40th Anniversary of Man on the Moon
A look back at that marvelous moment when Apollo 11 put men on the moon 40 years ago.
By Gregory Dullum
Remembering the first moon landing...
For thousands of years, man has looked to the night sky with wonder and admired that giant white orb which is our moon. He dreamed of going there someday, of setting foot upon our nearest heavenly body—240,000 miles into the harsh, foreboding, unforgiving vacuum of space.
In 1865, French author Jules Verne published From Earth to the Moon, a fanciful tale of men being shot to the moon from a giant cannon.
Nearly 100 years later, U.S. President John F. Kennedy began turning the dream of man walking on the moon into reality as he made it a national goal. On May 25, 1961, he told Congress, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to earth.”
The technology didn’t exist to accomplish this lofty goal. It had been only 20 days since Alan Shepard had completed America’s first 15-minute suborbital flight. The tiny Redstone rocket which shot Shepard’s Mercury capsule to the edge of space didn’t have enough power to send a man into Earth’s orbit, not to mention to the moon!
Challenged by the president, American ingenuity went to work. Six more Mercury flights followed, each manned by one astronaut. Blasted into space atop larger Atlas rockets, these missions put Americans into Earth’s orbit.
Throughout the mid-’60s came the Gemini project. These were larger capsules carrying two men that sat atop even bigger rockets—Titans. Astronauts performed tasks such as space walks and docking maneuvers that prepared them for the ultimate space trip—to the moon.
As the end of the decade approached, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) began its most ambitious program, the one that would take men to the moon—Apollo.
Read the rest of this informative 2,000-word article in a PDF on Greg Dullum’s Web site. He gave me permission to list the login info:
Username: user
Password: scoop
Let me know if you have any trouble or if you have any recollections and comments about that momentous week July 16-20, 1969, that took the first men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, from earth to moon!
