Fifty years ago this month, the world witnessed the achievement of something deemed generally unachievable just a decade earlier, landing a human being on the moon.
After all, it was less than seventy years since humans first took to the skies in heavier-than-air machines. And it was less than a decade since a man, Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union, had been rocketed into space and placed in orbit around the earth.
By any measure, landing people on the moon was an amazing engineering achievement, the culmination of cooperative human effort of the first order. So amazing, in fact, that the feat has not been replicated since the last team of two astronauts left the lunar surface in 1972.
Space exploration is indeed rocket science, to borrow from the expression for something that is particularly difficult. We, the human race, have not returned to the moon because it is immensely difficult to land a craft on another celestial body. Just ask the Israeli team that recently came tantalizingly close to being the first private company to accomplish the task, only to see its craft lose control with a few tens of metres to go.
When Neil Armstrong uttered the words “The Eagle has landed” from the lunar surface, he was really marking the beginning of the end of a program that had its roots in the rocketry program of Nazi Germany. After the war, key architects of Hitler’s program were brought to the United States. Chief among them was Wernher von Braun, who oversaw the Mercury Redstone program that saw Alan Shepard become the first American launched into space, although not into orbit. Von Braun then went on to head up the Saturn V program that launched Apollo 11 to the moon, with Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins accompanying Armstrong.
As early as the 1950s, von Braun had set about designing rockets that would take humans to Mars. He envisaged the Saturn V evolving to become the transport vehicle for that task. That didn’t happen. After the last lunar landing in 1972 and the launch of the Skylab mission in early 1973, the Saturn V never flew again, and von Braun resigned from NASA.
Although the Apollo 11 mission completed John Kennedy’s goal of “before this decade is out, landing a man on the moon,” the American space program went on to place another five teams on the moon. It was only the Apollo 13 mission that did not complete a landing: after a near catastrophic oxygen tank explosion, the world watched as clever adaptations were made to return the crew by using the moon’s gravity to slingshot the damaged craft back to a splashdown in the Pacific.
In an age when fascination with space exploration, particularly that led by private sector pioneers such as Elon Musk (SpaceX and Starlink), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), is once again capturing public attention, it is easy to forget what was accomplished by the Apollo moon landings.
Just twelve people have set foot on a celestial body other than the earth. No one has travelled farther from earth than have the Apollo astronauts. In fact, no one other than these astronauts has gone beyond the confines of near-earth orbits.
I grew up as a child completely fascinated by space exploration. I have a strong memory of my father taking me outside as a small boy in 1961 to see Echo 1, a giant mylar balloon satellite, the first widely visible man-made object to orbit the earth.
Throughout the sixties, I followed nearly every American manned spacecraft launch, recording many over shortwave radio broadcasts. Seeing the grainy TV image of Armstrong stepping onto the moon’s surface in the early evening of July 20, 1969, at what the Apollo 11 crew named Tranquility Base, is seared into my mind. On that date this month I hope to be able to look up at the waning gibbous moon and salute the accomplishments of the crew of Apollo 11.
Although I always dreamed of becoming an astronaut, that was pretty much out of the question. However, years later, near the start of my teaching career, I became a NASA-licensed moon rock exhibitor. A set of moon rocks arrived at my school, where for a week they became part of a lunar science program for students across the region. Perhaps some of the rock slivers were from material collected by Armstrong and Aldrin during their two and a half hours on the lunar surface.
Apollo 11 marked the end to the space race between the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Although the two nations cooperate today in the operation of the International Space Station, there is increasing concern about the militarization of space. It may be worth recalling the inscription on the lunar lander module for Apollo 11: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
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