“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”
– President John F. Kennedy
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the surface of the Moon. To celebrate, here is a quick look at how that July morning unfolded as the world watched with bated breath.
The launch windows for the Apollo 11 mission were calculated by Katherine Johnson, an African-American Aeronautical Technician, who had previously calculated the trajectory of Alan Sheppard’s 1961 spaceflight.
On the morning of July 16, 1969, astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and mission commander Neil Armstrong eat a pre-flight breakfast of steak and eggs, got into their suits, and were strapped into their seats on the spacecraft.
On board, the Apollo 11 spacecraft contained fuel tanks, fuel cells, tanks of oxygen and hydrogen, rations for the crew, a multitude of scientific equipment and supplies, and tools for collecting samples of the lunar surface.
At 9:32am local time, NASA’s Saturn V rocket ignited, using 7.6 millions pounds of thrust, sending humans the Earth to the Moon for the first time.
Within the first three minutes of flight, the rocket dropped its first stage into the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly after, it dropped its second stage and ignited the stage three engines that would carry the rocket to orbit.
All told, it took 11 minutes and 39 seconds from launch for the spacecraft to reach an elliptical orbit, traveling at 17,342 mph.
Within a few days of the launch, the Lunar Module, known as Eagle, would breakaway from the Command Module and touchdown in the Sea Of Tranquility on the Moon. In this moment, the possibilities of humans as a species seemed endless. We had achieved a goal that seemed outlandish and impossible, we walked on the surface of another celestial body. There are few moments in human history that impact all of us at our core like the success of the Apollo 11 mission.
Photo Credit- NASA
