But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. It was a feat for the ages. The non-stop campaign of testing and launches was also a race against time—specifically to honor slain president John F. After World War II drew to a close in the midth century, a new conflict began.
Beginning in the late s, space On July 20, , American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing module Eagle, and became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon. Nearly , miles from Earth, Armstrong spoke these words to more than a billion people listening at home: "That's The Eagle The event was the culmination of a technological race started by President John F.
Kennedy in with the goal of beating The moment is etched in the collective memory of an entire generation—the blurry black-and-white image of Neil Armstrong descending the stairs of the Apollo 11 lunar module on July 20, to become the first human being to step foot on the moon. Every epic moment in modern history inevitably spawns a tangled web of conspiracy theories, and the Apollo moon landings are no exception.
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His name was Bill Kaysing. Kaysing had actually contributed to the US space programme, albeit tenuously: between and , he was an employee of Rocketdyne, a company that helped to design the Saturn V rocket engines. Yet somehow he established a few perennials that are kept alive to this day in Hollywood movies and Fox News documentaries, Reddit forums and YouTube channels. Despite the extraordinary volume of evidence including kg of moon rock collected across six missions; corroboration from Russia, Japan and China; and images from the Nasa Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the tracks made by the astronauts in the moondust , belief in the moon-hoax conspiracy has blossomed since The podcast kingpin Joe Rogan is among the doubters.
So too is the YouTuber Shane Dawson. A sociology professor in New Jersey was exposed last year for telling his students the landings were fake. Every time something big happens, somebody has a counter-explanation. It turns out British people love conspiracy theories, too. Last year, the daytime TV show This Morning welcomed a guest who argued that no one could have walked on the moon as the moon is made of light. Now, in the age of technology, a lot of young people are now investigating for themselves.
One is the fact that no stars are visible in the pictures; another is the lack of a blast crater under the landing module; a third is to do with the way the shadows fall. Yet until his death in , Kaysing maintained that the whole thing was a fraud, filmed in a TV studio. With a boulder field ahead of him, alarms sounding and fuel running low, he guided the spacecraft to the ground.
But in the few talks and interviews Armstrong gave about the landing, he was always modest about the achievement. He pointed instead to the thousands of people who had made the mission possible. At its height, Nasa estimates that a total of , men and women across the United States were involved in the Apollo programme. The number includes everyone from astronauts to mission controllers, contractors to caterers, engineers, scientists, nurses, doctors, mathematicians and programmers.
To see how Nasa arrived at that figure, consider a single aspect of Apollo 11 — the lunar landing itself. On the ground, there was a room full of mission controllers. Behind this core team of per shift were hundreds of engineers in Houston and a team at MIT in Boston advising on the computer alarms. Hundreds of thousands of people worked in order that a handful of astronauts could walk on the lunar surface Credit: Nasa. Mission Control was supported by communications ground stations around the world, the engineering team at the Grumman Corporation that built the lander, and all their subcontractors.
Add in support staff — from senior managers to the people selling the coffee — and already there are thousands involved. Multiply that by all the different components of the endeavour — from rockets to spacesuits, communications to fuel, design to training, launch to splashdown…and , seems an almost modest figure.
Armstrong was not specially selected to pilot the first Moon landing, his crew was next-up in flight rotation. If Apollo 11 had been unable to land, then the commander of Apollo 12, Pete Conrad would most likely have been the first man instead. In fact, although they represented all of humanity, the astronauts of Apollo were remarkably similar in age, background, training and ability.
Many of the Apollo astronauts were similar in age and had very similar backgrounds Credit: Nasa.
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