The Moon Landing: 50 Years Later

And whilst the Apollo program was strictly a national project, there’s no doubt it was a collaborative effort. Apollo 11 was one in a series of missions that had built up to this moment of landing on the moon. Starting in 1961, both crewed and un-crewed launches went ahead to test spacecraft components, communication and more. Answering President Kennedy's challenge of landing men on the moon by 1969 required a sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources, ever made by any nation in peacetime -  cashing in at $24 billion at the time, which is that’s over $150 billion today. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 Americans and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities. It was all the efforts of those that made this mission possible. And at its heart, three very important astronauts; Michael Collins, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. As Spaceflight historian Amy Teitel explained to Adam Murphy…

Amy - The crew of Apollo 11, as we probably know, is Neil Armstrong is the commander, Buzz Aldrin is the lunar module pilot, and Mike Collins as the command module pilot. And the three of them come across as relatively stoic individuals. And I say that I've read the mission transcript a couple of times and you do get a little bit of a sense of them kind of teasing each other a bit. But Neil Armstrong really does come across as the commander, he knows what's going on and his sense of humour seems very dry.

Buzz Aldrin’s whole thing - he did his PhD dissertation from M.I.T. in orbital mechanics and orbital rendezvous and he loved talking about it to the point where people nicknamed him Dr Rendezvous! I've read that Mike Collins said that Neil and Buzz weren't exactly friends, but that they worked very well together and had this sort of happy enough working relationship. And that's I think the strangest thing to think about, when you imagine going to the moon, you're not necessarily going to the moon with buddies, you're going to the moon with people that you work well with. And Mike Collins his memoir Carrying the Fire really kind of brings him out as the more sort of artistic soul onboard. And a  very nice guy. I can say that much.

Adam - What is it that made these three men the right men for Apollo?
Amy - All three of the Apollo crew members were test pilots. That was what you had to be in the 1960s in that era to become an astronaut. Part of it was skill and part of it was things that they'd done to prove themselves. So Neil Armstrong's first flight was on Gemini 8.

Adam -  The Gemini program was the forerunner to Apollo. It took two man crews into Earth orbit and had them do spacewalks or extra vehicular activities - EVAs for short. It helped prepare for the kinds of things you'd expect to deal with on the way to the moon.

Amy - He was the pilot onboard that mission and it was the first time the Gemini spacecraft docked at the Agena. And a stuck thruster on the Gemini started the whole stack tumbling in orbit to the point where he and Dave Scott nearly blacked out, and Neil Armstrong knew that capsule so well he was able to get them out of that. They used their reserve fuel for the re-entry to negate the spin. And he could do it by feel because he knew the spacecraft so well. And he got them out of that, they came home early and everyone survived and that could have been a fatality in space but he did a darn good job piloting that one.

Adam - And what about Edwin Buzz Aldrin?

Amy - Buzz Aldrin’s expertise was orbital rendezvous. And he talked about it ad nauseum apparently to all the other astronauts and their wives. His previous mission was Gemini 12. So that was the last of the Gemini program that kind of did everything that Apollo was going to do, in terms of a rendezvous, in terms of duration in space. He was very technically proficient at a lot of things. Him being the expert in rendezvous was a necessary thing for the lunar module pilot, even though the commander was the one who did the bulk of the flying.

Adam -  And man number three? How did Mike Collins end up on Apollo?

Amy - Mike Collins was another Gemini veteran, his flight Gemini 10 was one of the later missions. He'd actually done two spacewalks on Gemini 10 so he was familiar enough with some of the things that we’re going to happen in space even though he wasn't the one walking on the moon. It's still a skill set that becomes valuable. So these three guys all had backgrounds in Gemini missions that gave them some familiarity that they would need on Apollo.

Adam - But even with these admittedly incredible skill sets, that didn't guarantee them the place on the moon.

Amy - But as to how they ended up on that mission, that's pure luck of the draw. So the way it typically worked was you had a prime crew and then the backup crew and then the support crew and the backup crew would backup a mission, set up for two rounds and then be the prime crew for the following mission. So the Apollo 11 crew was backup crew to Apollo 8 and then that put them in line for prime crew of Apollo 11.

Adam - Even up to the month before Apollo 11 launched, the three men couldn't be sure that they would be the ones who would end up taking those first steps.

Amy - There was still no guarantee until Apollo 11 touchdown that it would be the first mission to land on the moon. So NASA launched Apollo 11 in July of 1969 knowing that Apollo 12 was on deck to launch in November. So if Apollo 11 failed, Apollo 12 would still make it to the moon and make that first landing within the 1960s. Skill got them you know in that flight rotation. Luck got them on that mission.

The Apollo 11 launch was just the beginning of the journey that would rewrite the history books. Taking around 4 days to reach their destination. Except for 48 minutes every lunar orbit when Mike Collins was on the far side of the Moon, the Apollo 11 crew were in constant contact with mission control. The team kept in touch using radio waves, which travel at the speed of light. Even with that, there was still over a second’s delay as the light made the 350,000km trip to the Moon. Unfortunately, we can’t travel at the speed of light so when it comes to the journey itself how do you devise a route for A Trip that’s never been completed? Luckily, Izzie Clarke spoke to Norm Sears, who had a pretty good idea…

Norman - I'm Norman Sears. I was a former member of the instrumentation laboratory at MIT and I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Apollo program, which is very significant nationally and internationally even.

I started out early in the program on the lunar phases of the mission that would be the powered landing, the ascent from the lunar surface and the rendezvous back with the command module. Those were fairly key phases of the mission. Eventually, as time went on, I evolved into covering most of all of the mission phases and the systems required during those mission phases.

Izzie - Norm was the technical director for the primary guidance navigation and control system - the crucial equipment in place to get the spacecraft to its all important destination.

Norman - That was determined before I even started. You had to pick a landing area that you were interested in going to. You then had to time the mission so that as you approached that landing site, the sun was at the back - behind you - casting shadows out to the front and that determined when you would have to launch and had arrived at those different points.

Izzie - And I guess absolutely crucial information for the team like yourself behind the navigation system.

Norman - That's correct. The navigation system was one of the three functions. The navigation is telling you where you are and where you're gonna be in the future. If you want to go somewhere else, you have to change that orbit and the way you do it is change the velocity both in direction and size to go somewhere else. That's called guidance. Then the control part of it is actually executing what the guidance has told you is required to do. That involves orienting the vehicle, turning the engines on or off to get the right change in velocity to take to a new position. Those are your three functions of navigation, guidance and control.

Izzie - And those features relied on three essential inputs. First up there was the inertial platform, which used gyroscopes to measure and maintain the orientation of the craft and accelerometers to measure the acceleration. Then there was the optical alignment. This system allowed the astronauts to sight stars and landmarks simultaneously, which helped the Apollo navigator to determine the position and speed of the spacecraft. And then there was a computer that had to solve the guidance navigation and control functions with accuracy and quickly.

Norman - NASA at that time - to meet the goal President Kennedy set out to land on the moon and return by 1970 was very demanding and NASA - did not want to do any new development that they didn't actually have to do. In our particular case, of those three units: the inertial units, the optical units that aligned them... those technologies were fairly well known and no new development had to be made. The computer, however, was a brand new situation. It had to be capable of solving pretty complex space navigation problems for the guidance navigation control functions and they had to do it in real time.

At that time that was pressing that technology. Up to then, analogue computers had done most of that type of work, only they didn't have anywhere near the accuracy that would be required for the lunar mission. So for the laboratory itself - the new technology that had to be pursued and developed - was the digital flight computer. And that was our high risk item and most of our new development effort went into that system.

Izzie - With a lot of testing and training after its development to make sure this took the crew to the moon. But, four days after launch - on the 20th of July 1969 - Aldrin Armstrong and Collins found themselves entering the moon's orbit and it was time for the team to split.

Norman - The command module and the lunar module were attached from Earth orbit to lunar orbit. Once they were in lunar orbit, two of the crew members transferred to the lunar module and they were then separated during preparation to descend to the moon for landing.

Izzie -Those two being Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong leaving Michael Collins behind in the command module Columbia. With his two colleagues gone and radio contact with the abruptly cutting off at the instant he disappeared behind the moon. He became the most remote human in our solar system. Armstrong and Aldrin, however, continued on their descent to the moon in the lunar module, otherwise known as Eagle. And, whilst we know how the story ends, landing didn't quite go to plan.

Norman - The landing itself went fairly straightforward as it had been planned. The part that was unexpected is the computer alarms that occurred during the powered landing maneuver.

AUDIO from Apollo 11.

Norman - In the terms of Apollo though, the lavatory was the key operating support. In the sense that we had to be available during any mission phase. If something went wrong, people who had made the designs and developed them were available for a consultation if they were required. That turned out to be very crucial on the Apollo 11 because we did have that happen in an unexpected event during the power landing where we had five computer alarms sounded during the landing.

In the lunar module and command module, I believe, the astronauts had a switch or button. A computer checked that at every computer cycle. If they detected it, at any point, that program they were in would immediately stop and a new program would come up to take them back to the command module.

The computer alarms that happened - it turned out - was that rendezvous radar was turned on. The computer - even though that radar was not used for any real function - the computer tried to read it didn't have enough time to read it and that's what triggered the alarms. Fortunately, we had enough people in the right places to determine those were not crucial to the operation. They were really periphery items that the computer couldn't handle and gave the decision to keep going which was the right decision.

AUDIO from Apollo 11.

Norman - There was endless amounts of training missions through the simulators and in a sense they were sort of repetitive. You’d hear the same things over and over, you’d look at the same downlink data to see if you were in the various limits and all. I was in the Mission Control Center during the landing and listening to some of this going on though the various flight controllers and that was what I had heard many many times before. However there’s something I'd never heard on any other simulation training session and that was very close to the ground when Buzz Aldrin mentioned the words “picking up dust”. I'd never heard that before.

AUDIO from Apollo 11.

Norman - At that point it dawned on you this was no training exercise and you were just talking about a few seconds left.

AUDIO from Apollo 11.

On the 24th of July the crew splashed back down into the Pacific Ocean. They were picked up by the USS Hornet, and quickly moved to spend 21 days in quarantine. Just incase there were any nasty things on the Moon. But things could have gone drastically wrong, as Adam Murphy found out when he spoke to physicist Katie Mack, from North Carolina State University, about the return of the Apollo crew, and her family connection to it...

Katie - So my grandfather - his name was Captain Willard Samuel Houston, he went by Sam Houston - was involved in the Apollo missions. He was a meteorologist with the Navy when Apollo 11 was happening, and his job was to make sure that the splashdown site when the capsule came back to Earth would be okay, the weather would be fine and everything. And there was this amazing story about how he was able to redirect the capsule to a different site, because when he went to check the weather at the initial site all of the civilian weather monitoring looked fine, but he had access to some secret Navy spy satellites that he was using to study the weather.

He went around and checked on these spy satellites and found that there was this huge storm that wasn't showing up on the other kinds of monitoring systems. And so he had to go to NASA and tell them... they were a civilian organization, and he had to tell them, “you can't land where you think you're going to land, and I can't tell you why. And so you have to move the capsule, and I can't tell you anything more than that.” NASA luckily trusted him to the extent that they did agree to move the capsule, but they also said they were going to send a plane to the original site, and if there wasn't a storm there his career was over. And so they moved the capsule, everybody came down fine, it was a perfect end of mission; and they sent a plane to the original site, and there was a storm that was bad enough that it would have ripped the parachutes right off the capsule. So can you imagine if Apollo 11, they went, they walked on the moon, they came back, and if they came into a storm that would have been it, that would have been the end.
The Apollo missions are amazing because there are so many stories like that, where some little thing could have gone wrong and would have been a disaster. And there are so many things that had to go right. And of course in some of the missions things did go wrong, and they had to make corrections at the last minute, and in a lot of the testing there were a lot of disasters and problems. But it's still amazing to me how much was achieved, and how well it did go considering all of the little pieces that had to be in place and all of the places where they were this close to disaster.

Ever since Apollo 11, 12 men in total have walked on the moon with return missions running until 1972. Now, both national and private agencies want to return to the moon but it’ll rely on collaborations across the world. So when are we going back? And will it involve humans or should we leave the work to robots? Izzie spoke with James Carpenter who works on human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency…

James - So the International Space Station has shown us what is possible when the nations of the world unite and come together, to achieve incredible and impossible things. And I think that the moon is the next place where we can do that. Where we, as a species, can go and learn what it means to go beyond Earth and learn lessons that we can apply here on Earth, to improve the situation here.

Izzie - How are people planning to return to the moon?

James - The United States, through NASA is preparing something called Orion. Orion is a spacecraft which will carry humans beyond low Earth orbit, where the space station is - where we operate today, and out into deep space for the first time since Apollo. And the European Space Agency (ESA) is very much involved in this program. We are providing something called the European service module which is at the back of the crewed part of that vehicle, and it carries things like the propulsion systems, the power systems and some life support systems. And so that vehicle will go to something called the gateway. The gateway is a crew-tended platform, kind of a space station cum spaceship or space port, which sits in deep space, in the vicinity of the moon. And it's from here that humans will go down to the lunar surface and return from the lunar surface for the first time. And this is something which is being explored by a group of countries through the International Space Station partnership to work together to achieve this and we're looking at our different roles in this scenario now.

Izzie - And so will it act as a base station for people to, you know, pop off and grab some supplies and go elsewhere?

James - The gateway’s first function as a staging point will be to access the lunar surface and come back from the lunar surface. But the great advantage of the gateway's location, is that it's nice and high in the gravity well. So, unlike from Earth where we need a lot of energy to get away from the gravitational pull of the earth, once you’re at the gateway it becomes a staging point from which we could go on to other places in the solar system. So one could envisage a future where we have vehicles being assembled around the gateway, using materials brought from Earth, and maybe even the moon - perhaps filled with propellants that have been created at the lunar surface using ice and other things found at the poles of the moon - and then going on from there to Mars. So the gateway becomes a really important element in potential future architectures for the moon, but also to more distant destinations. Exactly what that will look like, I think we can work out once we've nailed the lunar return. In the US now, there is a very strong drive to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024. And we will be looking to understand how ESA can play a role in an international lunar exploration scenario which is sustainable and has a really a long term plan.

Izzie - Is there a place for humans in that, or are we just leaving it to robotics because we don't have that risk of - you know things going wrong with us, we are human?

James - So space robotics have come on a long way. And there are tremendous things that we can do with robots. Robots however cannot substitute entirely for humans. So if we look at the science that was performed at the lunar surface 50 years ago on Apollo - what was possible in just a few days with two humans at the lunar surface, is way beyond what would be possible with any robot available today, in a much much longer time. There is no substitute for having a well-trained human in situ at the surface of the moon, or any other planet, doing science. That said, there is a role for both humans and robots. So there are some things that humans are really good at, and robots are really bad at. And there are some things that robots are really good at that you don't need humans to do. And so the challenge for us, and the exciting thing I think for everybody, is to try and find that balance between what humans can do best and what robots can do best. And trying to get the best of both worlds and to create a real partnership between human and robotic capabilities.

Izzie - It might be early days but do we know what those humans might be doing when they do return to the lunar surface?

James - Definitely. So we know a lot about the moon but there is a huge number of science questions to be addressed. I think the future of the moon is likely to look somewhat like Antarctica today. So humans now go to Antarctica to form scientific research, make measurements, travel across the surface of the earth and Antarctica taking samples. And I think something like this will be what we see at the lunar surface too. They'll also be preparing for future exploration, so testing technologies and preparing the way in that sense too. One very important theme of Lunar exploration in the coming decade or two, is going to be establishing the use of local resources for space. So, one thing's become apparent is, if we want to explore the solar system in a permanent and sustainable way then we need to learn how to use the resources that we find, where we find them. And the moon is the place where we will learn for the first time how to use resources that are available in space to meet our needs. So one example of that could be the ice at the poles of the moon. So if we can learn how to purify it, and then to use it both for life support systems - drinking water and air - but also to split it into oxygen and hydrogen, which could become propellant, then this is a capability that will be enabling for us, moving out into the solar system. And it can also make accessing and using the moon sustainable in the long term. But we also need to do this in a way which is in itself sustainable. So through learning how to do this, we can, we are always pushed to the maximum efficiency and minimum waste that is the nature of the way we engineer for space. And so in doing so we can also learn some really important lessons about resource management here on Earth and how we can manage our own resources in a more responsible and sustainable way.