Apollo 11: 50 Years Later

TW Telecast

Order your FREE book: "Your Ultimate Destiny" http://bit.ly/2NvWDmn June 1969, a man was practicing flying a strange looking contraption, an awkward looking, dangerous, and difficult to fly machine, not practical for traveling from Los Angeles to London. Inside was a primitive computer that didn’t work very well and when it failed, the pilot took over. No matter, it was going to crash. A month later this same pilot would be in a similar contraption on one of mankind’s most daring adventures and there would be no room for error. On July 16, 1969 our daring pilot and two other men sat atop a huge firecracker, waiting to blast off from the face of the earth. If successful, this 6-million pound, 36 story colossus of fire and thunder, would take three men on a trip one quarter of a million miles away. Destination? The moon. Most things went remarkably well over the next few days, but not everything. Only later did we learn the details of how close to disaster Apollo 11 had come. I’ll be right back to give you the rest of the story of man’s first landing on the moon, so keep watching! A warm welcome to all of you joining me today on Tomorrow’s World. And if you’re joining us for the first time, I hope you’ll become a regular viewer of Tomorrow’s World. July 16, 1969 was a day for the history books as three men blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Destination...the moon. Four days later, following a number of times circling the moon Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gave farewell and separated from Mike Collins in the command module, and began their descent in the Lunar Module. From 12 miles up Armstrong and Aldrin raced across the face of the moon and began falling toward its surface, but such a bold adventure was fraught with many dangers and all did not go as planned. From several thousand feet above the surface, we pick up the story from science writer Rod Pyle, who explained how tenuous the landing was: Apollo 11 was four minutes into its landing sequence when the terse words of its commander, Neil Armstrong, came from the speaker in Mission Control: “Program alarm.” Buzz Aldrin, sitting next to Armstrong in the descending Lunar Module, stared at the frozen display on the computer, which read “1202.” It was an error code, but for what? Controllers in Houston scanned their notes trying to figure out what ... the problem was. But time was running short. “Give us a reading on the program alarm,” Armstrong said. He sounded tense, but no more so than during the simulations. It was hard to grasp that a life-or-death struggle was playing out 240,000 miles (386,000 kilometers) from Earth, in a small, fragile machine descending rapidly to the moon. Communications were spotty; the computer was threatening to quit, and Gene Kranz, the flight director for this first lunar landing, felt Mission Control slip a bit further behind the power curve. The alarm meant that the computer could not handle the data it was being fed. Few people viewing the landing understood the urgency of the matter. Landing a lunar module has been described as attempting to land a Boeing 747 from the passenger compartment. Armstrong already demonstrated how to crash a lunar lander only a month earlier where he ejected at the last instant and floated safely to the earth. But on the moon that was not an option. It was all or nothing. There could be no rescue. This was no longer practice or simulation. The crew was facing a serious danger. As Kranz related to Pyle several decades later: “We would either land on the moon, we would crash attempting to land, or we would abort,” he said simply. “The final two outcomes were not good.” Pyle Added, “That is an understatement on a grand scale.” But this was not the only problem. The landing site was strewn with large boulders and an alternate site had to be found and found quickly. Fuel was running precariously low. No one knows for sure, but the 30 second warning already sounded, and our brave astronauts clearly had only seconds of fuel remaining. The estimated 600 million people from around the world watched the moon landing live and cheered when they heard the words, “the Eagle has landed.” Only later did details come out regarding how precarious the situation was. This year marks the fifty-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when Neil Armstrong, stepped onto the surface of the moon and uttered the immortal words, “That’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.” Fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin and ten other men over the course of three and a half years followed in his footsteps, but Armstrong was the first. The last pair to do so were in December 1972.