The exterior has been modified to make it look like the Apollo 11 lander - the Eagle. The display vehicle at the museum never went to space, but it was used in ground tests, including drop tests to see how it could handle a hard landing. Originally called a Lunar Excursion Module, the spidery spacecraft was generally called “the Lem” and nicknamed “the bug.” It is officially known as LM-2 - Lunar Module 2. There’s a full-scale lunar lander on display at the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall. Photos from the Apollo 11 mission show the Earth, at top the lunar module and Saturn launch vehicle, middle and Earth-rise as seen from lunar orbit. If on July 20, 1969, a giant man-eating moon lizard had emerged from a lava tube and chased Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back into the lunar lander, NASA would have described this as an off-nominal event requiring a contingency procedure. NASA has an institutional instinct to project supernatural competence it downplays, or hides beneath jargon, the uh-oh moments in human spaceflight. 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.” In his memoir “ Carrying the Fire,” he wrote: “My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone. . .
If it didn’t, Nixon would have to pull out that memo.Ĭollins, who orbited the moon in the mother ship while his crewmates were on the surface, was keenly aware that failure was an option. The top half of the lunar lander, the ascent module, relied on a single engine to blast the astronauts back to lunar orbit. Hard? Soft? Powdery? Gooey? The mission planners feared that the lunar module could become instantly mired, or just sink out of sight.Įqually nerve-racking was the planned departure from the moon. No one knew the nature of the moon’s surface. One of those things was the landing on the moon, which obviously couldn’t be practiced under realistic conditions. “There were 23 critical things that had to occur perfectly,” recalls engineer JoAnn Morgan, the instrumentation controller in Launch Control at the Kennedy Space Center. “I consider a trip to the moon and back to be a long and very fragile daisy chain of events,” Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 crew, told The Washington Post recently. To put astronauts on the surface of the moon and bring them home safely, NASA had to do many things right, in succession, with margins of error ranging from small to nonexistent. Just two years before Apollo 11, three astronauts died in a freakish fire during a capsule test at Cape Canaveral, Fla.Īpollo 11 astronauts, from top, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong seen during the Apollo 11 mission.
Still, potential disaster lurked everywhere. NASA’s strategy during the 1960s was built around incremental achievements, with each mission wringing out some of the risk. The first landing on the moon could easily have been the first crashing. But it was never as breezy as NASA made it look. Why it worked - and why the United States beat the Soviet Union to the moon after having been humiliated, repeatedly, during the early years of the Space Race - remains a compelling story of managerial vision, technological genius and astronautical dash. After three weeks in quarantine (to prevent a purely hypothetical moon-germ contagion), the three Apollo 11 astronauts got their ticker-tape parade and eternal glory. They walked on the moon, gathered rocks, planted a flag, rocketed home to Earth and splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean. Nixon, in a memo from White House speechwriter William Safire, July 18, 1969, under the heading “IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER.” Remarks prepared for President Richard M. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.