LIFE The Moon Landing: 50 Years Later
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LIFE The Moon Landing - The Editors of LIFE
The Moon Landing
Mankind’s Greatest Adventure
The view of earth from Apollo 11, July 20, 1969.
CONTENTS
Edwin Buzz
Aldrin on the Sea of Tranquility, July 1969.
INTRODUCTION: The End of the Impossible
Before the Moon: A Story in Pictures
Is your son going to fly out into space?
The Journey. The Landing. The Moon
To Infinity and Beyond
Final Bill
The End of the Impossible
On July 20, 1969, humankind’s collective perspective changed forever
BY STEVE RUSHIN
FASCINATION WITH THE MOON IS as old as human civilization, captured in lore and scripture, art and film. An iconic image from the 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon
When Neil Armstrong emerged from the lunar landing module Eagle on July 21, 1969, the moon’s gray-scale landscape was reflected in the gold-tinted visor of his helmet, which resembled the curved glass fronts of the television screens through which half a billion people—one sixth of the earth’s population—witnessed the completion of Apollo 11’s journey from Cape Kennedy to the Sea of Tranquility. From the earth to the moon.
The sun was setting low in the lunar sky at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time—the newspapers said the five-foot-11 Armstrong would cast a 35-foot shadow—and as he descended the nine-rung ladder of the Eagle, he held on to its side rails. When his oversize left moon boot made its impression on the desolate surface, the moon dust was as fine as talcum. Like powdered charcoal,
Armstrong would say of the footprint left by the footstep that was the most watched event in human history.
But what was under that powdered charcoal? I was worried that the moon might be too soft and that he might sink in too deeply,
said Viola Armstrong, his mother, who was watching at home in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where as a teenager her boy gazed into the night sky and dreamed of flight. On the moon, however, her son weighed one sixth of his earthly 165 pounds, and he didn’t disappear into a porous surface—thus instantly dispelling ancient myths that the moon was made of something else, like green cheese.
That’s one small step for man,
Armstrong said. One giant leap for mankind.
What he intended to say, of course, was: That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
But the indefinite article a was dropped, leaving a redundant phrase that instantly entered the lexicon anyway.
Shakespeare portrayed the moon as unfaithful and sinister. He called the waxing and waning moon an arrant thief,
the fickle moon, the inconstant moon.
It is she who makes men mad,
the Bard wrote, but the world was moonstruck long before Romeo and Juliet and Othello. Lunacy and lunatic and lunar all derive from the same root, the name Luna, the ancient Roman goddess of the moon. From werewolves to legends of the man in the moon, this pale orb—governess of tides, mythical synchronizer of menstrual cycles—has always been a source of mystery, fascination, and dread.
Jules Verne, in his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, wrote about three men flying to the moon in a small capsule: In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe . . . we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars with the same facility, and rapidity, and certainty as now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York.
And Frank Sinatra expressed this universal longing in a song played by the Apollo 10 astronauts during their 1968 dress rehearsal to lunar landing: Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars.
The moon made bards of the unlikeliest poets. You didn’t have to be Cole Porter (a trip to the moon on gossamer wings
) for the moon to be your muse. Stepping onto its surface 19 minutes after Armstrong did—with Michael Collins orbiting the moon alone in the command module Columbia, awaiting rendezvous with the Eagle—Buzz Aldrin marveled out loud at the magnificent desolation
of the lunar landscape. And another enduring phrase was minted.
When in the run-up to the Apollo 11 mission Aldrin was asked by LIFE why he should go to the moon at all, he replied: If you are a fighter pilot, you want to get hold of the hottest thing you can. And having flown that, you ask yourself: ‘What else can I fly?’ You come down to the ultimate, the space program. It’s there.
The answer echoed what mountaineer George Mallory said in 1924 when asked why he climbed Mount Everest: Because it’s there.
President John F. Kennedy addressed the very question when he spoke in Houston on September 12, 1962, ostensibly to open NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center there: But why, some say, the moon?
the President told an audience at Rice University. Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
One might now ask, from the