Of the three crew members who went on Apollo 11, two are still alive. Obviously, they are in their 80s.
Michael Collins still makes appearances and he has a witty turn of phrase. His book is a good read, if you can find a copy.
Buzz Aldrin (Edwin E Aldrin Jnr) has had an eventful life. There are people who say he still bears a grudge at not being the first to walk on the Moon. Armstrong is remembered and the rest forgotten. I don’t know if it is true.
He has appeared on tv doing breakfast food adverts:
Apollo 11 took off on July 16, 1969. The journey was a few times around the Earth, a quarter of a million miles to the Moon, landing and then back.
Most of the mission had been done before, just not the landing on the Moon, exploration and take off from the surface bit. There was no guarantee that any part of it would not have a failure. It’s hard to understand just how brave those three astronauts in particular were.
If you have ever seen any real spacecraft close up, it’s pretty alarming. There is no assembly line for this. It’s hand-built. You can see the rivets, the bent bits of metal, the whole craft looks crude and a little home made. It isn’t, of course, but that’s the impression when you see one close up.
The Saturn V rocket is huge. I believe it is the most powerful machine ever built by man.
As we know from shuttle accidents, it only takes one small rubber ring to fail and there’s potential for disaster.
And we always assume that computers did everything. Well, they did have computer control for sure, but much less power than the average cell phone today.
So, during the flight they had problems. In fact, on the launchpad they had problems, but nothing they couldn’t deal with, and they landed on the Moon in prime time, July 21 1969.
In the UK it was the middle of the night. Even though it was the most historic achievement by man ever, the greatest adventure and true history, I was sent to bed and missed it.
We all remember the so-called Apollo 1 fire and the deaths of three astronauts. It seemed that that would kick NASA backwards so far as to possibly fail in its mission, but, as we know, it didn’t.
Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to leave the Earth entirely, orbiting the Moon and forcing Christmas religion on the world. I saw the capsule recently, in Chicago. (Incidentally, Frank Borman has been quoted as saying that reading the first verses of the Bible to the world was NOT anything religious. I am still thinking about that).
It’s very small and claustrophobic. I know astronauts were short, but there’s only the space of the front of a big car.
The 11 crew were Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin. Two would land on the surface of the Moon, one would remain in orbit, to help with docking, doing experiments and so on.
Of course, for lots of the journey they had the Lunar Module for extra space.
This isn’t their LEM, which was lost in space somewhere, but it is similar. It’s the thing that actually landed on the Moon, and took off again. Parts of it are barely thicker than aluminium cooking foil.
You can find these exhibits in Chicago, at the Science and Industry Museum. I believe it’s the largest museum in the USA.
