The passing away of Neil Armstrong on August 25 brought back many beautiful memories of the US space programme of the 1960s, which took a boost in May 1961 when President John Kennedy defined a very specific goal for his country: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade was out.
On the night of July 21, 1969 (in the US it was still July 20), Armstrong became the first of four men to walk on the moon before that decade was out. He was followed a few minutes later by his voyage companion, Buzz Aldrin. Only 12 men made it to the moon and back before the Apollo space programme came to an end in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission.
Upon leaping from the landing module onto the moon’s dusty surface, Armstrong uttered the famous one-liner: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, although the indefinite article (the “a”) before “man” is often omitted when the quote is reproduced. Armstrong always insisted he uttered it but it got lost in transmission noise, although in 1999 he admitted that he couldn’t hear himself utter the “a” in the audio recording of his moonwalk transmission.
With today’s sophisticated technology it is sometimes difficult to conceive the effort and commitment that the Apollo space programme entailed, not to mention the enormous risk involved. It is said that a typical domestic washing machine nowadays has more computing power than the landing module used at the time to touch down on the moon!
Perhaps the risk astronauts were exposed is epitomised in a speech that President Richard Nixon had prepared in 1969 in which he would have said: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace”!
Thank God, he never needed to use that speech but he would have to had it not been for the ingenuity and presence of mind of those men on the moon. Indeed, as Armstrong and Aldrin prepared to rejoin Michael Collins, who was in the meantime orbiting the moon in the command module, they discovered they had broken the ignition switch of the ascent engine with their bulky spacesuits. They only managed to make their way up by using part of a pen to push in the circuit breaker that activated the launch sequence and get the module rocket to fire up.
That’s the stuff men like Armstrong were made of.