In 1961 President John F. Kennedy promised that the
United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The sheer
audacity and scale of Kennedy’s vision is now hard to comprehend. It would cost
$120 billion, employ 400,000 people at its peak, use rockets and computers not
yet even imagined, let alone designed, and new alloys yet to be discovered.
Before the Apollo project began NASA's Mercury and Gemini
programs put astronauts into Earth orbit and tested docking procedures
necessary for a lunar landing. Launched by the largest rocket built, the mighty
Saturn V, the Apollo spacecraft was made up of three parts.
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| It's Christmas Day, 1968 and the crew of NASA's Apollo 8 take a photograph that would become the iconic image of the sixties. It would also become the most profound environmental photograph of all time. They called it 'Earthrise'. |
These were the
command module where the astronauts lived on the journey and the only part that
returned to Earth; the service module that provided the power and consumables;
and the lunar module that would allow the astronauts to descend to the lunar
surface.
The first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon was Apollo
8 on Christmas Day, 1968, famous for the iconic ‘Earthrise’ photograph that
showed the fragility of our planet along with Commander Jim Lovell’s beautiful Genesis
narrative. On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy with astronauts
Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins on board. On July 20, 1969 the
lunar module "Eagle", with Armstrong and Aldrin aboard descended to the
Sea of Tranquillity on the lunar surface, an event watched by millions worldwide
on television. Armstrong lowered a ladder and stepped down on the moon's
surface. It was "one small step for man, but one giant leap for
mankind." It was the first step by mankind on another world.
