January 16, 2020 • 43 mins
The Lunar Module is crippled, and its ability to get off the Moon is in doubt. We also examine how the Moon has captured the human imagination from the beginning of time, first as a source of spiritual influence and veneration, and later as an object of profound scientific curiosity.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Nine Days in July is a production of I Heart
Radio and Trade Draft Studios in association with High five Content.
It's July eighteenth, just two days before Apollo eleven is
set to land on the moon. White House speech writer
Bill Sapphire sits down at his desk to write a
speech he hopes the world will never hear. Sapphire has
(00:21):
the unenviable job of giving President Richard Nixon words of
comfort for the nation. Should Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren
not make it off the surface of the moon. Just
stop and think about that for a second. Pretend you
don't know how this mission ends. Put yourself in Sapphire's place.
On July eighteenth, Apollo eleven's triumphant history hadn't even been
(00:41):
written yet, and given this astronomical challenge, the president had
to prepare for the worst. I will now read you
the memo in its entirety, as President Nixon would have
had tragedy befallen Apollo eleven. Fate has ordained that the
men who went to the Moon to explore in peace
will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These
(01:03):
brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldren know that there
is no hope for their recovery, but they also know
that there is hope for mankind. In their sacrifice. These
two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most
noble goal, the search for truth and understanding. They will
be mourned by their families and friends. They will be
(01:25):
mourned by their nation. They will be mourned by the
people of the world. They will be mourned by a
mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into
the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of
the world to feel as one. In their sacrifice, they
bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days,
(01:47):
men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.
In modern times we do much the same, but our
heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will
follow and surely find their way home. Man's search will
not be denied. But these men were the first, and
they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every
(02:10):
human being who looks up at the moon and the
nights to come will know that there is some corner
of another world that is forever mankind. That letter now
rests in the National Archives in Washington, d C. Other
than some manageable issues with the computer during lunar descent,
the Apollo elevin mission has gone off without a hitch. Then,
(02:33):
last night, as buzz Aldrin lay on the floor of
the lunar module trying to sleep, he noticed that the
switch that supplies electrical power to their ascend engine had
been snapped off, probably when he and Neil were taking
off their bulky gear from the moonwalk. Without that switch,
there is no way they're getting off the moon. Sapphire's
letter now seems hauntingly prophetic. It's July, day six of
(02:58):
the Apollo eleven mission. Since the dawn of time, the
Moon has captured the human imagination. It began as an
object of spiritual influence and veneration. As science gradually replaced mysticism,
the moon became an object of profound intellectual curiosity. We
spent a lot of time discussing how we got to
the Moon and what we did once we got there,
(03:20):
but we spent hardly any time at all talking about
the moon itself. Today, we're going to dive into how
the Moon has been viewed down through time, how it
was created, and what it is still teaching US high
in orbit around the Moon. Command Module pilot Michael Collins
is woken by Ronald Evans and the capcom seat back
in Mission Control. Morning Morning. In just a few hours,
(03:50):
the Eagle, currently resting on a lunar surface as Tranquility Base,
will leave the Moon and climb through space to reunite
with the Columbia. But before that happens, Michael has a
lot of work to do. He has eight hundred and
fifty individual key commands to work through in the coming hours,
eight hundred and fifty chances for me to screw it up.
Michael things. Now it's time to wake the occupants of
(04:13):
Tranquility Base. Except they're already awake. Tranquility Base, Houston, Corny Houston,
Transquility Base. Did you get a chance to curl up
on the engine camp? All right? Drew deals ate so
really good at Hammock with weights, and he's been lying
(04:34):
on the at an engine cover, and I curled up.
The truth is neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz altern got
very much sleep last night, between the terrible accommodations, temperatures
that never exceeded sixty one degrees fahrenheit all the blinking
console lates in the darkness, and the knowledge that there
only means off this rock was compromised. The two men
spent a miserable night shivering inside their space suits. Finally,
(04:58):
Buzz gave up trying to sleep and turned attention to
the broken switch. Without the ability to trip that switch,
the Eagle isn't going anywhere. They go to Columbia. This
is a backup crew or congratulations for yesterday's performance person
with as Neil and Buzz prepare their moonship for departure.
They take a couple of minutes to gaze out the
(05:19):
windows at the magnificent desolation outside and snap a few photos.
They even turn the cameras on each other, capturing several
iconic images. Both men looked positively exhausted, yet there's a
sparkle in their eyes, the sign of having experienced something
utterly transcendent. Okay, we're going for this top and we'll
(05:40):
stave with THETFC rogers. That's correct, batteries. They're going e
D stands for explosive devices. When they are ready to launch,
small targeted explosions will separate the ascent stage from the
descent stage. That's like a board Okay, it's finally time
(06:07):
to address that busted circuit breaker. As you can hear, clearly,
both the crew and mission control think this launch is
going to happen. So how did they fix it? Given
the fact that the lunar module is perhaps the most
technologically advanced thing humans have ever created up to that point,
and that an army of America's brightest minds are on
the astronaut's proverbial speed dial, you might be expecting some complex,
(06:29):
high tech solution, but no. Buzz saved the day with
something he found in the pocket of his flight suit,
a chrome body felt tip pen. He sized it against
the whole where the broken switch used to be and
discovered that it was almost the exact same size. Buzz
stabbed the pen into the cavity and discovered, to everyone's relief,
that it fits perfectly. The ascent engine had its power
(06:53):
going to and from the Moon was an unbroken daisy
chain of dumbfounding successes, both sophisticated and simple, more than
sixty miles above them. Michael feels like a nervous bride.
Despite nearly two decades of flying and thousands of hours
in the cockpit, he has never been more anxious than today.
If everything goes according to plan, he merely has to
(07:15):
sit tight and wait for Neil and Buzz to come
to him. But if there are any issues after they
blast off, he may have to swoop down and retrieve them.
He needs to be prepared for anything. Michael has been
harboring a secret dread for months now that something is
going to go wrong on the Moon, stranding his teammates
and forcing him to abandon them and return to Earth alone.
(07:36):
Michael knows that if Neil and Buzz die on the Moon,
the mission will forever be viewed as a tragedy rather
than a success. And you're plays for take off rather
understand one. On the one, he h the ascent engine
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is their only way off the mood. There is no
plan B. If the ascent engine fails to work, Tranquility
Base will become a memorial. That's something eleven year old
Andy Aldrin, Buzz's youngest son, who was glued to the
TV beside his mother, understood all too well. That was
the one time that I was, you know, a little
bit freaked out because I had complete and total faith
(08:22):
and Nassa's ability to execute the mission. A complete and
total faith in the technology, but I was very much
aware that in order to get off of the Moon,
one engine had to work. Lunar ascent engine, you know,
it wasn't like the regular launch where you can do
it do over. To minimize any potential complications, NASA designed
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the engine to be as simple as possible. It doesn't
even need an ignition source. Twin pumps combine the fuel
and the oxidizer, which combust on contact with each other,
and away they go. At least that's the plan. A
split second before the engine is to fire, a horizontal
guillotine severs power cables between the two stages, and explosive
bolts disconnect them from each other. The engine fires, and
(09:06):
in a cloud of moon dust and insulation, flings the
ascent stage from the lunar surface. And look at that
stuff all over the make up. Back on Earth. Glued
to their living room television sets, Janet Armstrong and Joan
Aldren begin weeping with relief. As the eagle rises, Buzz
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allows himself a quick glance out the window. The bottom
half of the lamp shrinks beneath him, surrounded by all
the experiments and litter they left on the surface to
lighten the vehicle. The flag they planted yesterday, which was
so hard to drive into the compacted soil, is blown
over by their exhaust, and everywhere are their bootprints, evidence
that humans trod and another world. Given the Moon's lack
(09:51):
of atmosphere, wind, or water, those bootprints remain there still today,
just as they left them, a silent witness to history,
and they will remain that way for millions of years.
Shortly before Neil and Buzz left for the lunar surface,
mission control told them what they might expect to find
on the Moon. Watch for a lovely girl with a
(10:12):
big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl
called Chango has been living there for four thousand years.
It seems she was Spanish to the Moon because she's
told the tale of immortality from her husband. You might
also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit. And
(10:34):
you're seeing the live feet from Changa Probe. This is
the pictures taken on the camera of Changa three off
the lunar surface. It should come as no surprise, then,
that when the Chinese landed a rover on the Moon
in December, it was named Jade rabbit. It landed all
the moon. Tom Lofree is all the man Chung and
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her rabbit are just one of countless myths associated with
our celestial neighbor. The Moon has attracted our attention for
not just millennia, not just tens of thousands of years,
but presumably even longer. Humans probably even pre humans, have
been looking at the Moon since the beginning of time,
because it's this object that's always there, and it's much
(11:21):
larger than any of the other objects in the sky.
Those two voices you just heard are Dr Ed Krupp,
the director of the Griffith Observatory, my favorite spot in
Los Angeles, and Dr Eddie Dove, a planetary scientist at
the University of Central Florida. You know what, You could
look at almost any civilization in antiquity and you would
find immediately that the moon was deified. There are countless
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legends about the moon spanning every culture on Earth, and
this would apply for example, chancient Egypt, the moon was
known as con su Uh, and it was in fact
a personification of the moon and was a very important
part of Egyptian religion and and Mesopotamia. Uh the god
(12:05):
was known as Sing You can go to ancient Greece,
where the moon was a woman who drove a chariot
across the sky. Selny was her name, and she followed
the highway of the Moon and the Sun through the stars,
just as the moon does. The Romans basically took that
(12:26):
same image, modified it slightly, but the goddess Luna was
the Roman goddess of the moon, and so it would go.
You can work your way around the world from one
culture to the next. To the Hindus, the moon is Soma.
To the Maya, she is so Chill, the goddess of fertility.
For the Inuit, it's the god and Incoan who spends
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every day chasing the sun goddess. Mad with lust, his
body waxes and wanes as he expands all of his
energy towards the chase, disappearing a dozen times a year
to hunt and gorge himself for the next leg of
the hunt. Two tribes in Western Africa the moon is
ma Wu, one half of an epic love affair with
the sun goddess Lisa Eclipse, as they claim, are the
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deities in the throes of love making. Ancient culture is
quickly realized that the moon was more than a source
of light and beauty, It was also a means by
which they could chart time. Our word moon is actually
derived from an archaic word that means to measure, and
that alone tells you that from deepest antiquity, the moon
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was in fact a vehicle for measurement. It would tick
out these convenient bundles of days one month or month
after another as it went through those changes of phases
and those months. Those cycles of the moon seemed at
least to a degree, coordinated with the seasons, and the
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seasons are what it's really all about. Changing seasons affected
anyone's ability to serve vibe. Many Chinese festivals are rooted
in the lunar calendar, and both Judaism and Islam are
guided by its celestial ebb and flow. The moon has
long been fought to have the power over people's bodies
and minds. The association of the moon with fertility is
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part of this idea of the birth and growth and
death and rebirth of the moon. You have the parable
of fertility built into this idea of cyclical renewal. Fertility
in the moon have long been linked since the female
menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle are of similar length.
People say that there are more babies born, for example,
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at the time of the full moon, but when you
actually do the statistics, this just doesn't pan out. While
such police don't hold water in our scientific era, Dr
Crupp thinks they made perfect sense to our ancestors. And
you can easily imagine people looking at the world and
trying to understand how it works, and the most iCal
thing they see is that things essentially come and go,
(15:04):
whether it's the plants seasonally, uh animals, other living things,
and including ourselves. And this idea of birth, growth, death,
and then rebirth is absolutely underscored in the changing phases
of the moon over the monthly cycle. Historically, the moon
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has been blamed for the darker elements of the human personality,
from sleepwalking and suicide to criminal activity and violence. The moon,
it has been claimed, can drive people mad. In fact,
the words lunacy and lunatic are derived from the Latin
name for the moon, Luna. The strange case of Dr
Jekyl and Mr Hyde was inspired by the strange but
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true tale of a Lendoner who committed crimes during the
full moon, and of course, the most obvious application of
lunar madness that most people UH know about comes to
us via holl He would from a European tradition, and
this is the idea of the werewolf, where a human
being is transformed at the time of full moon. There
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you go here one minute, here, look very good. Back
on the eagle. The moon is falling away. A very
quiet ride, just a little bit of a slow walloway
back and forth, Grand fine I d. Soon the Eagle
reaches a vertical speed of eight ft per second. The
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lamb is now soaring over the same landmarks it descended
over yesterday. Seven minutes later, the engine cuts offine engine
or down. Now that the engine is shut down, and
Neil and buzzer once again in micro gravity, the men
noticed a slight haze in the cabin. It's all that
lunar dust now hovering in the air all around them.
(17:12):
Here you go, the whole world in product. Now that
the Eagle is in lunar orbit, it's safe to turn
on their rendezvous radar again. In our minds, miseducated by
too many sci fi movies, we think of a spacecraft
merely lifting off and zooming straight to its rendezvous. But
that's not how orbital mechanics work. From the moment the
ascent engine fired to the docking of the two craft,
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three and a half hours and two orbits pass before
they can dock. Eagle has to match Columbia's orbital shape, height,
and speed, and they don't have a lot of fuel
to do it with. As Michael monitors their progress, he's
relieved his greatest fear has not come to pass, But
now he wonders if they have enough fuel to catch
each other. Luckily, as you may remember from episode two,
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Buzz literally wrote the book on rendezvous in outer space.
Here in mission control, flight operations Director Chris Kraft commented
that he felt, like some five hundred million people around
the world. We're helping push Eagle off the Moon and
back into orbit. Now it's time for a series of
short burns to get the two craft back to each other.
(18:23):
The Eagles about one nautical miles away from Columbia and
closing at roughly per second. Since the Eagles set down
far outside its predicted landing zone yesterday, NASA had Michael
training his instruments on the Sea of Tranquility with every pass,
trying to locate the ship. He was never able to
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find his crewmates. This is Apollo Control range between Eagle
and Columbiana, showing sixty seven point five nautical miles closure
ratecond black team of flight controllers here in mission control
or or less and an advisory capacity and hearing this
round the boos sequence. They're actively computing when over times,
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but in the final analysis, it's onboard confrontations by the
crew of Columbia and the Eagle which really bring about
the round the boom. Up to this point, Michael has
just been waiting. Now he begins to prepare the Command
and Service module to meet the limb. Okay, two burns down,
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only one to go. The fancy orbital mechanics are more
or less done. The two spacecraft are less than forty
miles apart, now close enough for a line of sight thrust.
The Eagle is making a bee line straight for Columbia.
It is now about fifteen miles below the Command Service
Module and closing aboard Columbia. Michael feels like a hotel
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manager preparing to welcome guests in from the cold. He's
looking for the Eagle through the sextant. The Limb starts
off as a tiny, indecipherable blinking light framed by the
enormity of the Moon, but soon it's recognizable bug like
shape comes into view. For millennia, humans look to the
heavens and try to tease out their fate, messages from
(20:10):
their gods and portends for their lives. Then Galileo Galilei
changed everything. In sixteen o nine, he used a telescope
to examine the sky, not for signs and wonders, but
to understand it scientifically doctor ed Krupp. When Galileo first
points a telescope up to the sky a little over
(20:31):
four hundred years ago and looks add among other things,
the Moon, he winds up not just finding out something
about the Moon, but transforming our perspective on the Earth,
on the universe, and on ourselves. Since Aristotle, it was
believed that space was part of nested heavenly orbs, and
that all the celestial bodies, including the Moon, were perfect spheres.
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But Galileo challenged accepted orthodoxy largely unchanged since the third
century Dr Eddie Dove. When Galileo built his telescope, he
was able to start doing even finer details of what
he could see on the lunar surface. It was this
completely different way of looking at the universe. Galileo saw
shadows on the Moon's surface, indicating that it was not smooth.
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It had lofty mountains and deep chasms. Once Galileo, U
and then other astronomers were able to start looking and
finder detail, we could see that there was this other
planetary body that's actually shaped by the similar processes to
what we have here on Earth. Telescopes didn't mean we
got everything right. Prominent astronomers began predicting entire civilizations lived
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on the Moon. Even William Herschel, the British astronomer who
discovered Urnus, asserted that evidence of aliens could be clearly
seen through his telescope. Still, later observers thought that the
dark patches might be oceans of liquid water, while others
swore they could make out vegetation, and where there is
water and flora, they said there must be life. In fact,
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it wasn't until Neil and Buzz set down on the
Moon that it finally began giving up its secrets. Sure,
we built ever better telescopes over the centuries, and then
built spacecraft to photograph the Moon from orbit, but it
wasn't until the twentieth century that astronomers applied the principles
of geology to the study of the Moon and began
forming hypotheses around how it came to be. Apollo eleven's
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up close inspection and the keepsakes they brought back transformed
our understanding about what the Moon is. More on that.
In a moment right now in Columbia, Michael is preparing
to welcome his shipmates home. Doctor it won't belong now.
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Buzz can see Michael orienting the capsule for their docking.
Michael turns on the video camera to film the Eagle's
approachak O. Michael is about to take one of the
most famous pictures of the entire Apollo program. In one image,
he gets the Earth, the Moon, and the Eagle. Every
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single human being alive is in that one picture, except
for one himself. Okay, by got it. Neil and Buzz
bring the Eagle to a stop, and Mike swoops down
to complete the docking. Jesus, he thinks to himself, we're
really going to pull this off. There's a slight nudge
as the spacecraft meet. I'll tell you right there. Both
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spacecraft have been on the far side of the Moon
for this final maneuver. They now re emerge on the
Earth facing side as a single spacecraft control Columbia Eagle
now reunited to become Apollo eleven again. I can. When
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Michael opens the hatch upgrading the two ships, he finds
himself face to face with Buzz covered in moon dust.
Michael is overwhelmed with a sudden urge to grab Buzz's
balding head and give it a kiss, but imagines that
act making it into the history books and decides to
shake his hand instead. Buzz and Neil start passing Michael
their moon samples of the lot. Michael quickly realizes he
(24:25):
has to ensure he has a firm hold on the
rock boxes. As heavy as they are, they feel as
if they could easily get away from him and sail
right through the side of the ship. Hello, you go
give it a beerad over. That's Charlie Duke in the
capcom seat he took over from Evans while Apollo eleven
was on the far side of the Moon. Since the
Eagle is now docked tight, Michael lets him know it's
the Columbia. He's reached. Clambi Radiol. We're all right back
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and back and now we're running a brand, your degerd
Decker and going well. Roger Egal correct and rode to Clambia.
Weake copy you go, you lead it to the fine
Now get friendly white tame on Beyon do we get
be on the way home. And we'd like to congratulate
everybody on a Corrindau and a beautiful b d A.
(25:12):
It was a great deal for everybody. Or I don't.
Now that everyone is united and the lunar samples have
been stowed aboard Columbia, it's time to say goodbye to
the eagle. Hello Columbia, and we'd like you to start down.
You get up and pickle or they can't take the
eagle home with him. It's done its jobs spectacularly, but
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it's no longer needed. You can get a pendicure convenience. Okay,
under gone. Have you ever tiered up getting rid of
an old car? Sure you know it's just a machine,
an assemblage of metal and wires and rubber, but it
also literally drove you through so much of your history.
Though they'd spent only a couple of days of border
Neil and Buzz take the loss of the eagle. Heard
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they can't bring themselves to flip the switch and ask
Michael to do it instead. It you're good doing a
good one. R. We got eagle looking good holding cabin
pressure and it picked up about two feet per second
from that Jedison. The eagles carcass will remain in orbit
around the Moon for several years before smashing into the surface,
(26:18):
rejoining its other half. Afterwards, Charlie, Duke and Michael spend
some time catching up. How it feel a bed? Have
some company? Damn, I'll beat you always be talking to
yourself up where after Ben rev is though it's a
happy home. My parent be nice to have company. Being
(26:39):
married back nine. Have a couple of hundred million Americans
up here right They were with you in spirit anyway,
at least that many. We heard on the news today
eleven that plays New York Times came out with a
uh headlines, the largest headlines they've ever used in the
history of the newspaper. They had a copy, but I print.
(27:01):
The motto of the New York Times is, of course
all the news that's fit to print. Speaking of news,
congratulate story. Messages on the Apollo eleven mission have been
pouring into the White House from world leaders in a
study stream all day. Even the Soviet Union said congratulations,
though the only mentioned about the moon landing in the
main Moscow newspaper was a small story at the bottom
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of the page, buried inside the middle of the newspaper.
Some newsman's estimate that more than six of the news
houston papers across the country today concern your mission. The
New York Times has had a such a demand for
its edition of the paper to day, even though it
ran nine hundred and fifty thousand copies, that it would
reprint the whole thing on Thursday as a souvenir edition.
(27:45):
It turns out that NASA weren't the only ones delighted
with the follow eleven success. The Italian police reported their
Sunday night was the most crime free night of the year,
and in London, a boy who had the faith to
bet five dollars with a bookie that a man would
reach the moon before nineteen collected twenty four thousand dollars.
(28:05):
It's pretty good on Neil's wife jan was asked by
the press if she considered the moon landing the greatest
moment of her life. She said, no, that was the
day we were married, and and about covers the news
uh this day in Apollo eleven, Man's first landing on
(28:29):
the Moon, there was no objective more important to science
than the collection and return of samples of the lunar surface.
Within five days after the samples were picked up on
the lunar surface, where they had lain for millions of years,
they were delivered to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the
Man Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas, inside special vacuum chambers and
(28:50):
nitrogen filled cabinets. Decontamination measures were taken and the containers
were opened. Samples were examined, described, photographed, and wade. They
were then prepared for preliminary physical and chemical analysis. Amazingly,
of the Moon Hall has yet to be analyzed. As
Dr Dobb explains, a lot of the samples we have
(29:11):
from the lunar surface are still kept in the through
baggies they came back in and they haven't been opened,
just because we want to keep them as christine as possible,
so that when someone has a new idea or a
new technique, they can study an actual pristine sample and
not one that's already been exposed to for instance, our
atmosphere that's going to interact chemically with the rock is
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our ideas mature and we get new ideas on what
to look for and we get new technology with which
to look for them. That was a Paulo seventeens Harrison Schmidt,
geologist and moonwalker. Analytical chemistry has advanced in the last
fifty years, where now we can tease out of these
rocks things that we never imagined we could do fifty
(29:54):
years ago. And the FOLLOW program hasn't ended for lunar
scientists and probably never will. From their studies and discoveries,
basic new knowledge and understanding will emerge, and basic new questions,
the beginning of what one investigator has called a new science.
Of The rocks that have been studied have completely transformed
(30:15):
the Moon's origin story. We really didn't know much about
the Moon. Most of our ideas before Follow eleven more
were wrong. In the scientists preliminary studies of the lunar
samples in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, there were several significant findings.
For instance, all the rocks are similar chemically, which points
toward a family relationship. Firstly, the rocks from the Moon
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are very similar to the rocks found right here on Earth.
We were able to do chemical analyzes and age dating
and look at isotopes and say, actually, the chemical makeup
of the lunar rocks and their ages are very similar
to what we have here on Earth, and it's really
hard to have those be so identical unless they basically
(30:59):
came from the same starting pool. Perhaps the most interesting
discovery was that the volcanic rocks are at least three
billion years of age, dating back as far, perhaps further
than the oldest rocks ever discovered on Earth, and that
gout scientists thinking did the Earth and the Moon share
a common ancestor. Our current understanding of how the Moon
(31:19):
was formed is that it was through a giant impact.
Impacts are very very very common in the early Solar System.
Something probably a little bit smaller than the Earth was
hit by a Mars sized body u When that collided,
there was a lot of material that was thrown out
into orbit around the Earth and it's sort of coalesced
(31:39):
together to form the Moon. This is known as the
giant impact hypothesis. For millions of years, both the Earth
and the Moon were molten spheres. After about one million years,
rocks floated up and created the lunar crust of the
Moon and a planetoid crystallized and hardened. Then came millions
of asteroids, meteoroids, and commets. The Moon doesn't have an
(32:01):
atmosphere to protect its surface, so all of these impacts
get all the ways to the surface and then they're
recorded over the history of time. All of these impacts
pulverized the moon surface, creating several inches of a powdery surface.
We call regulars. The best word I love saying regulars.
Typically on the Moon, the regulars is actually pretty fine,
so it gets to particle sizes that are smaller than
(32:24):
the width of the human hair, for instance. But while
it may look as soft as fine ash, it is
anything but sand on the Earth gets rounded because it
gets rolled around with each other and with the ocean
and with wind, and so it gets really rounded. On
the Moon, the broken up bits of rock stay super jagged.
While Neil and Buzz didn't have any issues, later apolymsians,
(32:45):
particularly those in which the astronauts were more active and
as a result Fell more often reported that the lunar
soil was so abrasive it began to cut into their
space suits, releasing precious and critical oxygen. Have you ever
noticed that your view of the Moon never changes. The
orbit of the Moon around the Earth is interesting because
(33:07):
it's actually what we call synchronously orbiting or tidally locked.
Because of this, many people assume that the Moon does
not rotate, but it does. So it goes around the
Earth one time, and it also spins on its axis
one time, and the result of that is that if
they're perfectly in sync, but we always see the same side.
So from our perspective observing from down here on Terra Firma,
(33:29):
the Moon appears as if it's frozen still. Other than
pictures taken by the spacecraft and the astronauts who visited it,
no human eyes have ever seen the so called dark
side of the Moon. In addition to all those craters,
you've no doubt noticed that the Moon is covered in
both light and dark patches. These dark regions that are
called mara and they're actually lower topography, and then lighter
(33:50):
regions that are called the highlands. Typically, the dark regions
are from lava flows that's sort of seeped out from
under the surface when those craters happened um and sort
of filled in in those regions. So how large is
the Moon, Well, it's about that of the Earth, roughly
two of the planet's overall volume. If the Earth were hollow,
we could fit fifty moons inside. That's a lot more
(34:12):
than you thought, I bet. In fact, the United States
is roughly half the circumference of the Moon. If you
were to lay a scale outline of America over top
one of the Moon, it would almost perfectly fit on
the observable surface. We're in a pretty special time in
the history of the Earth and the Moon, and that
the Moon right now is the size it is, and
it's just far en us away that in the sky
(34:34):
it appears to be the same size as the Sun.
Lunar and solar eclipses remain a thrilling site for Earthlings.
So there, um, the Sun is much much further away,
it's much bigger, so in our sky right now they
look like they're the same size. So this is how
we get eclipses. But sometime in the distant future there
will be no more total solar eclipses because, believe it
(34:56):
or not, the Moon is drifting away from us at
the rate of a few centimeters per year. Actually, the
Moon has been moving away from the Earth. That turns
out for most of its history. So as the Moon
moves further away, it's actually going to get a little
bit smaller to our view, and we won't get these
total solar clipses like we see today. While the Moon
(35:16):
is two hundred and thirty eight thousand miles away from
the Earth now, it was roughly four hundred miles away
when it was first formed. Imagine how much larger it
would have appeared in the sky then. And how do
we know the Moon is moving away from us? The
crew of Apollo eleven, of course, do you remember that
laser reflector. We can measure the amount of time it
takes to get there and then come back, and that
(35:36):
tells us how far away the Moon is, because we
know how fast light moved in a couple of billion years.
Earth's tides will also act very differently, because despite what
Bill O'Reilly thinks, we know exactly why the Earth's oceans,
which cover roughly seventy the planet's surface, behave the way
they do. The Moon has gravity and the Earth has gravity,
and they tug on each other. If the Earth was
(35:59):
just a solid body like the Moon, we wouldn't even
observe this very much. But because the Earth's covered with
all this water. Um these forces and these tugs actually
pull at the water at different times of day and
at different amounts, and it ends up causing tides. The
Earth's gravitational poll also affects the Moon. It causes moonquakes
(36:21):
that occur deep beneath the lunar surface. And just how
do we know that? Yeah, the seizedmometer that Neil and
Buzz deployed. There's still so much more to learn about
the Moon. Nearly everything we know came from six Apollo
moon missions, eighty and one half hours on the surface
and eight dred and forty two pounds of moon rocks.
(36:43):
Now that the gear is stowed, it's finally time for
Apollo eleven to head home. This is Apollo Control. At
this time, the crew should be involved in their pre
trans Earth injection status check. The trans Earth injection burn is,
as Michael Collins refers to it in his biography, the
get us home burn, the save our as burn, the
(37:03):
we don't want to be a permanent Moon satellite burn.
As they strap into their couches, Buzz realizes he is
at the end of his physical limits. He has barely
slept in three days and is running on pure adrenaline.
All he wants to do is sleep the rest of
the way back to Earth Houston year ago for one minute,
(37:26):
yellows go sick, thank you well, good once again. You
will not be surprised to learn that this burn will
take place while the spacecraft is behind the moon and
we have lots of signal. Now, so let's say that
the waters this way and then staffs escave that. Right. Therefore,
I'm parting like that. Normally a joke like that would
(37:48):
be all Michael, but that was actually buzz. Perhaps his
sleep deprivation is relaxing him in more ways than one night.
The burn is powerful enough to pin them to their seats,
and it feels like presures are good. Tanter conjectures should
(38:09):
be completed in about the town seconds any racer and
shut down. Now, okay, start down. When the engine cuts off,
the astronauts find themselves witless again. We should have shot
down at the time at this point of follow eleven
land of feet of a box eight six hundred sixty
(38:30):
feet per second, or about five sols nine hundred mile
to be honest, way back to work, not hated forth
flashed out in the Pacific ocean at one hundred tiny
five hours eighteen. I love you. You are eight zero.
Back on Earth, Charlie Duke and everyone in mission control
are eager for news. Finally, Columbia emerges for a final
(38:53):
time from behind the Moon. I've ever seen in my life.
I'll day, but you guys today Paula levin Houston had
to go over and I'll open up the r L door.
L L r L stands for the Lunar Receiving Laboratory,
(39:14):
the facility at nassa's Man Spacecraft Center in Houston, now
known as the Johnson Space Center. Here's where the astronauts
and their lunar booty will be quarantined upon arrival back
on Earth. There are some very expectant lunar rock scientists waiting. Roger,
we got you coming home. It's well stocked. Secretly, Michael
hopes that stock means loaded with vermouth and gin. He
(39:36):
is craping a martini. As they fly from the Moon,
they become tourists, once again, gazing out the windows to
look longingly at the world shrinking behind them, And just
like that, the hardest phase of the mission is over.
They successfully landed and walked on the Moon. There's only
one harrowing element of the mission left, atmospheric cree entry,
(39:56):
but it's still several days away. For now. D Slayton,
the director of flight crew Operations, has a more immediate concern.
Congratulations on an outstanding job. You guys are looping on
a great show up there. I think it's a fun
time to power down. I've got a little rest of
eason and playing along later. Hope girl is going to
get a good sleep on the way by, given how
long they were up on the Moon and how little
(40:17):
sleep they got in the cold and cramped lemb dealon
buzz can't agree more. We're looking forward to a little
wrap and wrastle trip back, and as you've heard it.
Slayton passes the mic back to Duke, who lets the
crew know that they have ceased receiving data from the Eagle. Okay,
very good. Without its life support systems and heaters running,
(40:42):
the vessel has succumbed to the cult of space two
point seven kelvin a fancy space way of saying negative
four d and fifty five degrees fahrenheit. As Apollo Levan
races back to Earth, it is simultaneously moving further away
from it, because after millennia of humans gazeing up at
the Moon in both worship and scientific marvel, we have
(41:03):
finally visited another world, and in so doing we have
demonstrated to ourselves and anyone else who might be watching
from the stars, that humanity is now a space faring civilization.
Day six is over. Day seven July begins with our
next episode, in which we describe an epic showdown between
two titans, the United States and the Soviet Union, as
(41:26):
they used the space race to wage the Cold War,
and one thing will become abundantly clear, America would have
never reached the Moon before the Russians without a whole
lot of help from the Nazis. This podcast is a
production of I Heart Radio and trade Craft Studios. Executive
(41:48):
producers Ashe Seroia and Scott Bernstein, in association with High
five Content and executive producer Andrew Jacobs. Amazing research and
production assistance by associate producer is Brian show Saw and
Natalie Robomed. Our incredible editor is Bill Lance. Original music
by Henry ben Wah. Special thanks to Andy Aldred, Dr
(42:11):
Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory and UCF planetary
scientist Dr Eddie Dove. Special thanks to everyone at NASA
who made this podcast possible, especially the incredible technological wizardry
of consulting producer Ben Feist, who's responsible for organizing and
cleaning the eleven thousand hours of mission audio you're hearing
(42:32):
selections from in this podcast. Special thanks also to consultant
Gina Delvac. Licensing rights and clearances by Deborah Correa. This
is a brand new podcast and we're so excited to
be sharing it with you. Help us spread it far
and wide, tell your friends, leave ratings and reviews, and
chat about it on social media. Our hashtag is nine
(42:53):
D I J. We would love to hear what you think.
New episodes come out each week, so be sure to
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brandon Phipps. Thanks
so much for listening, and I'll see you next episode.
(43:28):
M
Nine Days in July is a production of I Heart
Radio and Trade Draft Studios in association with High five Content.
It's July eighteenth, just two days before Apollo eleven is
set to land on the moon. White House speech writer
Bill Sapphire sits down at his desk to write a
speech he hopes the world will never hear. Sapphire has
(00:21):
the unenviable job of giving President Richard Nixon words of
comfort for the nation. Should Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren
not make it off the surface of the moon. Just
stop and think about that for a second. Pretend you
don't know how this mission ends. Put yourself in Sapphire's place.
On July eighteenth, Apollo eleven's triumphant history hadn't even been
(00:41):
written yet, and given this astronomical challenge, the president had
to prepare for the worst. I will now read you
the memo in its entirety, as President Nixon would have
had tragedy befallen Apollo eleven. Fate has ordained that the
men who went to the Moon to explore in peace
will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These
(01:03):
brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldren know that there
is no hope for their recovery, but they also know
that there is hope for mankind. In their sacrifice. These
two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most
noble goal, the search for truth and understanding. They will
be mourned by their families and friends. They will be
(01:25):
mourned by their nation. They will be mourned by the
people of the world. They will be mourned by a
mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into
the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of
the world to feel as one. In their sacrifice, they
bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days,
(01:47):
men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.
In modern times we do much the same, but our
heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will
follow and surely find their way home. Man's search will
not be denied. But these men were the first, and
they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every
(02:10):
human being who looks up at the moon and the
nights to come will know that there is some corner
of another world that is forever mankind. That letter now
rests in the National Archives in Washington, d C. Other
than some manageable issues with the computer during lunar descent,
the Apollo elevin mission has gone off without a hitch. Then,
(02:33):
last night, as buzz Aldrin lay on the floor of
the lunar module trying to sleep, he noticed that the
switch that supplies electrical power to their ascend engine had
been snapped off, probably when he and Neil were taking
off their bulky gear from the moonwalk. Without that switch,
there is no way they're getting off the moon. Sapphire's
letter now seems hauntingly prophetic. It's July, day six of
(02:58):
the Apollo eleven mission. Since the dawn of time, the
Moon has captured the human imagination. It began as an
object of spiritual influence and veneration. As science gradually replaced mysticism,
the moon became an object of profound intellectual curiosity. We
spent a lot of time discussing how we got to
the Moon and what we did once we got there,
(03:20):
but we spent hardly any time at all talking about
the moon itself. Today, we're going to dive into how
the Moon has been viewed down through time, how it
was created, and what it is still teaching US high
in orbit around the Moon. Command Module pilot Michael Collins
is woken by Ronald Evans and the capcom seat back
in Mission Control. Morning Morning. In just a few hours,
(03:50):
the Eagle, currently resting on a lunar surface as Tranquility Base,
will leave the Moon and climb through space to reunite
with the Columbia. But before that happens, Michael has a
lot of work to do. He has eight hundred and
fifty individual key commands to work through in the coming hours,
eight hundred and fifty chances for me to screw it up.
Michael things. Now it's time to wake the occupants of
(04:13):
Tranquility Base. Except they're already awake. Tranquility Base, Houston, Corny Houston,
Transquility Base. Did you get a chance to curl up
on the engine camp? All right? Drew deals ate so
really good at Hammock with weights, and he's been lying
(04:34):
on the at an engine cover, and I curled up.
The truth is neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz altern got
very much sleep last night, between the terrible accommodations, temperatures
that never exceeded sixty one degrees fahrenheit all the blinking
console lates in the darkness, and the knowledge that there
only means off this rock was compromised. The two men
spent a miserable night shivering inside their space suits. Finally,
(04:58):
Buzz gave up trying to sleep and turned attention to
the broken switch. Without the ability to trip that switch,
the Eagle isn't going anywhere. They go to Columbia. This
is a backup crew or congratulations for yesterday's performance person
with as Neil and Buzz prepare their moonship for departure.
They take a couple of minutes to gaze out the
(05:19):
windows at the magnificent desolation outside and snap a few photos.
They even turn the cameras on each other, capturing several
iconic images. Both men looked positively exhausted, yet there's a
sparkle in their eyes, the sign of having experienced something
utterly transcendent. Okay, we're going for this top and we'll
(05:40):
stave with THETFC rogers. That's correct, batteries. They're going e
D stands for explosive devices. When they are ready to launch,
small targeted explosions will separate the ascent stage from the
descent stage. That's like a board Okay, it's finally time
(06:07):
to address that busted circuit breaker. As you can hear, clearly,
both the crew and mission control think this launch is
going to happen. So how did they fix it? Given
the fact that the lunar module is perhaps the most
technologically advanced thing humans have ever created up to that point,
and that an army of America's brightest minds are on
the astronaut's proverbial speed dial, you might be expecting some complex,
(06:29):
high tech solution, but no. Buzz saved the day with
something he found in the pocket of his flight suit,
a chrome body felt tip pen. He sized it against
the whole where the broken switch used to be and
discovered that it was almost the exact same size. Buzz
stabbed the pen into the cavity and discovered, to everyone's relief,
that it fits perfectly. The ascent engine had its power
(06:53):
going to and from the Moon was an unbroken daisy
chain of dumbfounding successes, both sophisticated and simple, more than
sixty miles above them. Michael feels like a nervous bride.
Despite nearly two decades of flying and thousands of hours
in the cockpit, he has never been more anxious than today.
If everything goes according to plan, he merely has to
(07:15):
sit tight and wait for Neil and Buzz to come
to him. But if there are any issues after they
blast off, he may have to swoop down and retrieve them.
He needs to be prepared for anything. Michael has been
harboring a secret dread for months now that something is
going to go wrong on the Moon, stranding his teammates
and forcing him to abandon them and return to Earth alone.
(07:36):
Michael knows that if Neil and Buzz die on the Moon,
the mission will forever be viewed as a tragedy rather
than a success. And you're plays for take off rather
understand one. On the one, he h the ascent engine
(07:58):
is their only way off the mood. There is no
plan B. If the ascent engine fails to work, Tranquility
Base will become a memorial. That's something eleven year old
Andy Aldrin, Buzz's youngest son, who was glued to the
TV beside his mother, understood all too well. That was
the one time that I was, you know, a little
bit freaked out because I had complete and total faith
(08:22):
and Nassa's ability to execute the mission. A complete and
total faith in the technology, but I was very much
aware that in order to get off of the Moon,
one engine had to work. Lunar ascent engine, you know,
it wasn't like the regular launch where you can do
it do over. To minimize any potential complications, NASA designed
(08:44):
the engine to be as simple as possible. It doesn't
even need an ignition source. Twin pumps combine the fuel
and the oxidizer, which combust on contact with each other,
and away they go. At least that's the plan. A
split second before the engine is to fire, a horizontal
guillotine severs power cables between the two stages, and explosive
bolts disconnect them from each other. The engine fires, and
(09:06):
in a cloud of moon dust and insulation, flings the
ascent stage from the lunar surface. And look at that
stuff all over the make up. Back on Earth. Glued
to their living room television sets, Janet Armstrong and Joan
Aldren begin weeping with relief. As the eagle rises, Buzz
(09:29):
allows himself a quick glance out the window. The bottom
half of the lamp shrinks beneath him, surrounded by all
the experiments and litter they left on the surface to
lighten the vehicle. The flag they planted yesterday, which was
so hard to drive into the compacted soil, is blown
over by their exhaust, and everywhere are their bootprints, evidence
that humans trod and another world. Given the Moon's lack
(09:51):
of atmosphere, wind, or water, those bootprints remain there still today,
just as they left them, a silent witness to history,
and they will remain that way for millions of years.
Shortly before Neil and Buzz left for the lunar surface,
mission control told them what they might expect to find
on the Moon. Watch for a lovely girl with a
(10:12):
big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl
called Chango has been living there for four thousand years.
It seems she was Spanish to the Moon because she's
told the tale of immortality from her husband. You might
also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit. And
(10:34):
you're seeing the live feet from Changa Probe. This is
the pictures taken on the camera of Changa three off
the lunar surface. It should come as no surprise, then,
that when the Chinese landed a rover on the Moon
in December, it was named Jade rabbit. It landed all
the moon. Tom Lofree is all the man Chung and
(10:57):
her rabbit are just one of countless myths associated with
our celestial neighbor. The Moon has attracted our attention for
not just millennia, not just tens of thousands of years,
but presumably even longer. Humans probably even pre humans, have
been looking at the Moon since the beginning of time,
because it's this object that's always there, and it's much
(11:21):
larger than any of the other objects in the sky.
Those two voices you just heard are Dr Ed Krupp,
the director of the Griffith Observatory, my favorite spot in
Los Angeles, and Dr Eddie Dove, a planetary scientist at
the University of Central Florida. You know what, You could
look at almost any civilization in antiquity and you would
find immediately that the moon was deified. There are countless
(11:45):
legends about the moon spanning every culture on Earth, and
this would apply for example, chancient Egypt, the moon was
known as con su Uh, and it was in fact
a personification of the moon and was a very important
part of Egyptian religion and and Mesopotamia. Uh the god
(12:05):
was known as Sing You can go to ancient Greece,
where the moon was a woman who drove a chariot
across the sky. Selny was her name, and she followed
the highway of the Moon and the Sun through the stars,
just as the moon does. The Romans basically took that
(12:26):
same image, modified it slightly, but the goddess Luna was
the Roman goddess of the moon, and so it would go.
You can work your way around the world from one
culture to the next. To the Hindus, the moon is Soma.
To the Maya, she is so Chill, the goddess of fertility.
For the Inuit, it's the god and Incoan who spends
(12:48):
every day chasing the sun goddess. Mad with lust, his
body waxes and wanes as he expands all of his
energy towards the chase, disappearing a dozen times a year
to hunt and gorge himself for the next leg of
the hunt. Two tribes in Western Africa the moon is
ma Wu, one half of an epic love affair with
the sun goddess Lisa Eclipse, as they claim, are the
(13:10):
deities in the throes of love making. Ancient culture is
quickly realized that the moon was more than a source
of light and beauty, It was also a means by
which they could chart time. Our word moon is actually
derived from an archaic word that means to measure, and
that alone tells you that from deepest antiquity, the moon
(13:32):
was in fact a vehicle for measurement. It would tick
out these convenient bundles of days one month or month
after another as it went through those changes of phases
and those months. Those cycles of the moon seemed at
least to a degree, coordinated with the seasons, and the
(13:53):
seasons are what it's really all about. Changing seasons affected
anyone's ability to serve vibe. Many Chinese festivals are rooted
in the lunar calendar, and both Judaism and Islam are
guided by its celestial ebb and flow. The moon has
long been fought to have the power over people's bodies
and minds. The association of the moon with fertility is
(14:17):
part of this idea of the birth and growth and
death and rebirth of the moon. You have the parable
of fertility built into this idea of cyclical renewal. Fertility
in the moon have long been linked since the female
menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle are of similar length.
People say that there are more babies born, for example,
(14:42):
at the time of the full moon, but when you
actually do the statistics, this just doesn't pan out. While
such police don't hold water in our scientific era, Dr
Crupp thinks they made perfect sense to our ancestors. And
you can easily imagine people looking at the world and
trying to understand how it works, and the most iCal
thing they see is that things essentially come and go,
(15:04):
whether it's the plants seasonally, uh animals, other living things,
and including ourselves. And this idea of birth, growth, death,
and then rebirth is absolutely underscored in the changing phases
of the moon over the monthly cycle. Historically, the moon
(15:26):
has been blamed for the darker elements of the human personality,
from sleepwalking and suicide to criminal activity and violence. The moon,
it has been claimed, can drive people mad. In fact,
the words lunacy and lunatic are derived from the Latin
name for the moon, Luna. The strange case of Dr
Jekyl and Mr Hyde was inspired by the strange but
(15:47):
true tale of a Lendoner who committed crimes during the
full moon, and of course, the most obvious application of
lunar madness that most people UH know about comes to
us via holl He would from a European tradition, and
this is the idea of the werewolf, where a human
being is transformed at the time of full moon. There
(16:23):
you go here one minute, here, look very good. Back
on the eagle. The moon is falling away. A very
quiet ride, just a little bit of a slow walloway
back and forth, Grand fine I d. Soon the Eagle
reaches a vertical speed of eight ft per second. The
(16:44):
lamb is now soaring over the same landmarks it descended
over yesterday. Seven minutes later, the engine cuts offine engine
or down. Now that the engine is shut down, and
Neil and buzzer once again in micro gravity, the men
noticed a slight haze in the cabin. It's all that
lunar dust now hovering in the air all around them.
(17:12):
Here you go, the whole world in product. Now that
the Eagle is in lunar orbit, it's safe to turn
on their rendezvous radar again. In our minds, miseducated by
too many sci fi movies, we think of a spacecraft
merely lifting off and zooming straight to its rendezvous. But
that's not how orbital mechanics work. From the moment the
ascent engine fired to the docking of the two craft,
(17:35):
three and a half hours and two orbits pass before
they can dock. Eagle has to match Columbia's orbital shape, height,
and speed, and they don't have a lot of fuel
to do it with. As Michael monitors their progress, he's
relieved his greatest fear has not come to pass, But
now he wonders if they have enough fuel to catch
each other. Luckily, as you may remember from episode two,
(17:57):
Buzz literally wrote the book on rendezvous in outer space.
Here in mission control, flight operations Director Chris Kraft commented
that he felt, like some five hundred million people around
the world. We're helping push Eagle off the Moon and
back into orbit. Now it's time for a series of
short burns to get the two craft back to each other.
(18:23):
The Eagles about one nautical miles away from Columbia and
closing at roughly per second. Since the Eagles set down
far outside its predicted landing zone yesterday, NASA had Michael
training his instruments on the Sea of Tranquility with every pass,
trying to locate the ship. He was never able to
(18:44):
find his crewmates. This is Apollo Control range between Eagle
and Columbiana, showing sixty seven point five nautical miles closure
ratecond black team of flight controllers here in mission control
or or less and an advisory capacity and hearing this
round the boos sequence. They're actively computing when over times,
(19:06):
but in the final analysis, it's onboard confrontations by the
crew of Columbia and the Eagle which really bring about
the round the boom. Up to this point, Michael has
just been waiting. Now he begins to prepare the Command
and Service module to meet the limb. Okay, two burns down,
(19:27):
only one to go. The fancy orbital mechanics are more
or less done. The two spacecraft are less than forty
miles apart, now close enough for a line of sight thrust.
The Eagle is making a bee line straight for Columbia.
It is now about fifteen miles below the Command Service
Module and closing aboard Columbia. Michael feels like a hotel
(19:49):
manager preparing to welcome guests in from the cold. He's
looking for the Eagle through the sextant. The Limb starts
off as a tiny, indecipherable blinking light framed by the
enormity of the Moon, but soon it's recognizable bug like
shape comes into view. For millennia, humans look to the
heavens and try to tease out their fate, messages from
(20:10):
their gods and portends for their lives. Then Galileo Galilei
changed everything. In sixteen o nine, he used a telescope
to examine the sky, not for signs and wonders, but
to understand it scientifically doctor ed Krupp. When Galileo first
points a telescope up to the sky a little over
(20:31):
four hundred years ago and looks add among other things,
the Moon, he winds up not just finding out something
about the Moon, but transforming our perspective on the Earth,
on the universe, and on ourselves. Since Aristotle, it was
believed that space was part of nested heavenly orbs, and
that all the celestial bodies, including the Moon, were perfect spheres.
(20:54):
But Galileo challenged accepted orthodoxy largely unchanged since the third
century Dr Eddie Dove. When Galileo built his telescope, he
was able to start doing even finer details of what
he could see on the lunar surface. It was this
completely different way of looking at the universe. Galileo saw
shadows on the Moon's surface, indicating that it was not smooth.
(21:18):
It had lofty mountains and deep chasms. Once Galileo, U
and then other astronomers were able to start looking and
finder detail, we could see that there was this other
planetary body that's actually shaped by the similar processes to
what we have here on Earth. Telescopes didn't mean we
got everything right. Prominent astronomers began predicting entire civilizations lived
(21:39):
on the Moon. Even William Herschel, the British astronomer who
discovered Urnus, asserted that evidence of aliens could be clearly
seen through his telescope. Still, later observers thought that the
dark patches might be oceans of liquid water, while others
swore they could make out vegetation, and where there is
water and flora, they said there must be life. In fact,
(22:01):
it wasn't until Neil and Buzz set down on the
Moon that it finally began giving up its secrets. Sure,
we built ever better telescopes over the centuries, and then
built spacecraft to photograph the Moon from orbit, but it
wasn't until the twentieth century that astronomers applied the principles
of geology to the study of the Moon and began
forming hypotheses around how it came to be. Apollo eleven's
(22:23):
up close inspection and the keepsakes they brought back transformed
our understanding about what the Moon is. More on that.
In a moment right now in Columbia, Michael is preparing
to welcome his shipmates home. Doctor it won't belong now.
(22:47):
Buzz can see Michael orienting the capsule for their docking.
Michael turns on the video camera to film the Eagle's
approachak O. Michael is about to take one of the
most famous pictures of the entire Apollo program. In one image,
he gets the Earth, the Moon, and the Eagle. Every
(23:08):
single human being alive is in that one picture, except
for one himself. Okay, by got it. Neil and Buzz
bring the Eagle to a stop, and Mike swoops down
to complete the docking. Jesus, he thinks to himself, we're
really going to pull this off. There's a slight nudge
as the spacecraft meet. I'll tell you right there. Both
(23:36):
spacecraft have been on the far side of the Moon
for this final maneuver. They now re emerge on the
Earth facing side as a single spacecraft control Columbia Eagle
now reunited to become Apollo eleven again. I can. When
(23:58):
Michael opens the hatch upgrading the two ships, he finds
himself face to face with Buzz covered in moon dust.
Michael is overwhelmed with a sudden urge to grab Buzz's
balding head and give it a kiss, but imagines that
act making it into the history books and decides to
shake his hand instead. Buzz and Neil start passing Michael
their moon samples of the lot. Michael quickly realizes he
(24:25):
has to ensure he has a firm hold on the
rock boxes. As heavy as they are, they feel as
if they could easily get away from him and sail
right through the side of the ship. Hello, you go
give it a beerad over. That's Charlie Duke in the
capcom seat he took over from Evans while Apollo eleven
was on the far side of the Moon. Since the
Eagle is now docked tight, Michael lets him know it's
the Columbia. He's reached. Clambi Radiol. We're all right back
(24:49):
and back and now we're running a brand, your degerd
Decker and going well. Roger Egal correct and rode to Clambia.
Weake copy you go, you lead it to the fine
Now get friendly white tame on Beyon do we get
be on the way home. And we'd like to congratulate
everybody on a Corrindau and a beautiful b d A.
(25:12):
It was a great deal for everybody. Or I don't.
Now that everyone is united and the lunar samples have
been stowed aboard Columbia, it's time to say goodbye to
the eagle. Hello Columbia, and we'd like you to start down.
You get up and pickle or they can't take the
eagle home with him. It's done its jobs spectacularly, but
(25:33):
it's no longer needed. You can get a pendicure convenience. Okay,
under gone. Have you ever tiered up getting rid of
an old car? Sure you know it's just a machine,
an assemblage of metal and wires and rubber, but it
also literally drove you through so much of your history.
Though they'd spent only a couple of days of border
Neil and Buzz take the loss of the eagle. Heard
(25:56):
they can't bring themselves to flip the switch and ask
Michael to do it instead. It you're good doing a
good one. R. We got eagle looking good holding cabin
pressure and it picked up about two feet per second
from that Jedison. The eagles carcass will remain in orbit
around the Moon for several years before smashing into the surface,
(26:18):
rejoining its other half. Afterwards, Charlie, Duke and Michael spend
some time catching up. How it feel a bed? Have
some company? Damn, I'll beat you always be talking to
yourself up where after Ben rev is though it's a
happy home. My parent be nice to have company. Being
(26:39):
married back nine. Have a couple of hundred million Americans
up here right They were with you in spirit anyway,
at least that many. We heard on the news today
eleven that plays New York Times came out with a
uh headlines, the largest headlines they've ever used in the
history of the newspaper. They had a copy, but I print.
(27:01):
The motto of the New York Times is, of course
all the news that's fit to print. Speaking of news,
congratulate story. Messages on the Apollo eleven mission have been
pouring into the White House from world leaders in a
study stream all day. Even the Soviet Union said congratulations,
though the only mentioned about the moon landing in the
main Moscow newspaper was a small story at the bottom
(27:22):
of the page, buried inside the middle of the newspaper.
Some newsman's estimate that more than six of the news
houston papers across the country today concern your mission. The
New York Times has had a such a demand for
its edition of the paper to day, even though it
ran nine hundred and fifty thousand copies, that it would
reprint the whole thing on Thursday as a souvenir edition.
(27:45):
It turns out that NASA weren't the only ones delighted
with the follow eleven success. The Italian police reported their
Sunday night was the most crime free night of the year,
and in London, a boy who had the faith to
bet five dollars with a bookie that a man would
reach the moon before nineteen collected twenty four thousand dollars.
(28:05):
It's pretty good on Neil's wife jan was asked by
the press if she considered the moon landing the greatest
moment of her life. She said, no, that was the
day we were married, and and about covers the news
uh this day in Apollo eleven, Man's first landing on
(28:29):
the Moon, there was no objective more important to science
than the collection and return of samples of the lunar surface.
Within five days after the samples were picked up on
the lunar surface, where they had lain for millions of years,
they were delivered to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the
Man Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas, inside special vacuum chambers and
(28:50):
nitrogen filled cabinets. Decontamination measures were taken and the containers
were opened. Samples were examined, described, photographed, and wade. They
were then prepared for preliminary physical and chemical analysis. Amazingly,
of the Moon Hall has yet to be analyzed. As
Dr Dobb explains, a lot of the samples we have
(29:11):
from the lunar surface are still kept in the through
baggies they came back in and they haven't been opened,
just because we want to keep them as christine as possible,
so that when someone has a new idea or a
new technique, they can study an actual pristine sample and
not one that's already been exposed to for instance, our
atmosphere that's going to interact chemically with the rock is
(29:31):
our ideas mature and we get new ideas on what
to look for and we get new technology with which
to look for them. That was a Paulo seventeens Harrison Schmidt,
geologist and moonwalker. Analytical chemistry has advanced in the last
fifty years, where now we can tease out of these
rocks things that we never imagined we could do fifty
(29:54):
years ago. And the FOLLOW program hasn't ended for lunar
scientists and probably never will. From their studies and discoveries,
basic new knowledge and understanding will emerge, and basic new questions,
the beginning of what one investigator has called a new science.
Of The rocks that have been studied have completely transformed
(30:15):
the Moon's origin story. We really didn't know much about
the Moon. Most of our ideas before Follow eleven more
were wrong. In the scientists preliminary studies of the lunar
samples in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, there were several significant findings.
For instance, all the rocks are similar chemically, which points
toward a family relationship. Firstly, the rocks from the Moon
(30:38):
are very similar to the rocks found right here on Earth.
We were able to do chemical analyzes and age dating
and look at isotopes and say, actually, the chemical makeup
of the lunar rocks and their ages are very similar
to what we have here on Earth, and it's really
hard to have those be so identical unless they basically
(30:59):
came from the same starting pool. Perhaps the most interesting
discovery was that the volcanic rocks are at least three
billion years of age, dating back as far, perhaps further
than the oldest rocks ever discovered on Earth, and that
gout scientists thinking did the Earth and the Moon share
a common ancestor. Our current understanding of how the Moon
(31:19):
was formed is that it was through a giant impact.
Impacts are very very very common in the early Solar System.
Something probably a little bit smaller than the Earth was
hit by a Mars sized body u When that collided,
there was a lot of material that was thrown out
into orbit around the Earth and it's sort of coalesced
(31:39):
together to form the Moon. This is known as the
giant impact hypothesis. For millions of years, both the Earth
and the Moon were molten spheres. After about one million years,
rocks floated up and created the lunar crust of the
Moon and a planetoid crystallized and hardened. Then came millions
of asteroids, meteoroids, and commets. The Moon doesn't have an
(32:01):
atmosphere to protect its surface, so all of these impacts
get all the ways to the surface and then they're
recorded over the history of time. All of these impacts
pulverized the moon surface, creating several inches of a powdery surface.
We call regulars. The best word I love saying regulars.
Typically on the Moon, the regulars is actually pretty fine,
so it gets to particle sizes that are smaller than
(32:24):
the width of the human hair, for instance. But while
it may look as soft as fine ash, it is
anything but sand on the Earth gets rounded because it
gets rolled around with each other and with the ocean
and with wind, and so it gets really rounded. On
the Moon, the broken up bits of rock stay super jagged.
While Neil and Buzz didn't have any issues, later apolymsians,
(32:45):
particularly those in which the astronauts were more active and
as a result Fell more often reported that the lunar
soil was so abrasive it began to cut into their
space suits, releasing precious and critical oxygen. Have you ever
noticed that your view of the Moon never changes. The
orbit of the Moon around the Earth is interesting because
(33:07):
it's actually what we call synchronously orbiting or tidally locked.
Because of this, many people assume that the Moon does
not rotate, but it does. So it goes around the
Earth one time, and it also spins on its axis
one time, and the result of that is that if
they're perfectly in sync, but we always see the same side.
So from our perspective observing from down here on Terra Firma,
(33:29):
the Moon appears as if it's frozen still. Other than
pictures taken by the spacecraft and the astronauts who visited it,
no human eyes have ever seen the so called dark
side of the Moon. In addition to all those craters,
you've no doubt noticed that the Moon is covered in
both light and dark patches. These dark regions that are
called mara and they're actually lower topography, and then lighter
(33:50):
regions that are called the highlands. Typically, the dark regions
are from lava flows that's sort of seeped out from
under the surface when those craters happened um and sort
of filled in in those regions. So how large is
the Moon, Well, it's about that of the Earth, roughly
two of the planet's overall volume. If the Earth were hollow,
we could fit fifty moons inside. That's a lot more
(34:12):
than you thought, I bet. In fact, the United States
is roughly half the circumference of the Moon. If you
were to lay a scale outline of America over top
one of the Moon, it would almost perfectly fit on
the observable surface. We're in a pretty special time in
the history of the Earth and the Moon, and that
the Moon right now is the size it is, and
it's just far en us away that in the sky
(34:34):
it appears to be the same size as the Sun.
Lunar and solar eclipses remain a thrilling site for Earthlings.
So there, um, the Sun is much much further away,
it's much bigger, so in our sky right now they
look like they're the same size. So this is how
we get eclipses. But sometime in the distant future there
will be no more total solar eclipses because, believe it
(34:56):
or not, the Moon is drifting away from us at
the rate of a few centimeters per year. Actually, the
Moon has been moving away from the Earth. That turns
out for most of its history. So as the Moon
moves further away, it's actually going to get a little
bit smaller to our view, and we won't get these
total solar clipses like we see today. While the Moon
(35:16):
is two hundred and thirty eight thousand miles away from
the Earth now, it was roughly four hundred miles away
when it was first formed. Imagine how much larger it
would have appeared in the sky then. And how do
we know the Moon is moving away from us? The
crew of Apollo eleven, of course, do you remember that
laser reflector. We can measure the amount of time it
takes to get there and then come back, and that
(35:36):
tells us how far away the Moon is, because we
know how fast light moved in a couple of billion years.
Earth's tides will also act very differently, because despite what
Bill O'Reilly thinks, we know exactly why the Earth's oceans,
which cover roughly seventy the planet's surface, behave the way
they do. The Moon has gravity and the Earth has gravity,
and they tug on each other. If the Earth was
(35:59):
just a solid body like the Moon, we wouldn't even
observe this very much. But because the Earth's covered with
all this water. Um these forces and these tugs actually
pull at the water at different times of day and
at different amounts, and it ends up causing tides. The
Earth's gravitational poll also affects the Moon. It causes moonquakes
(36:21):
that occur deep beneath the lunar surface. And just how
do we know that? Yeah, the seizedmometer that Neil and
Buzz deployed. There's still so much more to learn about
the Moon. Nearly everything we know came from six Apollo
moon missions, eighty and one half hours on the surface
and eight dred and forty two pounds of moon rocks.
(36:43):
Now that the gear is stowed, it's finally time for
Apollo eleven to head home. This is Apollo Control. At
this time, the crew should be involved in their pre
trans Earth injection status check. The trans Earth injection burn is,
as Michael Collins refers to it in his biography, the
get us home burn, the save our as burn, the
(37:03):
we don't want to be a permanent Moon satellite burn.
As they strap into their couches, Buzz realizes he is
at the end of his physical limits. He has barely
slept in three days and is running on pure adrenaline.
All he wants to do is sleep the rest of
the way back to Earth Houston year ago for one minute,
(37:26):
yellows go sick, thank you well, good once again. You
will not be surprised to learn that this burn will
take place while the spacecraft is behind the moon and
we have lots of signal. Now, so let's say that
the waters this way and then staffs escave that. Right. Therefore,
I'm parting like that. Normally a joke like that would
(37:48):
be all Michael, but that was actually buzz. Perhaps his
sleep deprivation is relaxing him in more ways than one night.
The burn is powerful enough to pin them to their seats,
and it feels like presures are good. Tanter conjectures should
(38:09):
be completed in about the town seconds any racer and
shut down. Now, okay, start down. When the engine cuts off,
the astronauts find themselves witless again. We should have shot
down at the time at this point of follow eleven
land of feet of a box eight six hundred sixty
(38:30):
feet per second, or about five sols nine hundred mile
to be honest, way back to work, not hated forth
flashed out in the Pacific ocean at one hundred tiny
five hours eighteen. I love you. You are eight zero.
Back on Earth, Charlie Duke and everyone in mission control
are eager for news. Finally, Columbia emerges for a final
(38:53):
time from behind the Moon. I've ever seen in my life.
I'll day, but you guys today Paula levin Houston had
to go over and I'll open up the r L door.
L L r L stands for the Lunar Receiving Laboratory,
(39:14):
the facility at nassa's Man Spacecraft Center in Houston, now
known as the Johnson Space Center. Here's where the astronauts
and their lunar booty will be quarantined upon arrival back
on Earth. There are some very expectant lunar rock scientists waiting. Roger,
we got you coming home. It's well stocked. Secretly, Michael
hopes that stock means loaded with vermouth and gin. He
(39:36):
is craping a martini. As they fly from the Moon,
they become tourists, once again, gazing out the windows to
look longingly at the world shrinking behind them, And just
like that, the hardest phase of the mission is over.
They successfully landed and walked on the Moon. There's only
one harrowing element of the mission left, atmospheric cree entry,
(39:56):
but it's still several days away. For now. D Slayton,
the director of flight crew Operations, has a more immediate concern.
Congratulations on an outstanding job. You guys are looping on
a great show up there. I think it's a fun
time to power down. I've got a little rest of
eason and playing along later. Hope girl is going to
get a good sleep on the way by, given how
long they were up on the Moon and how little
(40:17):
sleep they got in the cold and cramped lemb dealon
buzz can't agree more. We're looking forward to a little
wrap and wrastle trip back, and as you've heard it.
Slayton passes the mic back to Duke, who lets the
crew know that they have ceased receiving data from the Eagle. Okay,
very good. Without its life support systems and heaters running,
(40:42):
the vessel has succumbed to the cult of space two
point seven kelvin a fancy space way of saying negative
four d and fifty five degrees fahrenheit. As Apollo Levan
races back to Earth, it is simultaneously moving further away
from it, because after millennia of humans gazeing up at
the Moon in both worship and scientific marvel, we have
(41:03):
finally visited another world, and in so doing we have
demonstrated to ourselves and anyone else who might be watching
from the stars, that humanity is now a space faring civilization.
Day six is over. Day seven July begins with our
next episode, in which we describe an epic showdown between
two titans, the United States and the Soviet Union, as
(41:26):
they used the space race to wage the Cold War,
and one thing will become abundantly clear, America would have
never reached the Moon before the Russians without a whole
lot of help from the Nazis. This podcast is a
production of I Heart Radio and trade Craft Studios. Executive
(41:48):
producers Ashe Seroia and Scott Bernstein, in association with High
five Content and executive producer Andrew Jacobs. Amazing research and
production assistance by associate producer is Brian show Saw and
Natalie Robomed. Our incredible editor is Bill Lance. Original music
by Henry ben Wah. Special thanks to Andy Aldred, Dr
(42:11):
Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory and UCF planetary
scientist Dr Eddie Dove. Special thanks to everyone at NASA
who made this podcast possible, especially the incredible technological wizardry
of consulting producer Ben Feist, who's responsible for organizing and
cleaning the eleven thousand hours of mission audio you're hearing
(42:32):
selections from in this podcast. Special thanks also to consultant
Gina Delvac. Licensing rights and clearances by Deborah Correa. This
is a brand new podcast and we're so excited to
be sharing it with you. Help us spread it far
and wide, tell your friends, leave ratings and reviews, and
chat about it on social media. Our hashtag is nine
(42:53):
D I J. We would love to hear what you think.
New episodes come out each week, so be sure to
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brandon Phipps. Thanks
so much for listening, and I'll see you next episode.
(43:28):
M
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