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47 Years Ago: A Giant Leap for Mankind

bradl

bradl

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jun 16, 2008
5,980
17,511
Crazy, isn't?

Two score and seven years ago, three guys took 7.5 million pounds of thrust, packed it into a 365-foot rocket, and set off on a journey that one person dared to put out there, but nobody thought would ever occur...

Then it did.

July 16th, 2016 was 47 years to the day that Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins boarded Apollo 11, and set off. 4 days later, they landed on the moon. I'll let NASA take it from here. Enjoy.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11.html

July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind

July 1969. 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.

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.

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. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history.

At 9:32 a.m. EDT, the engines fire and Apollo 11 clears the tower. About 12 minutes later, the crew is in Earth orbit. (› Play Audio)

After 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. Three days later the crew is in lunar orbit. A day after that, Armstrong and Aldrin climb into the lunar module Eagle and begin the descent, while Collins orbits in the command moduleColumbia. (› View Flash Feature)

Collins later writes that Eagle is "the weirdest looking contraption I have ever seen in the sky," but it will prove its worth.

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. During the final seconds of descent, Eagle's computer is sounding alarms.

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."

When the lunar module lands at 4:18 p.m EDT, only 30 seconds of fuel remain. Armstrong radios "Houston, Tranquility Base here. 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." (› Play Audio)

Armstrong will later confirm that landing was his biggest concern, saying "the unknowns were rampant," and "there were just a thousand things to worry about."

At 10:56 p.m. EDT Armstrong is ready to plant the first human foot on another world. 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." (› Play Audio)

Aldrin 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.

They leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew, and aplaque on one of Eagle's legs. It reads, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."

Armstrong and Aldrin blast off and dock with Collins in Columbia. Collins later says that "for the first time," he "really felt that we were going to carry this thing off."

The crew splashes down off Hawaii on July 24. Kennedy's challenge has been met. Men from Earth have walked on the moon and returned safely home.

In an interview years later, Armstrong praises the "hundreds of thousands" of people behind the project. "Every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, 'If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault.'" (› Read 2001 Interview, 172 Kb PDF)

In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong calls the flight "a beginning of a new age," while Collins talks about future journeys to Mars.

Over the next three and a half years, 10 astronauts will follow in their footsteps. Gene Cernan, commander of the last Apollo mission leaves the lunar surface with these words: "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind."
Click to expand...

62297main_neil_on_moon_full.jpg

Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong working at an equipment storage area on the lunar module. This is one of the few photos that show Armstrong during the moonwalk.

62295main_liftoff_full.jpg

Smoke and flames signal the opening of a historic journey as the Saturn V clears the launch pad.

62288main_aldrin_ladder_full.jpg

Buzz Aldrin climbs down the Eagle's ladder to the surface.

62291main_crater_orbit_full.jpg

Crater 308 stands out in sharp relief in this photo from lunar orbit.


Instead of talking about the Dwarf Planets, My kids will be having this for their story time tonight. :)

BL.
 
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Reactions: deany, Jess13, jnpy!$4g3cwk and 4 others
The craft used to go to the moon looks like junk. The Stealth Bomber design painted white would have looked nicer space craft design to go to the moon.
 
ucfgrad93 said:
It is sad that we haven't been back in over 40 years.
Click to expand...
Well, there were scheduling conflicts with the studio that they booked at the Warner lot....

Hehe...KIDDING (ducking) ;)

Honestly, when I saw this thread, I thought "****, here come all of the conspiracy nuts!" :)

As a huge fan of Space 1999 - I really DO hope we have a moon base someday....maybe just as a "life boat" for ships between here and Mars, but it'll still be way cool to visit!!! :)
 
False flag. They did NOT go to the moon. No living organism can survive the massive magnetic Van Allen radioactive belts surrounding Earth. All their photos are obviously false. Please understand this simple truth.
 
vkd said:
False flag. They did NOT go to the moon. No living organism can survive the massive magnetic Van Allen radioactive belts surrounding Earth. All their photos are obviously false. Please understand this simple truth.
Click to expand...

Right.

Thing is, the Russians were monitoring all the transmissions and path of the rocket throughout the whole process. I don't know how much you're aware of US/Russian relations at the time, but they weren't the best of buddies.

If there was any hint that something wasn't legitimate — anything at all — they would have said something. Although that's putting it lightly. They'd have kicked up a massive fuss. Remember that the Russians were trying so hard for so long to put a man on the moon as well?

Of course, the knee-jerk reaction of conspiracy theorists to this obvious news is that "the Russians knew it was fake". So it goes from a US conspiracy to a global conspiracy, and all the people involved haven't squeaked a word about it. All that effort to say: "hey, we got a boot on a rock once."

I think that's the simplest of truths, frankly. Please do logically analyse why you think what you do.
 
  • Like
Reactions: deany
bradl said:
Crazy, isn't?

Two score and seven years ago, three guys took 7.5 million pounds of thrust, packed it into a 365-foot rocket, and set off on a journey that one person dared to put out there, but nobody thought would ever occur...

Then it did.

July 16th, 2016 was 47 years to the day that Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins boarded Apollo 11, and set off. 4 days later, they landed on the moon. I'll let NASA take it from here. Enjoy.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/apollo11.html



62297main_neil_on_moon_full.jpg

Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong working at an equipment storage area on the lunar module. This is one of the few photos that show Armstrong during the moonwalk.

62295main_liftoff_full.jpg

Smoke and flames signal the opening of a historic journey as the Saturn V clears the launch pad.

62288main_aldrin_ladder_full.jpg

Buzz Aldrin climbs down the Eagle's ladder to the surface.

62291main_crater_orbit_full.jpg

Crater 308 stands out in sharp relief in this photo from lunar orbit.


Instead of talking about the Dwarf Planets, My kids will be having this for their story time tonight. :)

BL.
Click to expand...


HER CODE GOT HUMANS ON THE MOON—AND INVENTED SOFTWARE ITSELF

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/

For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander’s work. “We had to simulate everything before it flew,” Hamilton remembers. Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the “Little Old Ladies,” threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible.

[...] Without it, Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have made it to the moon.​



Mods, I tried to quote it rather than indentation. Very tired of this stupid quote bug.


Screen capture: split quote boxes, when I did not format as such

QB.png



I formatted this with one quote at very start and one at very end.

Look what happened to the quote count, such a stupid bug :rolleyes:

QB.png
​
 
Last edited:
Read in the news two days ago that astronauts who have been to the moon were mortally affected by heart disease.

This calls into question the whole concept of space travel. It seems that a combination of deep space radiation and weightlessness has a long term effect on the heart. I wonder if we'll ever solve the problem.
 
Benjamin Frost said:
Read in the news two days ago that astronauts who have been to the moon were mortally affected by heart disease.

This calls into question the whole concept of space travel. It seems that a combination of deep space radiation and weightlessness has a long term effect on the heart. I wonder if we'll ever solve the problem.
Click to expand...

It all depends on the research. Mark and Scott Kelly and Chris Hadfield would make great subjects for study on this, as they were up there longer than those that went to the moon.

BL.
 
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