Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

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Welcome to Fascinating Facts and Tantalizing Trivia

A Hartson Dowd Column

July 19, 2007

JULY 20 –  “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The men who made the epic voyage seemed, in many ways, ordinary men – unlikely candidates for immortality.  Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins were all in their late thirties.  They were introspective men who cherish their privacy.  But they possessed the qualities NASA was looking for: exceptional flying skill, intelligence and strength, the capacity to concentrate and absorb information, icy coolness and a gambler’s impulse to rise to challenges.

Since then, other voyages have been made to the moon, and brilliantly successful unmanned probes have been launched into deep space.  Yet no space venture has had the impact of that first lunar touchdown.  Do you remember how it was when man first touched moon with a silver finger – and felt the heartbeat of his own world?

The U.S. flight to the moon would not have occurred when it did had it not been for the Russians.  Their early superiority in space – including the first unmanned flight around the moon and the first manned flight in orbit around the earth – goaded President Kennedy in 1961 into pledging to put a man on the moon “before this decade is out.”

The first years of the Apollo program was marked with disasters.  Rockets blew up, flights were aborted and three astronauts died on the launch pad when fire broke out in their spacecraft cabin.  With the problems finally conquered, Apoll0 11 was ready to try for the moon on July 16, 1969.  That Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were the crew was largely a matter of chance.  In the system of rotation, modified by accidents and the deaths of the other astronauts, it was simply their turn.  Armstrong was appointed commander partly because he had a year’s seniority over the others.

Few men ever worked harder to prepare for a mission.  For 12 hours at a stretch, they operated command-mobile and moon-landing simulators, worked submerged in water to accustom themselves to the weightlessness two of them would experience on the moon and handled countless simulated emergencies on panels with hundreds of instruments.  They took crash courses in astronomy, celestial navigation, rocket propulsion, digital computers and lunar geology.  Compared with what the astronauts had already endured, the actual flight came as a welcome relief.

On its launch pad, snorting steaming wasp of vented oxygen the 3100-ton Apollo 11 looked like a gargantuan living monster, 36 stories high.  Its smooth skin concealed a mind-boggling eight million working parts and 91 engines.  Thirty-three stories above the ground – just behind the launch-escape system (which protruded like the tip of a ball-point pen) – was the tiny command module Columbia, in which the three astronauts lay on their couches listening to the count-down.

No one who saw the lift-off from the launch pad at Merritt Island (a million watched from across the river at Cape Canaveral, 500 million on worldwide TV) will ever forget it.  For a heart stopping nine seconds, while Saturn’s mighty booster engines built thrust and the nozzles below spewed out flames with an apocalyptic roar, the rocket did not budge.  Then ever so slowly it began to rise on a great pillar of fire – seeming to pause as it veered slightly to the right to avoid the control tower, then slowly gaining velocity until it was out of sight.

The first- and second-stage rockets were jettisoned.  Tracked by a communications network extending around the earth and above it – from the Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston to key antennas in Spain, Australia and California, the command/service module and the lunar module (housed in an adapter) circled the earth for 2 ? hours to make sure they had a moonworthy vehicle.  Then, its velocity boosted to 650 kilometres per minute by a refiring of Saturn’s third stage, Apollo tore loose from the earth’s gravity on trajectory to the moon.

Shortly afterward, 4800 kilometres from the moon, the command/service module separated from Saturn’s third stage and was turned around.  At the conclusion of a complicated docking sequence, command-module pilot Michael Collins gently inserted Columbia’s pointed probe into the drogue atop the lunar module, ultimately forming a pressure-tight seal.  With Eagle attached to the nose, Columbia drew away from the third stage and continued toward the moon.

One of the greatest difficulties the crew encountered on their four-day outward journey was functioning in the cramped, weightless environment.  Although the conical capsule’s outside dimensions were 3.8 metres in diameter at the base and about 3 metres in height, the men had about as much room as would in a taxi: most of the space was occupied by a floor-to-f=ceiling instrument panel, storage lockers and the couches into which the men strapped themselves for sleep to keep them from drifting around the cabin.

But there were compensations for their cramped quarters as they flew through the moon’s shadow, they could watch the stars blazing in the infinite blackness, marvel at the beautiful solar corona – a luminous envelope surrounding the sun – and gaze at the fragile blue earth receding in the distance.  The most impressive sight was the moon itself, illuminated by the earth and, at close range, appearing three-dimensional.

Hartson S. Dowd

hsdowd@telus.net