A little time lapse look into building our bar over the last few weeks.

50 years ago today, at 20:17 UTC (3:17pm EST), Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle landed on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility. This is the story of that landing. Some of this content will be repeats of previous facts.

We start after Neil and Buzz in the Lunar Module (LM) have disconnected from Michael Collins in the Command Service Module (CSM) and were heading down to the moon.

(Diagrams of the different spacecrafts are at the bottom of this article)



Decent to the surface
About 4 minutes into their decent and landing sequence, they got a program alarm. 1202. Unable to find this error in their book, a choice had to be made.
1. Continue with the unknown alarm and potentially crash into the moon
2. Abort, which could also fail due to the unknown alarm
3. Continue with the unknown alarm and potentially land successfully.

NASA discovered the alarm meant the computer was over loaded and was going to stop processing more requests until it caught up. NASA determined as long as the alarm was intermittent, they were good to continue landing. During the entire landing and confusion of the error, there was also a problem with the antenna causing communication problems.

Low on fuel and off course
With an unreliable computer, Neil took over control of the Landing Module (LM) and proceeded to manually land. Due to the issues with the computer, they now found themselves off course. Instead of a nice smooth landing area as expected, they were now heading into a rough, rocky area. With less than a minute of fuel left, they still had not found a safe place to land. The 30 second mark was their final chance to abort the mission. With dust being kicked up from the engines, they had no way of seeing the surface any more to see if it was safe to land, so they chose to just continue and land. They landed on the surface with 23 seconds of fuel left.

Video of the final minute of the landing, shot from the 16mm camera in the LM window.

We’re on the moon, now can we get out?
Buzz and Neil didn’t immediately get out after landing on the moon. In fact, their first order of business after a systems check was to take a nap. Being too excited from, you know, landing on the moon, they convinced NASA to let them skip their nap, however they needed to take the time to just rest and relax.

Three hours later, they were ready to exit onto the surface. All suited up, they started to depressurize the LM, however once the gauge read zero, they found there was still too much pressure to open the hatch.

“We tried to pull the door open, and it wouldn’t come open,” Aldrin said. “We thought, ‘Well, I wonder if we’re going to get out or not?’ It took an abnormal time for it to finally get to a point where we felt we could pull on a fairly flimsy door.”

In fact, Aldrin eventually resorted to peeling back one edge of the front hatch … but carefully. “You don’t wanna rupture that door and leave yourself in a vacuum for the rest of the mission!” he recalled with a chuckle.

Armstrong maneuvered toward the open hatch, aided by Aldrin. As Armstrong twisted his bulky suit to head out, unheard in the vacuum of the cabin, something small snapped. Armstrong’s backpack had broken off the ascent engine arming switch. This would not be discovered until 21 hours later when they needed that switch to leave the surface of the moon.

Leaving the moon
While making preparations to leave the surface, Buzz noticed the broken switch laying on the LM floor covered in moon dust. Unable to activate the broken switch, Mission Control advised the astronauts to retract the point of one of their Fisher-provided ballpoint pens and use the hollow end to push the broken circuit breaker switch. Aldrin, however, recalls it a bit differently.

“Since it was electrical, I decided not to put my finger in, or use anything that had metal on the end, I had a felt-tipped pen in the shoulder pocket of my flight suit that might do the job.”

“I inserted the pen into the small opening where the circuit breaker switch should have been, and pushed it in; sure enough, the circuit breaker held. We were going to get off the moon, after all,” Aldrin recounted. “To this day, I still have the broken circuit breaker switch and the felt-tipped pen I used to ignite our engines.”



For the most part, their docking with Collins in the command module and heading back to earth was pretty uneventful.

The astronauts used Eagle‘s ascent stage to lift off from the lunar surface, leaving the decent stage on the moon, and rejoin Collins in the command service module. They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that propelled the ship out of the last of its 30 lunar orbits on a trajectory back to Earth. Back in Earth orbit, they jettisoned the service module (the cylinder part of the CSM) and started re-entry in the Command Module. They returned to Earth and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24 at 16:50 UTC after more than eight days in space.

Contingencies and more stuff left on the surface
There was a fairly good chance that the mission would be a failure, and either Neil and Buzz would be left to die on the moon, or all three astronauts would be lost.

30 years after the moon landing, it was discovered that in preparation for this, President Nixon had a speech prepared if the worst should happen.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.

In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.“

Michael Collins recounts in his autobiography that his biggest fear wasn’t complete mission failure and loss of his own life along with Neil and Buzz, but that Neil and Buzz would be stuck on the surface of the moon and he would be forced to return home alone. “I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.”

Collins took this photo of the LM heading toward the surface. This photo is the only photo that includes every person in the world, alive or dead, except for Michael Collins. (it’s also the background photo on my phone)



Among the other things left on the moon, described in previous facts, each moon landing mission also left a mirror on the moon. This was done so that NASA (and you at home with the correct laser telescope) can beam a laser off the mirror to both verify the location of the moon landings, as well as monitor the distance between the moon and the earth (sub fun fact: the moon is very slowly moving away from the earth and will one day stop orbiting us. Don’t worry, we’ll all have been dead for millions of years by then.)



Finally, you know that footage of Neil going down the ladder, making those iconic footprints? Yeah, NASA lost that original footage as well as a bunch of other original footage from the first moon landing. Most of the video we all know today was actually just a recording someone made of the original footage (before it was lost) on a monitor.



The good news is they found where the tapes went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed — magnetically erased — and re-used to save money.

“The goal was live TV, We should have had a historian running around saying ‘I don’t care if you are ever going to use them — we are going to keep them’,”

They found good copies in the archives of CBS news and some recordings called kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson Space Center.

You can re-live the entire Apollo 11 mission in real-time at: https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

During the Apollo 11 moon mission, almost every single photo you see of an astronaut on the lunar surface is of Buzz Aldrin. Many people attribute this photo as being Neil Armstrong



but in fact there are only about three photos of Neil on the lunar surface that exist. This is because Neil was the one tasked with carrying the camera and taking photos. The camera was mounted to his chest, so he couldn’t turn it back on himself. Because of that, he’s not really in any of them. That photo I just said people mistake for Neil, but is actually Buzz? Neil is in that photo, but as a reflection in Buzz’s face shield. Someone recently enhanced the photo to better show the reflection.



One photo of Neil on the moon is a screengrab from a video camera that was mounted on top of the lunar lander. This is the same camera as the camera Neil smuggled back to earth mentioned in a previous fact.



Neil’s shadow as he grabs a photo of the lander.



This photo is believed to be the only known actual photo of Neil on the moon, taken by Buzz with a portable 16mm camera.



The only shots of the two of them together on the moon come from that lander mounted video camera. That camera captured them setting up the flag.



Close the hatch
After Neil Armstrong became the first person on the moon, Buzz Aldrin followed twelve minutes later. The hatch on the lunar lander was closed most of the way to help keep the heat in the lander, however Neil had to remind Buzz not to fully close the hatch as there was a fear if the hatch fully closed and the lander re-pressurized with the astronauts out on the lunar surface, that the internal pressure would be too much to overcome and they wouldn’t be able to open the hatch to get back in.

This was because they could not get all the air out of the LM. The astronauts opened the valve and watched as the oxygen vented out … but even as it read zero, they could not get the hatch open. There was still too much pressure inside the lander.

“We tried to pull the door open, and it wouldn’t come open,” Aldrin said. “We thought, ‘Well, I wonder if we’re going to get out or not?’ It took an abnormal time for it to finally get to a point where we felt we could pull on a fairly flimsy door.”

In fact, Aldrin eventually resorted to peeling back one edge of the front hatch … but carefully. “You don’t wanna rupture that door and leave yourself in a vacuum for the rest of the mission!” he recalled with a chuckle.

Space Grandmas
Many of the early astronauts were rambunctious, fighter pilot type of people. Neil Armstrong was the first civilian accepted into the astronaut program and was kind of looked at as a goody two shoes by other astronauts. With Apollo 11 heading for the moon, TV crews swarmed the Armstrong house and interviewed his 82 year old grandma. She said “I think it’s dangerous. I told Neil to look around and not step out if it didn’t look good. He said he wouldn’t”

Customs
Before the ticker tape parades and the inevitable world tour, the triumphant Apollo 11 astronauts were greeted with a more mundane aspect of life on Earth when they splashed down, going through customs.

Just what did Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins have to declare? Moon rocks, moon dust and other lunar samples, according to the customs form filed at the Honolulu Airport in Hawaii on July 24, 1969 – the day the Apollo 11 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean to end their historic moon landing mission. The customs form is signed by all three Apollo 11 astronauts. They declared their cargo and listed their flight route as starting Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) in Florida with a stopover on the moon.

Since Hawaii had already become a state by the time of the moon landing, the customs form was done as a joke to welcome back the crew. The crew then spent 21 days in a mobile quarantine facility while NASA determined they hadn’t brought back anything harmful from space.



Little Neil Armstrong

Being an American Badass that first stepped on the moon doesn’t mean you weren’t adorable as a kid, or still treated like an average Joe afterwards. Thought to be the oldest known item ever signed by Neil is a letter he wrote to the Easter bunny asking the Easter bunny to hide his basket.

It reads
“Dear Easter Bunny
Please Hide our baskets
And try to make us finet (find spelled wrong) them
Neil”

Average Joe

Imagine, you just flew to the moon and back. You were welcomed home by the president of the united states and a ticker tape parade was thrown in your honor. A few years later, you decide you want a credit card and you are denied. How could someone like Neil be denied a Diner’s Club card? He didn’t make enough money. The astronauts were paid government salaries and didn’t get bonuses for doing stuff like traveling 400,000 to and from the moon. Neil’s 1969 salary was about $20,000 and that was below the salary requirements for the Diner’s Club card at the time. Sorry, Neil. At least they returned his $15 check for the application fee.

For those that don’t know, every ounce carried into space or back to earth from space need to be accounted for to be added into payload and trajectory calculations. If the payload is heavier than the rocket is built for, then it doesn’t make it into orbit. Trying to come back from the moon? Make sure the mass of your space craft is accurate or the thrust you use to get back could cause you to miss the earth completely or throw you into the atmosphere too hard.

Some items were intended to be left on the moon, such as experiments and equipment that couldn’t come back. Some, however, was better left on the moon than trying to bring it back in a confined space for several days. Apollo astronauts needed to use the bathroom and the bags that collected their waste were left on the moon (I’ll going to this subject in a future post).



Buzz Aldrin actually has the honor of being the first person to pee on the moon. Well, to pee while standing on the moon.

According to space historian Teasel Muir-Harmony’s book, “Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects,” Aldrin’s urine collection device bag broke on a leap onto the lunar surface, leaking into his left boot. So one could say his steps on the moon — or those, at least — were slushier than expected.

“Everyone has their first on the moon,” Aldrin said.

Souvenirs
Before setting back from the moon during the Apollo 11 moon landing, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong were chatting back and forth with NASA to calculate the weight of their spacecraft after collecting moon samples and leaving equipment behind.

Here are some of the transcripts of the conversation about their sample bags:

Aldrin: Now, here are a couple of bags – and I think it’s self-explanatory what goes in them.

Aldrin: Get ready for those million-dollar boxes. Got a lot of weight; now, watch it.

Collins: You intend to keep [garble]?

Armstrong: Yes.

[A few min later after the sample bags are full, speaking with Collins who remained in orbit around the moon during the landing]

Armstrong: Okay. If you want to have a look at what the Moon looks like, you can open that up and look. Don’t open the bag, though.

[Armstrong is allowing Collins a quick look at the Contingency Sample, the first small bag of lunar soil he collected on the surface. He scooped this up and put it in a pocket, in case he and Aldrin had to depart quickly. Although he did not reach the surface, Collins becomes the third human being to get a close-up look at lunar soil. Armstrong’s last comment appears to be an instruction not to open a different bag of samples.]

[At this point Collins possibly makes a remark, not picked up by the onboard recorder, about the gray color of the lunar samples. That would elicit the following ironic wit from Armstrong.]

Armstrong: You’d never have guessed, huh? (Laughter)

[Now filling out the checklist]

Collins: What was that bag [garble]?

Armstrong: Contingency sample.

Collins: Rock?

Armstrong: Yes, there’s some rocks in it, too. You can feel them, but you can’t see them; they’re covered with that – graphite.

[Then, when referencing the mystery bag Collins wasn’t allowed to look in]

Armstrong: You know, that – that one’s just a bunch of trash that we want to take back – LM parts, odds and ends, and it won’t stay closed by itself. We’ll have to figure something out for it.

That final line from Neil was where he referenced the bag to Mission Control who was calculating the return trajectory. This was imperative as the return trajectory calculations would have needed to accommodate the additional, unexpected weight (about 10lbs) in order to allow the team’s safe re-entry to Earth.

The bag was never mentioned upon returning to earth and was forgotten about.

In the wake of his death, Carol Armstrong donated many of Neil’s Apollo 11 artifacts to the National Air & Space Museum. She also shared some of her husband’s correspondence and paper files to Purdue.

Not until 2015 did Carol Armstrong email the museum with the news she’d found, “a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft.” With the email, she included a picture of the items, spread out on her carpet.

Though not all of the items were from the Apollo 11 mission, the white bag used to carry the items, the camera used to film Neil descending the ladder from inside the Lunar Module, and a safety tether used for space walks are confirmed from the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hidden away in Neil’s Armstrong’s closet for 50 years.

If you ever wanted to be as an exciting of a person as I am, you can actually read through all communication transcripts from all the NASA missions. https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ap11fj/index.html

This photo contains every single human, alive or dead, in existence except for one man, Michael Collins (who took the photo) (It’s also brewer Jason’s wallpaper on his phone)

Michael Collins was the pilot of the Apollo 11 command module, Columbia. This meant when Neil and Buzz were on the moon, Collins remained in the command module relaying messages and performing other tasks.



During the 22 hours Armstrong and Aldrin spent on the moon, Collins orbited the Moon alone in the command module. This meant that he passed over the dark side of the Moon several times. The entire body of the Moon stood between the Earth and Collins in the command module for 47 minutes each orbit. Therefore, he was unable to communicate neither with the Apollo 11 Mission Control back on Earth, nor with the other two astronauts who were on the surface. Unable to communicate created a unique sense of loneliness.



In a statement to the public, NASA said “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing during this 47 minutes of each lunar revolution when he’s behind the Moon with no one to talk to except his tape recorder aboard Columbia.”

Upon his return to Earth, Collins said: “I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

In 2009, which marked the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing, Collins admitted that his biggest fear during the entire mission arose from a different concern: he was afraid that something might go wrong with the lunar module and that Aldrin and Armstrong might perish on the surface of the Moon or during their ascent back to Columbia.

“My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter,” he wrote.

“If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.”

All three returned safely to Earth on July 24th, 1969.