Apollo 11

Apollo 11, U.S. spaceflight during which commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Edwin (“Buzz”) Aldrin, Jr., on July 20, 1969, became the first people to land on the Moon and walk the lunar surface. Apollo 11 was the culmination of the Apollo program and a massive national commitment by the United States to beat the Soviet Union in putting people on the Moon. All told, 24 Apollo astronauts visited the Moon and 12 of them walked on its surface. Additional NASA astronauts are scheduled to return to the Moon by 2025 as part of the Artemis space program.

From the time of its launch on July 16, 1969, until the return splashdown on July 24, almost every major aspect of the flight of Apollo 11 was witnessed via television by hundreds of millions of people in nearly every part of the globe. The pulse of humanity rose with the giant, 111-metre- (363-foot-) high, 3,038,500-kg (6,698,700-pound) Saturn V launch vehicle as it made its flawless flight from Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral), Florida, before hundreds of thousands of spectators. So accurate was the translunar insertion that three of the en route trajectory corrections planned were not necessary. Aboard Apollo 11 were Armstrong, Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins. Their enthusiasm was evident from the beginning, as Armstrong exclaimed, “This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.…It was beautiful!”

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The third stage of the Saturn then fired to start the crew on their 376,400-km (234,000-mile) journey to the Moon. The three astronauts conducted their transposition and docking maneuvers, first turning the command module, Columbia, and its attached service module around and then extracting the lunar module from its resting place above the Saturn’s third stage. On their arrival the astronauts slowed the spacecraft so that it would go into lunar orbit. Apollo 11 entered first an elliptical orbit 114 by 313 km (71 by 194 miles) and then a nearly circular orbit between 100 and 122 km (62 and 76 miles) above the surface of the Moon.

On the morning of July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin crawled from the command module through an interconnecting tunnel into the lunar module, Eagle. Toward the end of the 12th lunar orbit, the Apollo 11 spacecraft became two separate spacecraft: Columbia, piloted by Collins, and Eagle, occupied by Armstrong and Aldrin.

By firing Eagle’s propulsion system, the two astronauts changed from their nearly circular orbit to an elliptical course whose closest approach to the Moon was only 15,000 metres (50,000 feet). At this low point they again fired their engine, this time to undergo the powered descent initiation maneuver. Five times during the descent, the guidance computer triggered an alarm (called “1202” or “1201”) that its memory was full, but NASA simulations before the mission showed that a landing could still happen despite the alarm, and thus Mission Control told the astronauts to continue the descent. At about 150 metres (500 feet) above the surface, Armstrong began maneuvering the craft manually (although the main engine continued under automatic control) to avoid landing in a rock-strewn crater.

For about a minute and a half, Armstrong hovered Eagle, moving it laterally with the reaction control system until he found a clear area on which to descend. Then the contact light went on inside the cockpit, as the 172-cm (68-inch) probes dangling below Eagle’s footpads signaled contact with the ground. One second later the descent rocket engine was cut off, as the astronauts gazed down onto a sheet of lunar soil blown radially in all directions. Armstrong then radioed at 4:17 pm U.S. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Eagle had touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, an area selected for its level and smooth terrain.

At 10:56 pm EDT on July 20, Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar soil with the words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” (In the excitement of the moment, Armstrong skipped the “a” in the statement that he had prepared.) He immediately described the surface as “fine and powdery” and said that there was no difficulty moving about. Aldrin joined his companion about 20 minutes later.

During their moon walk of more than two hours, Armstrong and Aldrin set up a device to measure the composition of the solar wind reaching the Moon, a device to receive laser beams from astronomical observatories on Earth to determine the exact distance of the two bodies from one another, and a passive seismometer to measure moonquakes and meteor impacts long after the astronauts had returned home. They also took about 23 kg (50 pounds) of rock and soil samples, took many photographs, and maintained constant communication with mission control in Houston, Texas. After 21 hours 38 minutes on the Moon’s surface, the astronauts used Eagle’s ascent stage to launch it back into lunar orbit. After various maneuvers, Eagle once again docked with Collins in Columbia, and the trip back to Earth began soon afterward.

Splashdown of Apollo 11 occurred in the Pacific Ocean about 1,400 km (900 miles) west of Hawaii on July 24. The astronauts were immediately placed in quarantine in a van on the recovery ship. From there they were flown to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, where they were transferred into the large, 58-room Lunar Receiving Laboratory. The quarantine lasted 21 days from the time Eagle took off from the Moon; during that period the astronauts were checked for any diseases they might have picked up on the Moon, and the lunar samples were subjected to preliminary analysis.

Columbia is part of the collections of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.