The Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 was a major triumph of human endeavor, engineering, and science. The entire world had been waiting for this moment. The Apollo lunar missions ended in 1972, but the moon has remained a source of fascination for NASA and scientists. NASA has shipped over 500 Apollo lunar samples to experts all over the world for ongoing study. Each year, a handful of new scientific publications provide insights and updates on what we’ve learned about the Moon from these samples. The Apollo program has become a cultural touchstone. How often have you heard the question, “If they can send a man to the moon, why haven’t they?”
It’s been over half a century since the first manned lunar landing, and NASA hasn’t been able to repeat the feat. At the time, NASA was getting ready to launch the first Apollo mission without people on board. When the space agency tried to launch a manned mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, three astronauts died in a fire. But this setback didn’t stop a determined country from sending a person on the first Apollo mission. 18 months later, the first crewed mission, Apollo 7, successfully went around the Earth and tested most of the complicated equipment that would get them to the Moon. In March 1969, NASA conducted the Apollo 8 mission, which carried astronauts to the far side of the moon but did not involve a moon landing. The Apollo 11 mission blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on the morning of July 16, 1969, with the entire world watching. On board were two men who would achieve worldwide renown.
In addition to Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the mission commander, there was a third astronaut whose name you may not recognize. Michael Collins, age 39, arrived after a 76-hour journey. Apollo 11 arrived in lunar orbit on July 19 at 1:46 pm the following day. The lunar module Eagle, manned by Armstrong and Aldrin, separated from the Command Module, where Collins remained; he would not walk on the moon. Two hours later, the Eagle began its descent to the moon’s surface; it landed on the southern border of the Sea of Tranquility at 4:17 p.m. Armstrong immediately transmitted one of the most famous communications ever received to Mission Control in Houston, Texas: “The Eagle has landed.” At 10:39 p.m., Armstrong opened the lunar module’s hatch. Five hours ahead of schedule, as Armstrong began his descent down the module’s ladder, a television camera attached to the craft filmed his movements and transmitted the signal back to Earth, where hundreds of millions of people watched with intense excitement. At 10:56 p.m., Armstrong landed on the moon’s powdery surface and uttered one of his most famous quotes: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Aldrin joined Armstrong 19 minutes later on the moon’s surface, where they took photographs and planted an American flag. This was followed by a few simple scientific experiments and a phone call with President Richard Nixon. NASA would conduct five more moon landings before calling it quits on December 14, 1972. NASA landed twelve people on Earth’s satellite in total. Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan were the last humans to set foot on the Moon before the remaining three of the 20 planned Apollo missions were canceled. However, numerous obstacles stood in NASA’s way while the Endeavor was driven by the spirit of competition. 500 largely African-American protesters, led by civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy, assembled outside the Kennedy Space Center gate a few days before Apollo 11’s launch. They brought mules and a wooden cart to emphasize the disparity between the gleaming white Saturn V rocket family and those who couldn’t afford food or a proper place to live. Abernathy was a close ally of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The final group believed that the money would be better spent addressing American social issues. The argument was whether the United States should have spent $20 billion to win a race to place the first men on the moon, or if the country could have used that money and political capital to address a variety of global issues such as racial discrimination, pollution, and gender inequality. Is the narrative different today? No, public interest in lunar exploration remains tepid; at the peak of the Apollo 11 program, only 53% of Americans believed the effort was worthwhile. 63 percent of respondents believe that NASA should prioritize human missions to Mars. Elon Musk’s Mars Vision may have no trouble finding volunteer colonists, but 91 percent of respondents believe NASA should focus on monitoring the skies for dangerous asteroids. When crude is so expensive, it is impossible to take risks with human life, which seriously complicates missions. For example, NASA’s budget for the entire year of 2022 was 24 billion dollars, which sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider all of NASA’s programs, it’s clear there isn’t enough to send people to the Moon. The first, for example, cost around 10 billion dollars. NASA also finances the space launch system SLS, which has proven to be a financial black hole. NASA has also awarded SpaceX a roughly $4 billion contract for a lunar human landing system. In comparison, the U.S. military received $777 billion.
However, NASA’s budget has decreased over the years, reaching a peak of four percent of the federal budget in 1965 but falling to well below one percent in recent decades. If the United States were to fund the Apollo missions today, they would cost an estimated $120 billion. As the president and administration changed, so did the federal government’s focus. For instance, if Trump’s plans had succeeded, NASA would have returned to the moon at the end of his second term, but he was not re-elected. Preparing for a manned voyage to the Moon takes longer than the conventional two terms of a sitting president, and incoming presidents and legislatures have frequently abandoned their predecessors’ space exploration ambitions. These costly priority changes have led to cancellation after cancellation, resulting in a loss of approximately $20 billion and years of lost momentum outside of public support funding and politics. NASA’s return to the moon faces a new obstacle. The moon may appear beautiful in the night sky, but it is a death trap for anyone who dares to journey there. You may have seen pictures of the Apollo astronauts waving and smiling for the camera, but they came close to death more times than they could count. In fact, President Nixon had a prepared statement in case the astronauts died. Armstrong and Aldrin would have been stranded on the moon and would have been forced to choose between starvation and suicide. The moon’s surface is covered with craters and rocks, giving it a rugged appearance.
The Landing extremely risky prior to The Landing in 1969 NASA spent billions of dollars developing, deploying, and transporting satellites to the Moon to map its surface and an admission planner’s search for suitable Apollo landing locations. Consider how terrible it would have been if the Apollo lunar module had landed on overly soft terrain and sunk. However, even before stepping out of the lunar module, the astronauts and NASA back on Earth had to contend with a threat known as regoleth or Manticore. On March 17, the largest set of doors in the world opened to reveal an aeronautical marvel at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida. There, in NASA’s largest facility, stood its newest, most powerful, and tallest-ever rocket, Nightfall. NASA intends to use it to return humans to the lunar surface more than 50 years after the last U.S. astronauts walked there during the Apollo missions. The program is named Artemis, after Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. NASA plans to launch a space launch system mega-rocket later this year to initiate the Artemis Exploration Mission Architecture (ERA).
This mission, designated Artemis 1, will travel around the Moon and back unmanned for 26 to 42 days. By the end of 2025, NASA hopes to achieve its next major objective of landing humans at the lunar South Pole. NASA has contracted with companies to send a series of robotic landers to the moon in support of the Artemis Mission, which will carry NASA-funded equipment to examine the moon’s surface and improve the science that could result from future astronaut missions.
