Results tagged “apollo”

...Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were inside the Apollo 11 spacecraft, on their way to the Moon. They would reach their destination on 21 July at 6:17:40 AEST (20 July 20:17:40 UTC), and Neil Armstrong would become the first human to set foot on the Moon a few hours later, at 12:56 AEST. Images of this event were sent to the whole world from tracking stations in eastern Australia, as anyone who's watched "The Dish" knows.

There is really not much I can write about this event that hasn't been written before and better by other writers, so I will simply let this post mark the occasion. Or, rather, I will let the image below mark the occasion.

That is the Apollo 11 landing site, as photographed last week by the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, current on its mission orbiting our satellite. You can clearly see the Eagle landing module, and if you click on the image you'll be taken to the NASA article with images of the landing sites of the other Apollo missions. And the best thing is: better images will come. These pictures were taken before the LRO reached its final orbit, and future passes over these sites will yield much better resolution.

So, let's celebrate the past with an eye on the future. Here's to our return to the Moon!

On 18 May 1969, Apollo 10 was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the last mission in preparation for the Moon landing mission that was to come three months later.

Apollo 10 was a full "dress rehearsal", the only one in the Apollo program. The ship was identical to the one used for Apollo 11, and everything progressed — on board and on land — just as if a landing was going to happen. The Lunar Module was deployed on 23 May with Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene A. Cernan on board, leaving John W. Young alone in the command module, and it descended towards the Moon, spending six hours away from the Command Module and getting as close as 15.7km from the surface before going back up and docking.

The mission landed safely on 26 May on the Pacific Ocean, some 500km east of the American Samoa islands, and after that NASA was ready for the "real deal" with Apollo 11.

Commander Thomas Stafford left NASA soon after (ostensibly due to not having been selected to fly Apollo 13) and never returned to space; Young landed on the Moon with Apollo 16 in 1972 and flew the Space Shuttle's inaugural mission in 1981, among other missions; and Cernan has the distinction of being so far the last person to have been on the surface of the Moon, as a crew member on Apollo 17.