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.

Getting into space required a lot of inventing, a lot of craziness, and a lot of badasses.

Most people know Neil Armstrong was the first person on the moon and some even know of his modest, down home family type of personality which was somewhat juxtaposed with the other astronauts.

What most people don’t know is Neil’s journey to the moon was preceded by several times looking straight at death and calmly saying, not today. I have work to do.

Neil is considered to be the first civilian astronaut because he was not employed by the armed forces at the time he became an astronaut, however he had served in the Navy as a pilot before attending Purdue.

During the Korean war, he was on a bombing run and was hit by anti-aircraft fire and had to bail out.

After the war, he came to Purdue and got his degree and went on to become a test pilot.

He flew in the experimental rocket plane, the X-15 seven times.


One of the flights he was flying so fast and so high, that when he attempted to start to descend to land, there wasn’t enough air around the plane for the planes controls to be effective. He managed to get the plane slowed enough and low enough that his controls started to work again, but now, still traveling at 10 football fields per second, he had passed his landing site and had to turn around, which the plane wasn’t really designed to do. He managed to get it turned around and landed in his original landing site instead of bouncing off the atmosphere and breaking apart in the air, or gliding uncontrollably into the ocean. https://youtu.be/xSJ-Oo9G0Qk?t=42

After the X-15 program, Neil joined the Air Force’s Man in Space Soonest program (no really, that’s what it was called) which later became Project Mercury after NASA was formed and took over space operations from the Air Force. Neil was also selected to fly Boeing’s X-20 Dyna-soar (they were really good at naming things back then) which was a tiny plane that was launched on a rocket.


Though the program was cancelled during construction and the X-20 never flew, the concept for a plane being launched by a rocket later turned into the Space Shuttle Program.

But probably Neil’s biggest moment of simply shrugging off death came while preparing for the moon landing and flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV).

Neil had flown the LLRV 30-40 times, but on May 6, 1968 experienced a failed thruster, ejected at the last second, and after being checked out medically, simply went back to his office to continue working without mentioning his crash to anyone in the office as if it were no big deal. (You can skip to 1:25 if you don’t want a short description of the actual Lunar Lander) https://youtu.be/OlJGQ92IgFk

Most of you have probably seen the old videos of astronauts in the centrifuge and other weird bouncing chairs and such (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6F9Ar_FK4o), but some of the other training astronauts have to endure that is less known to the public is survival training.

Astronauts have to undergo desert, jungle, open sea, and arctic survival training.

In the early days of space flight, much like everything else, training was less planned out and more “let’s drops these guys in the middle of the jungle with no supplies and see what happens. It was quite literally that.

Here is Neil Armstrong and other Mercury astronauts building some survival contraptions



Sometimes you’re just dropped in the desert. Sometimes you’re given supplies. Supplies in that most likely if your capsule crashed in the desert and you survived, most likely the parachute for the capsule would be with you, so you can make protective clothing and shelter from it.




Water training was critical, as the desert, jungle, and arctic training was to prepare for a mission failure of some kind in which the capsule is off course on take-off or landing and crashes outside the designated landing area. Before the shuttle program, all NASA space craft came back to earth via water landing. So extensive training was done in water.

This training ranged from “throw them into the ocean to see how long they can tread water before putting themselves in a harness to be air lifted out”

to putting them in an actual test space craft to be able to perform exiting the craft while floating in the ocean.



(Why are they in full bio-suits in that last one? Never having been to the moon and back, NASA wasn’t sure if the astronauts would be contaminated, so they practiced water exists in full bio-suits as well, which the Apollo 11 crew actually wore upon return to the earth after their trip to the moon)

Training eventually became more structured and much of the training started to be done in more controllable environments such as specially built pool where different water conditions could be created.




Today’s astronaut has a different kind of training. 6+ hour space walks are common for ISS astronauts, so learning how to live in a pressurized space suit for that long is key to both surviving and performing their duties in space. Here is Purdue Astronaut Scott Tingle describing the rigorous underwater spacewalk training astronauts have to complete. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sbMi0rqX8o

Yes. Yes you were. We did promise to start doing regular construction updates.

About that…

Turns out spring is a busy time for, well, just about everyone but especially contractors and permit issuers. So as of yet, we don’t have our construction permit and are still waiting on contractor bids to come in. Until then, we can’t make any major progress on the building itself.

HOWEVER! We’re not just sitting around thinking up clever space related beer names for beer we can eventually serve you (we’re doing that, it’s just not the only thing we’re doing).

What’s been done so far?
– we have applied for our federal TTB permit and hope to have that in the next few weeks
-We have applied for our local alcohol permits
-We have ordered our Blichmann Engineering 5 barrel brewing system and hope to have that the beginning of August
– We have started buying kitchen equipment
– and we’ve been petting and hugging a lot of cats to keep our stress levels under control.

Permits and paperwork have taken up most of our time.

Ideally, all the things we’re waiting on come in all at once and we can power through construction quickly. Luckily, the plumbing and electrical upgrades are the biggest construction needed and the space will just need some decorating and some places for you to sit for us to open our doors.

Stay tuned for more updates.

We finally have a location for the brewery! For real this time!

Our architects are working on floor plans right now and as soon as we have them finalized, we will have a better idea of our timeline for opening. Keep checking our website and social media for updates!

Six months is a long time for us to be silent, and for that we apologize. Some of you have contacted us through social media, and this last weekend we had the pleasure of chatting with some of you in person while attending the Winter Warmer at Lafayette Brew Co. The general topic: When the hell are you going to open and why no updates?

The reason for that silence? In this case it’s no news is bad news. 2018 was pretty rough on us. After spending much of the year working to get the Parkside location rezoned, parking variances, and raising funds to afford our down payment, we have unfortunately lost the Parkside building.

The main issue was, after all the previous issues we had getting our bank to embrace the concept of the vegetarian brewpub, the powers that be chose to provide us with a loan to buy the building, but would not provide a loan for the expansion and equipment needed to house the brewery portion. Additionally, one of the final steps in the process was an appraisal, which came back far lower than we needed in order to proceed with the purchase. While we possibly could have moved forward with renting the space rather than buying, it would have taken us several years to afford to build on the brewery. Making delicious vegetarian food for all of you is good, however our main mission is to brew beer, making the Parkside building no longer an option.

So we licked our wounds, and we sat. Quiet. Mourning.

We provide this update, not as a big announcement of what is to come, but as an announcement that we are still here and we are still moving forward. We just don’t have any solid timeline.

For the last couple of months, we have been negotiating with a couple of potential properties, but the process is quite slow and we do not have a timeline for when we will know where our home will be.

When we finally get a location secured, after some much needed celebratory beers, we will make an announcement to the world. We’ll have so many updates when we are working to open that you’ll pine for the days this last six months when we were silent.

As NASA flight director Gene Kranz said: “Failure is not an option”