CBS News - Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 1969

CBS News - Apollo 11 Moon Landing, July 1969 - part 1!!
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Most think of the achievement of the “moon landing” as Neil Armstrong stepping on the lunar dust. I don’t; I chose this 10 minute time period because I thought it’s the most significant achievement of the “moon landing.” It was “Buzz” Aldrin who said the landing was the hard part. After all, once you have landed then it’s a simple matter to get out and walk around.

Even getting to the moon was not that hard. As soon as Robert Goddard build his first liquid fueled rocket in the 1930’s he realized that it would be possible to travel to the moon. (So did Nazi scientists such as Werhner Von Braun, who helped design the Saturn V rocket used to go to the moon).

No, the real achievement was that last 10 minutes of “powered descent” where the landing craft had to slow down from “space travel speed” to a near dead stop just at the surface of the moon. This technique was perfected by none other than semi-madman Howard Hughes, who built the first spacecraft to land safely on the moon.

In this clip you’ll hear some drama that we didn’t know much about at the time. You’ll hear those pesky “program alarms” indicating the computer was overloaded. Notice there’s a long pause where they ask about their “delta h” and “what do you want us to do with that alarm?” What he was asking was “are we gently descending to the moon or are we plummeting to our deaths? Um, any time you’d like to tell us would be great.”

Notice also the CBS “animation” is great, but at the end it’s off by almost a minute. These things are supposed to be figured to the microsecond! So what was going on?

They were supposed to land at the time the animation shows. And it’s confusing because you hear the astronauts call out “lights on” just as the animation shows a light coming on. But those are different lights! The animation shows the “contact light” but the light they were announcing was the low fuel light and they were nowhere near landing in reality. You can hear a guy on the ground give a terse “sixty seconds” (one minute of fuel remaining). What had happened, unknown to anyone on Earth at the time was that the computer was guiding them right to an unsuitable landing site; so Armstrong had to take over control and slide forward a little and then land. Just before they land you can hear that guy scream “thirty seconds!” He was reminding them, in NASA speak, that bad things would happen in 30 seconds.

There’s actually a film of these same events from inside the lander. I like that video too. But this one shows Walter Cronkite who died today at age 92.

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