50 Years Ago Today
For millennia our species has looked up at the moon and imagined walking on its surface. Almost 2000 years ago, a writer named Lucian wrote a book called A True Storyin which the narrator visits the Moon and meets the inhabitants (called Selenitans). In 1610, Kepler giddily wrote Galileo about how, together, they could produce the atlas of the Moon that would be used by future travelers. 154 years ago, Jules Verne published his novel From the Earth to the Moon, telling the story of a group of people that endeavor to reach the Moon. 50 years ago today, human beings fulfilled those dreams and walked upon the surface of the Moon.
But let’s step back in time a little more, sixty-six years to 1903, when the Wright brothers took their first flight. That flight lasted twelve seconds and traveled 120 feet (37 meters). One in six of the people watching Neil Armstrong take that first step on the Moon, in 1969, were alive when the Wright brothers flew.
As he put his boot upon the lunar soil, Neil Armstrong said “that’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” Neil was a modest man and one who succeeded in extremely dangerous careers by never allowing a situation to overwhelm him. He chose those words to take the emphasis off of him and to include the thousands of people that helped get him there, and the millions of people watching at home, on Earth.
Neil was saying “Hey, I’m just a boy from Ohio and I’m just following the procedures I’ve been told to follow. This isn’t about me. This journey is about all of us, and we have done something significant, today.”
400,000 people worked on the Apollo program. They were astronauts like Neil, Michael, and Buzz. They were flight controllers like Steve Bales and Gene Kranz. They were mathematicians like Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan. They were seamstresses like Anna Lee Miller and Joanne Thompson. They were artists like Chet Jezierski and they were engineers like John Tribe.
That one small step for a man was a giant leap for mankind. We went from a species that 150 years earlier thought they would never travel faster than a horse, to a species that 66 years earlier made its first flight, to a species that just 22 years earlier first broke the sound barrier, to a species that set foot upon another celestial body 238,900 miles (384,400 km) above us.
That moment transformed our species and civilization. We became a species that could break the shackles of gravity and leave our planet, simply because we chose to. No one can take that away from us, except ourselves.
Seven years earlier, in 1962, President Kennedy said:
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win,”
He also said:
“But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.”
Those 400,000 people were bold and they met that challenge with their labor. The American people met that challenge with their treasure. The nation was given an aspirational challenge to show that together we can do great things.
Seven years later, that giant rocket roared off of the launch pad and accelerated the crew to a speed of almost 25,000 mph (40,000 km). For three days they sped through the vacuum of space arriving at an altitude just 100 miles (160 km) above the surface of the Moon. The crew separated their spacecraft into two and half of it, carrying Neil and Buzz landed upon the surface of the Moon, with just 18 seconds of fuel remaining.
The crew exited their spacecraft and explored the surface, walking around an area the size of a baseball field, placing scientific instruments, taking photographs, and collecting samples of rock and soil. They left behind a plaque that read “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon - July 1969, A.D. - We came in peace for all mankind.”
They re-entered their spacecraft and blasted off, rendezvousing with their colleague in orbit and then firing their engines to escape the clutches of lunar gravity and fall back down the gravity well towards the Earth.
Their spacecraft entered the Earth’s atmosphere through a corridor of safety only two degrees wide at a speed of six miles per second (10,000 m/s). To come to a safe halt on the ocean surface they had to shed 300 billion joules of energy. That is approximately the same amount of energy that is produced by Hoover Dam in two and a half minutes. That energy is converted to heat. The lower portion of the spacecraft experienced temperatures of around 13,000 degrees Fahrenheit (7800 K). The vehicle slowed and then the drogue parachutes opened at 24,000 feet (7300 m). The vehicle slowed more. The main parachutes opened at 10,000 feet (3000 m). The capsule hit the water at a speed of about 20 miles per hour (9 m/s).
All of those impressive numbers aside, the lede is that we walked upon the Moon. Our species became cosmic travelers.
Fifty years ago, we aspired and we achieved - together. In these times in which division is sown, we must remember that divided is not how we should be. Every time we look up at the Moon we know that together we are at our best and can do astounding things. If 400,000 of us can put a man on the Moon, what could a million of us do?
