 degrees ahead of and behind the Moon and if you put something there it will stay there forever, or a long time at least.)

Such a station would allow us to build deep space ships for a trip to Mars, and eventual Martian settlement.

I want to see us settle the Moon, too. We can learn a lot about living off-planet by doing that, establishing permanent settlements. If something goes terribly wrong we can always go home. And we can get supplies from Earth, and even be in communication with Earth (imagine; you could go on the internet if you were a lunar settler; something impossible on, say, Mars.)

We may do it yet, but it's been fifty one years now. But Earth will wither and die without a new frontier, and Man is a restless critter. We need new horizons, new territories, new experiences and hopes and dreams. We have a whole planet just a short hop away to start.

Let's get at it then!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:22 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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