Lunar landing july 20 196910/4/2023 With more than half a billion people watching on television, he climbs down the ladder and proclaims: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."Īldrin joins him shortly, and offers a simple but powerful description of the lunar surface: "magnificent desolation." They explore the surface for two and a half hours, collecting samples and taking photographs. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. The Eagle has landed." Mission control erupts in celebration as the tension breaks, and a controller tells the crew "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again."Īrmstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern, saying "the unknowns were rampant," and "there were just a thousand things to worry about."Īt 10:56 p.m. Armstrong radios "Houston, Tranquility Base here. When the lunar module lands at 4:18 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remain. It turns out to be a simple case of the computer trying to do too many things at once, but as Aldrin will later point out, "unfortunately it came up when we did not want to be trying to solve these particular problems." During the final seconds of descent, Eagle's computer is sounding alarms. When it comes time to set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong improvises, manually piloting the ship past an area littered with boulders. A day after that, Armstrong and Aldrin climb into the lunar module Eagle and begin the descent, while Collins orbits in the command module Columbia.įootage from the Apollo 11 moonwalk that was partially restored in 2009.Ĭollins later writes that Eagle is "the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky," but it will prove its worth. Three days later the crew is in lunar orbit. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit.Īfter one and a half orbits, Apollo 11 gets a "go" for what mission controllers call "Translunar Injection" - in other words, it's time to head for the moon. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.Īt 9:32 a.m. Now, on the morning of July 16, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. It is only seven months since NASA's made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket. It's a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out. This is what it looked like, and what it felt like, to be a part of it for the three men who flew, and for the countless others on Earth who watched, and marveled, and willed the trio safely back home.July 1969. Less than a decade after JFK’s bold proclamation, America did just that. In a sense, LIFE magazine shared in that triumph, as it had rigorously followed and reported on the soaring successes and the tragedies of America’s space program since well before President John Kennedy, in 1961, challenged the country to set foot on the moon. One look through the page spreads in this gallery (we recommend viewing all of the slides in “full screen” mode) makes it clear that, with this special issue, LIFE created not only the best first draft of history around the 1969 lunar landing, but produced an astonishingly comprehensive, coherent and, at times, poetic account of what LIFE’s editors called “history’s greatest exploration.”Īs Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and command module pilot Michael Collins reached out for destiny all those years ago, 500 million people around the world watched in awe as the grainy black-and-white television footage beamed back to Earth from the cold surface of the moon and it seemed then, for America, that anything was possible. Waiting two weeks was simply the price one paid for getting it right. For millions of people who witnessed the Apollo 11 mission, watching on television or following it on the radio as humanity improbably, literally walked on the moon, the event perhaps did not feel quite real until, more than two weeks later, LIFE published its definitive account of the epic journey.
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