APOLLO 11 BY CRAIG COLLINS Photos courtesy of NASA
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y the summer of 1969, almost every element of the Apollo program had been tested and proven. The massive Saturn V rocket – the most powerful machine ever built and the first launch vehicle developed strictly for space applications – had shown it could reliably lift the Apollo modules and astronauts together beyond the Earth’s orbit. The command and service module (CSM) and lunar module (LM) could launch together, dock, and separate, and the LM could fly on its own. Russian and U.S. unmanned probes had performed soft landings on the Moon, dispelling fears that spacecraft would simply sink into the powdery lunar surface. In December 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, the power bottled in the Saturn V’s three stages sent U.S. astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders into orbit around the Moon and back, a total distance of a little under a half-million miles. There was, really, only one question left to answer, and it was embedded in Apollo 11’s pithy prime mission objective: “Perform a manned lunar landing and return.” Could a man land on the Moon? Even in the Information Age, it’s difficult to grasp the technological burst – still unequaled today – that approached its historic climax in the summer of 1969. A little more than eight years earlier, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and astronaut Alan Shepard had become the first men in space; now astronauts were preparing to set foot on another world. Many experts continued to fear that the LM – much heavier than its unmanned predecessors – would sink into the lunar surface, fatally stranding the astronauts.
BY CRAIG COLLINS
APOLLO 11 I 50 YEARS
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