![]() ![]() The Apollo 11 crew, left to right: mission commander Neil Armstrong, command module pilot Mike Collins and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin. in orbital mechanics from MIT and helped perfect the rendezvous techniques needed by Apollo crews.Ĭollins, one of the most articulate astronauts, was an equally accomplished pilot who thoughtfully accepted his role as the man who would stay behind in lunar orbit while his more famous crewmates descended to the surface. Aldrin, like Armstrong a Korean War fighter pilot, earned a Ph.D. And they all had very different personalities.Īrmstrong was the consummate test pilot who flew the fabled X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space and cooly overcame in-flight emergencies. All three were accomplished spaceflight veterans, top-notch pilots and experts on Apollo's myriad systems. The famous moon boot sole print was the result of an answer to that design challenge, solved by a model maker in Connecticut.Ĭold War hero or whitewashed Nazi villain? That’s the question Alejandro de la Garza takes on in a smart, thoughtful piece on how historians reckon with iconoclast Wernher von Braun today.Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin and command module pilot Mike Collins were assigned to the first moon-landing mission in January 1969, six months before launch. It could have been quicksand, for all we knew. Before the Apollo missions, NASA had no samples of moon soil, or really much of an idea of what the surface was actually like. The old moon boots were designed blindly. The Los Angeles Times did a nice job of rounding up and profiling in miniature the likeliest candidates: the 12 women in NASA’s active astronaut corps (there are currently 26 men). NASA has vowed that the next time it puts astronauts on the lunar surface, at least one of them will be a woman. The next moon boots will be worn by a woman. TIME’s Olivia Waxman explains what we know and don’t know about the line. What is surprising is how little agreement there is about it-how Armstrong came up with it, what it really meant to him, if it has been misquoted for years. But in recent years, interest in reaching the moon again has picked up, with Japan, the European Space Agency, China, and India all making their first successful moon mission.Ĭlick here for a much more in-depth, full-screen version of this chart.ĭid he say what we think he said? Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” line is one of the most famous recorded sentences in American history, and so it’s no surprise that there has been so much scholarship on it. ![]() Since then, not a single human has stepped foot on the Earth’s closest celestial neighbor. From 1969 to 1972, 12 people-all Americans- walked on the lunar surface. In 1966, Roscosmos-the U.S.S.R.’s space agency-made the first soft touchdown on the moon.īut in the late 1960s, NASA blew past Roscosmos with the Apollo program, with the first crewed mission to the moon and, of course, the Apollo 11 mission that enabled the first people to walk on the moon. Luna 2 was the first to reach the lunar surface, and Luna 3 sent back the first images of the dark side of the moon. drew first blood in the Cold War space race with the U.S.: in that one year, the Soviet’s Luna 1 became the first spacecraft to reach the moon. All over the world, countries are looking at ways to move beyond the world. And in the future, we’ll be looking at some of the other players in the space game-India, Japan, the European Union, and more. This week’s TIME cover takes a deep dive into the new moon race. Yet, tantalizingly, there is a lot of looking forward too: to a robust competition to return to the moon and explore deeper in space. But celebrating history is, by definition, a backward-looking exercise-a fond one, but backward all the same. We’re contemplating that history a lot this week, as the world celebrates the half-century anniversary of Apollo 11-and there’s nothing wrong with that. Aldrin had one and he used it, and on the pivot point of a fifty-cent bit of plastic nothing, history turned and the lunar module lifted off. But a pen-a felt tip to prevent the risk of a metal-on-metal short-might do just fine. It was far too small a hole for a finger. The stem of the switch was still visible, recessed inside the small hole remaining in the instrument panel. ![]() In the end, the solution was wonderfully simple, wonderfully crude. In Houston, engineers scrambled to find a workaround that would reroute power to the engine without the switch, but after several hours, they had nothing. ![]()
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