5 Hours Of Mindblowing Space Facts To Fall Asleep To
The title sells a five hour sleep aid of "mindblowing space facts." The reality is far better. This is a complete, chronological documentary of the American space program, narrated by Naked Science, running from the night Sputnik crossed the sky in 1957 to the moment Gene Cernan lifted the last human boot off the Moon in 1972.
Published Jun 9, 20264:52:12 video45 min readAdded Jun 14, 2026Open on YouTube →
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The title sells a five hour sleep aid of "mindblowing space facts." The reality is far better. This is a complete, chronological documentary of the American space program, narrated by Naked Science, running from the night Sputnik crossed the sky in 1957 to the moment Gene Cernan lifted the last human boot off the Moon in 1972. In between it tells the whole story: the panic after the Soviets went first, the seven Mercury test pilots strapped to converted missiles, Project Gemini learning to walk and dock in space, the Apollo 1 fire that killed three men on the pad, the monstrous Saturn V, and then Apollo flying its missions in a "Gatling gun sequence" until the Eagle landed and kept landing.
It is a film built out of Smithsonian artifacts and the astronauts' own voices, unearthed from the NASA vault. The throughline is that the impossible got done by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, by failure treated as curriculum, and by improvisation with duct tape, drugstore cameras, and household mousetrap springs. This page rebuilds the documentary in full, in the order it tells the story, keeping every name, number, mission, and aside. Read it and you have watched the five hours.
Sputnik: the night America fell behind
It opens with a sound, the beep of Sputnik 1, the first Soviet satellite, arcing over America on a sleepy Friday night in 1957. Eisenhower had left Washington to go golfing. Most Americans were home; Leave It to Beaver premiered that very night. Citizens could hear the satellite with their own ham radios, each beep a taunt. The shock was real because the Soviet Union was considered a technologically backward country, devastated by World War II, while postwar America was thriving and fully expected to be first into space.
The narrator makes the sharp point that the true shock was not the first beep but the one two punch: Sputnik 2 followed within a month, and this time it carried a dog named Laika. Soviet Union two, America nothing. A month later America put its first satellite, Vanguard TV3, on a rocket built on a shoestring, with components that included springs plucked from common household mousetraps. One engineer remembered Senator John F. Kennedy dismissing rockets as a waste of money. On launch morning, rocket fever hit Cape Canaveral and local shops sold out of binoculars. Then the rocket failed: someone screamed, another yelled "Duck," and the satellite was thrown from the blast. It cracked open, the antennas bent, but its interior transmitter kept beeping from the wreckage, telling everyone it was still alive. It now sits at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Less than two months later America tried again, and Explorer 1 reached orbit, confirmed by the Goldstone tracking station in California. And it was not only the professionals watching. The documentary introduces Steve, an eighteen year old Brooklyn physics student and amateur astronomer who got permission to climb the roof of the RCA Building in New York to watch satellites pass overhead, part of the Smithsonian's Operation Moonwatch. His team lined up telescopes so their fields of view made a "picket fence across the sky." Science fiction had become the cutting edge, exciting enough to keep you up all night.
Project Mercury: seven men and the machines
In 1958 NASA posted a new job, open only to military test pilots: astronaut, for Project Mercury, America's first human spaceflight program. At first it was a secret on shaky ground; nobody even knew if it would go forward. After hundreds applied, seven made the cut: Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Alan Shepard, and John Glenn. Introduced on April 9, 1959, they were celebrities before they had flown, household names and cover stories, yet also competitors for the single first seat.
The training was brutal and improvised. Wally Schirra endured a heat chamber. Grissom flew blindfolded. Glenn became a human test dummy in a centrifuge the astronauts called "the beast," spinning so violently their hearts banged into their lungs. To simulate weightlessness, a C-131 transport (and later the "vomit comet") climbed to 40,000 feet and pushed over like a roller coaster so the men could float. Doctors did not know if humans could survive long in weightlessness, whether organs would function or food would stay down, and they probed the psychological side with memory puzzles, ink blots, and the question "Who am I?" What they found was fearlessness bordering on recklessness. As the narrator puts it, their worst fear was not dying, it was not being allowed to fly.
The machine was a capsule, not an airplane. A rocket would fling it past the atmosphere at more than 5,000 mph; retro rockets would slow it for a fiery freefall into the Atlantic, slowed at the very end by parachutes. NASA dropped empty capsules over and over to test those parachutes, because the parachute was plan A and there was no plan B. As the old joke goes, it is not the fall that kills you, it is the landing. Building Mercury also meant building a global ground network: fresh college graduates with pocket protectors were sent to Nigeria, Morocco, and Kenya to track flights and relay data, half of them lacking even voice communication, writing messages on paper for teletype operators. One of them, Arnold Aldridge, remembered the most important piece of equipment being a bottle of Kaopectate on top of the console.
A chimpanzee went first. Trained with shocks to his feet if his attention strayed, three year old Ham flew Mercury 2 to "man rate" the vehicle. His capsule lost pressure but his suit held; he pulled levers and pushed buttons as trained and came home with nothing worse than a bruised nose, dehydrated and tired, happy with an apple. Then NASA chose Alan Shepard to be first. Before him, though, came another blow: on April 12, 1961, the Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into a full orbit, an order of magnitude harder than a suborbital hop. Five days later the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. Kennedy needed a win.
He got one in pieces. On May 5, 1961, Mercury-Redstone 3 carried Shepard 100 miles up. He recalled driving to the pad in the dark, the liquid oxygen venting, telling himself, "okay Buster, let's go and get the job done." His heart rate jumped to 126 at liftoff; he was weightless for only five minutes but ran a tight script and splashed down clean. It was a suborbital answer to Gagarin's orbit, "a somewhat insufficient answer," but enough that Kennedy pinned a medal on him at the White House three days later (and nearly knocked heads when the medal slid off its box). Privately Kennedy backed Mercury not for science but for status, treating space as a measuring stick of national strength.
Kennedy's deadline: the Moon by the end of the decade
On May 25, 1961, just six weeks after Gagarin and three weeks after Shepard's fifteen total minutes of human spaceflight experience, Kennedy stood before Congress and committed the nation to "achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." It was a call to action handed to an agency not yet three years old. The space race now had a finish line, even if it had no path.
Mercury kept flying. Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury 4) nearly drowned him when the hatch blew on splashdown and the capsule sank. Then came John Glenn. On Friendship 7 in February 1962 he became the first American to orbit the Earth, watched by 100 million on television, more than double the previous launch, his trajectory only five hundredths of a degree off. NASA had wired the capsule as a flying examination room: a tiny eye chart sat in the middle of the instrument panel because doctors feared zero gravity would unfocus his eyes, and he had to swallow applesauce and water and turn his head side to side to test for nausea. He had none.
Glenn also had better public relations instincts than NASA, which did not value images. After a haircut in Cocoa Beach he walked into a drugstore, bought an Ansco camera, and brought it back; engineers flipped it upside down and added a handle and triggers so he could shoot and wind film one handed in a glove. The drama came at the end: a faulty signal suggested his landing bag and heat shield might have come loose, raising the chance he would burn up on re-entry. He flew the required 14 degree angle through a real fireball and splashed down safely. His flight finally gave America parity with the Soviet Union; one young viewer, five years old, said it was the first thing he remembered in his life, and that he had wanted to be a dump truck driver until John Glenn hooked him.
The program rolled on with confidence: Carpenter's Aurora 7, Schirra's nine hour six orbit Mercury 8, and Cooper's full day in space on Mercury 9. Mercury proved humans could orbit repeatedly and come home safely. Then came two shocks. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. And two of the original seven were grounded: Shepard with Meniere's disease and Slayton with a heart problem. There are only three ways out of the business, an astronaut says: you retire, you are killed, or you are grounded, and grounded is by far the worst.
Project Gemini: learning to live and work in space
To reach the Moon, NASA needed a new home and a bridge program. Houston, Texas, a freewheeling oil town, won the Manned Spacecraft Center in a decision sealed by the political pull of Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. The site, a swamp southeast of Houston chosen within weeks of Hurricane Carla's 170 mph fury, became space central; author Norman Mailer called the place "a marvelously up to date minimum security prison." Astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Ed White built houses next to each other, and "Houston" became shorthand for planet Earth.
Project Gemini, underway in early 1964, was a series of missions to test every nut and bolt of a Moon shot with two person crews in bigger capsules, on longer missions, doing rendezvous, docking, and working outside. The astronaut corps grew from seven to thirty, each taking responsibility for a system; Grissom was such a meticulous engineer that the crews called the capsule the "Gusmobile." America had moon mania, and toy makers cashed in: the documentary lingers on a McCoy pottery cookie jar shaped like Friendship 7, bought at a Woolworth's and filled with warm cookies after school, and on a Soviet Lunokhod toy so detailed (the gearing, the proportions) that curators believe the toy designers worked with the real rover designers. Hardware moved aboard the "Pregnant Guppy," an airplane wide enough to swallow rocket stages.
Gemini's run is a string of vivid milestones. Gemini 3, the maiden crewed flight, put Grissom and rookie John Young up; the first stage flew so smooth there "isn't a jiggle or a bump," though they landed 52 miles off target and Grissom lost his breakfast in deep swells. Gemini 4 carried the first American spacewalk: Ed White, paired with his best friend Jim McDivitt, floated free with a handheld propulsion gun, having so much fun ("this is the greatest experience I've ever known, Jim") that Grissom on Capcom had to call him back like an impatient parent ("Gemini 4, get back in"). White had been beaten to the first spacewalk by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in March 1965, and getting back inside the inflated suit was far harder than getting out.
Then came rendezvous and docking, the skills you could not reach the Moon without. After the target Agena rocket for Gemini 6 broke up on ascent, NASA got radical: it flew Gemini 7 first, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell enduring a fourteen day endurance marathon Lovell called "two weeks in a men's room" (Borman wore the flexible "grasshopper suit" the whole time and they lost, then shared, a single toothbrush), and then sent Gemini 6 to find them. Schirra flew the first space rendezvous in inches, in thrusts he called "a micro mouse fart." Gemini 8 sent rookies Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong to the first docking, then nearly killed them when a stuck thruster spun the joined spacecraft up to one revolution per second; Armstrong fired the re-entry control system to wrestle it back, ending the mission in the program's first emergency landing.
Spacewalks, meanwhile, were going badly. On Gemini 9Gene Cernan overheated until his visor fogged and froze and he had to wipe a clear spot with his nose. Dick Gordon, tying a tether, exhausted himself ("I needed both hands"). NASA finally cracked it with underwater training in a Baltimore pool, pioneered by veteran scuba diver Buzz Aldrin, who on Gemini 12 rewrote the rules with slow, deliberate movements and new handholds and footholds. Gemini ran ten missions in twenty months, each more ambitious than the last, and checked the box. Next stop, the Moon.
The Apollo 1 fire
Apollo's first crew was Gus Grissom, Ed White, and rookie Roger Chaffee, wrestling the most complicated spacecraft yet, a command module with nearly two million parts and miles of wiring, against a deadline only three years out. On a Friday at Cape Kennedy in January 1967, they ran a routine, "non hazardous" plugs out test, sealed inside the capsule and pressurized with pure oxygen exactly as it would be in space. Grissom, fed up with garbled communications, asked, "How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?" Then a voltage surge sparked a fire. From the first cry of alarm to radio silence was seventeen seconds.
It was not a spreading fire but an explosive combustion. The hull ruptured from the pressure, the temperature reached 1,200 degrees, and there were puddles of melted aluminum. It was sparked by electrical fault, fed by pure oxygen, and contained by a heavy hatch designed to lock out space that instead locked in the fire. As a historian says, nobody at NASA realized they had put three astronauts into a bomb waiting to go off. The investigation found the design flawed, the construction rushed, and NASA and its contractors culpable. Three weeks before they were to launch, the crew were buried, most astronauts in full military dress for the duty they wished they did not have. Johnson, whose support for NASA never wavered and who saw space as part of his Great Society, steered the program through the wreckage. It could go forward, but not in the form it was. The new form was more inspections, more diligence; Armstrong remembered that you could not tell when quitting time was, because nobody left.
The Saturn V: a controlled explosion the size of a small nuclear bomb
The rocket, at least, stayed on the fast track. Reaching the Moon with three men required the three stage Saturn V, six years in the making and too far behind to test stage by stage, so NASA made the audacious decision to test the whole vehicle at once ("all up" testing). It stood as tall as a 36 story building and held nearly a million gallons of fuel. Its first stage carried five F-1 engines, each producing a million and a half pounds of thrust, together 7.5 million pounds, enough to lift a vehicle over 6.2 million pounds off the pad while guzzling fifteen tons of fuel per second. As a curator notes, if one engine failed or it hit the tower, it could blow up with the force of a small nuclear bomb.
Figure 1. The numbers of the Saturn V's first stage, straight from the documentary. Five F-1 engines at 1.5 million pounds of thrust each sum to 7.5 million pounds, just enough to break the 6.2 million pound vehicle (about 5.5 million pounds of which is fuel) off the pad. That narrow margin is why the launch looked, in one astronaut's words, like it "lumbered" upward.
Its maiden flight, Apollo 4, carried an empty redesigned command module, the first launch since the fire, with the press thought safe three miles away. Crews poured water onto the pad so reflected sound waves would not bounce back and destroy the bottom of the rocket. At ignition the fire ripped the air apart with a tearing sound; three miles off, ceiling tiles fell around Walter Cronkite as the trailers shook like an earthquake. It was a flawless launch, a shot in the arm at the end of 1968, one of the most tumultuous years in modern American history: Vietnam, the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, cities and campuses exploding in violence. The command module sent back the first color shots of Earth from more than 11,000 miles away.
Apollo 7: redeeming the command module, with a head cold
With Kennedy's deadline only two years out and no part of the Moon capable spacecraft yet tested by humans, the redesigned command module flew its first crewed mission, Apollo 7, an eleven day Earth orbit shakedown. The rebuilt capsule now had new wiring, a fireproof interior, a hatch easier to open from inside, and a honeycomb body to survive 5,000 degree re-entry. To fly a textbook mission NASA chose veteran Wally Schirra, with rookies Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, the backup crew for Apollo 1 who had lost three friends in the fire.
The spacecraft worked beautifully: Schirra separated, turned around, fired the all important engine (the one that has to work to leave lunar orbit or you are stuck forever), and re-rendezvoused. But Schirra caught a "monster head cold," and in zero gravity his sinuses would not drain. The documentary uses the moment to detour through early space food, which had to be coated in gelatin so crumbs would not float into air filters: sugar coated cereal, sausage patties, chicken stew, butterscotch pudding, grapefruit drink. None of it was mom's chicken soup. Schirra grew irritable, picked the famous fight with mission control over an overloaded timeline, refused to start a live television broadcast on schedule, and, on descent, refused to wear his helmet so he could clear his ears. Flight director Glynn Lunney was not used to hearing no. The crew flew an almost perfect mission and proved the command module spaceworthy, but mission control quietly swore none of them would fly again.
Apollo 8: Christmas Eve in lunar orbit
Then US intelligence reported the Soviets might be ready to send a craft around the Moon, and NASA reached for its boldest idea. The lunar module was not ready, so the brain trust decided to put three men on the command and service module alone and send them to the Moon, the riskiest, scariest mission they thought they could fly. The crew would spend Christmas circling the Moon, with only sixteen weeks to make the shift. The crew of Apollo 8 was Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and rookie Bill Anders, who privately put the odds at a third chance of full success, a third of going but failing the goal, and a third of not coming back.
On December 21, 1968, a quarter million people watched the Saturn V make its first crewed flight, generating energy the narrator likens to rechanneling every river in the United States through a single hydroelectric dam at once. After translunar injection the wall map in mission control switched, for the first time, to a flight path to the Moon. On day three the crew crossed into the Moon's sphere of gravitational influence, the first humans to feel the pull of another world. Navigation across a quarter million miles of "interworld void," hitting a moving target where the smallest error meant missing by thousands of miles, was done with a sextant, the same tool sailors used for centuries, built like the finest Swiss watch; astronauts memorized numbered stars and keyed them into the computer, which relayed to tracking stations for micro course corrections.
The most critical maneuver, the engine burn to enter lunar orbit, had to happen behind the Moon, completely cut off from Earth: too slow and they crash, too fast and they fly off forever, with no way to know until it was over. After 32 minutes of silence mission control sent a test call and heard Lovell's voice. From sixty miles up the Moon was "essentially gray, no color, looks like plaster of Paris," its craters rounded, many clearly hit by meteorites. On the third orbit, as Borman tilted the ship, Earth rose over the lunar horizon and Anders, the mission photographer, scrambled ("give me a roll of color quick"), shooting the Earthrise photograph, one of the most iconic images in history, showing no political boundaries, a single fragile planet. Told they would have the largest audience ever to hear a human voice and instructed only to "do something appropriate," the crew read from the Book of Genesis, chosen as a foundation of multiple world religions so it would be a message for all mankind. The broadcast reached over a billion people in 64 countries, and Borman signed off: "Good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth."
Apollo 9: proving the foil origami
Now NASA had to prove the lunar module, a little shuttle to take crews from lunar orbit to the surface and back, built on Earth to work only in vacuum, a seven year sprint to design something that did not need to be aerodynamic. With its stubby body, spindly legs, and gold foil waist, it looked like nothing that had ever flown. Apollo 9 took the sixteen ton craft to Earth orbit with Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart, what Scott called "the connoisseur's mission": fly the untried vehicle around the Earth, separate from the mothership, then redock and come home. The launch was postponed when all three caught colds, NASA gun shy after Apollo 7.
The crew docked for the first time, extracted the lander, and named the spacecraft to tell them apart on the radio: the gumdrop shaped command module became Gumdrop, the spider shaped lander Spider. Schweickart tested the new self contained moon suit (no umbilical, life support on his back, the cut tether you would need to walk on the Moon). When Scott's camera jammed mid spacewalk, Schweickart got a quiet, unscheduled five minutes alone, deciding "my job right now is to just be a human being," to stop being an astronaut and let it all come in. The deepest moment of the mission came when Spider flew off on its own, more than a hundred miles from Gumdrop, in a spacecraft that was "just foil origami" with no possibility of re-entry. Both crews knew the stakes: if they could not rendezvous and redock with Dave, they would die, and Dave would come home alone, a "wrenching national trauma." Spider's ascent engine fired, the redocking went better than planned, and the lander worked.
Figure 2. The anatomy of an Apollo spacecraft, as the film explains it. Of everything that launched, only the command module ever returned to Earth. The lunar module split in two at the Moon: the descent stage stayed on the surface as a launch pad, and the ascent stage carried the crew back up, then was crashed back into the Moon after redocking.
Apollo 10: the dress rehearsal that went everywhere but down
With three perfect test flights in five months ("achieve one amazing thing, come home, shower up, hit the books, send the next three guys up"), NASA flew Apollo 10, a full dress rehearsal, with its most experienced crew ever: Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan, five spaceflights between them. They trained in simulators run from an instructor's operating station that could conjure worst case scenarios, with debriefings that bluntly told you "what you did was a disaster and you wound up dead." The cartoon nicknames stuck because Charlie Brown and Snoopy were the most popular cartoons of 1969: the command module was Charlie Brown, the lander Snoopy, sent to "snoop around." The crew also brought the first color TV from space, delighting over a billion viewers as they tumbled and joked about which way was up.
Stafford and Cernan took Snoopy down to 50,000 feet, the exact point where a real landing's final descent would begin. Mission planners debated letting them land but decided to bite off a reasonable amount and leave the big bite for Apollo 11; landing and lunar liftoff were untested and far riskier than orbiting. A docking ring slippage of about six degrees nearly scrubbed the undocking. And on the way back up, with John Young alone in the command module (a scary new first in lunar orbit), Snoopy suddenly went into a wild gyration, the lunar horizon flashing by eight times in fifteen seconds before Stafford punched the abort guidance and regained control. The cause was a single mistaken switch setting, exactly the kind of imperfection the final test was meant to catch, and it never happened again. Three days later the crew came home, one step from the goal.
Apollo 11: the Eagle has landed
In July 1969 nearly a million people gathered for Apollo 11, the attempt to land. The crew were all veterans: commander Neil Armstrong, a test pilot who had survived Gemini 8; Buzz Aldrin, the first astronaut with a PhD and the spacewalk expert; and command module pilot Michael Collins, grounded from Apollo 8 by a loose cervical disc and returned to the pool in time. They trained relentlessly, Armstrong and Aldrin in the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, the "flying bedstead," a downward pointing jet engine with a seat bolted on; in 1968, on his twenty first flight in the trainer, Armstrong was forced to eject seconds from a fatal crash, then calmly went back to his desk to finish the workday.
Outside the gates, civil rights leader Reverend Ralph Abernathy and the Poor People's Campaign arrived not to protest the Moon shot but to put poverty on an international platform. NASA administrator Thomas Paine met them, "hitch your wagons to our honors," and invited them to watch the launch, beginning a dialogue toward reconciliation. On launch day, with ex president Johnson, vice president Spiro Agnew, and reporters from 56 countries watching, the Saturn V carried a decade of hope into a blinding sky.
After a three day journey Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit. The crew undocked into the command module Columbia and the lunar module Eagle, which carried just over twelve minutes of descent fuel. Flight director Gene Kranz locked the doors and told his controllers he believed they were destined to be in that room and that he would never second guess their calls. The descent was the most complex part of the flight, "a thousand things to worry about," and at once the computer flashed a "1202" alarm nobody on board understood: it meant the computer had too many tasks and might abort. The ground gambled and pressed on. Then Armstrong saw he had overshot into a field of boulders around a crater and flew on, manually, hunting a smooth spot a half mile away as the fuel ran down: 100 feet, 60 seconds, 40 feet, 30 feet, contact light. "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." They had between 17 and 47 seconds of fuel left.
Mission control did not celebrate; they ran "stay / no stay" checklists to decide instantly whether the ship was safe to remain. The moonwalk was moved earlier, to 9:30 p.m. Houston time, prime time, a live broadcast for the whole world. At 9:56 p.m. the 38 year old Armstrong descended the ladder ("a pretty good little jump") and stepped onto the surface: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," having intended to say "for a man" and, in the excitement, dropped the word. Twenty minutes later Aldrin followed, surveying the "magnificent desolation." They had only about two hours to deploy the flag, set out experiments, and gather rocks, while Collins orbited above, his only fear that the two might get stuck on the surface. The Smithsonian's 3D scan of Columbia later revealed "space graffiti," the calendar and operational notes the crew scratched on the walls to track time. President Nixon phoned during the EVA, "the proudest day of our lives," kept brief because NASA judged it too risky for ceremony. The crew brought back over fifty pounds of soil and rock and more than a hundred photographs, including the visor picture reflecting Eagle and the photographer.
Taking off from the Moon was a task as hard as landing: separating the lander's descent and ascent halves and firing the ascent engine, never before tried at the Moon, with no rescue if it failed. Eagle's engine fired, the redocking went without a hitch, and the crew released Eagle to crash back into the Moon. Columbia hit the atmosphere at 36,000 feet per second and splashed down in the Pacific, where the USS Hornet waited. As a precaution against lunar germs the crew donned biological isolation garments and entered a Mobile Quarantine Facility, a trailer with bunks, a microwave, and the hot shower, gin, and steak the astronauts most wanted. Their goodwill tour took them to 24 countries in 45 days, with Armstrong stressing again and again that it was not two men landing but hundreds of thousands working around the clock for years. Everywhere people said "we did it," as fellow humans. Nixon called it "the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation," a phrase that stunned Michael Collins.
Apollo 12: struck by lightning, twice
NASA never saw Apollo 11 as the end, only the proof of concept. Apollo 12 was the first science based mission, commanded by the brilliant, funny Princeton man Pete Conrad, flying with Navy buddies Richard Gordon and Alan Bean. They launched November 14, 1969, under deteriorating skies, with Nixon the first sitting president to attend an Apollo launch. The flight was routine for 36 seconds. Then a burst of static, the platform dropped out, and the instrument panel lit up "like a Christmas tree," more warning lights than Conrad had ever seen, his hand near the abort handle.
On the ground, controller John Aaron recognized the garbage data from a training session a year earlier and made the legendary call: "Flight, tell them to try SCE to auxiliary." Neither flight director Gerry Griffin nor Capcom Jerry Carr knew what it meant, but they relayed it; Conrad was confused ("NCE to auxiliary?") until crewmate Alan Bean found the obscure switch and clicked it. The power came up and everything worked. The launch had caused a phenomenon nobody knew existed: triggered lightning, with the rocket trailing a plume of ionized gas, becoming "the world's longest lightning rod," struck at 36 and 52 seconds after liftoff. Throughout, the Saturn V instrument unit, the rocket's own self steering computer, kept it dead on trajectory.
Apollo 12 pulled off NASA's first pinpoint landing, targeting Surveyor crater so it could reach the robotic Surveyor 3 that had landed two years earlier (from 1966 to 1968 NASA sent seven Surveyors, five working perfectly, to prove the surface would hold a multi ton craft). Conrad nailed it, landing about 25 feet from Surveyor in the lander Intrepid. The first color TV from the Moon failed when Bean pointed the camera at the Sun and ruined it; one network filled the air with actors in spacesuits. Still, Conrad and Bean shot some of Apollo's finest stills and logged eight hours of moonwalks, triple Apollo 11, retrieving Surveyor's camera (now at the Smithsonian) to show a precise spot could be reached on purpose.
Apollo 13: the successful failure
After Apollo 12, NASA prepared for eight more landings even as enthusiasm waned amid civil rights struggles, the economy, and the Vietnam War. Apollo 13 launched in April 1970 under commander Jim Lovell (his second flight to the Moon), with Fred Haise and, after Ken Mattingly was grounded by measles exposure 72 hours out, backup pilot Jack Swigert, who happened to have written the command module malfunction procedures. The crowds were thin and the networks did not even carry the crew's TV broadcast from command module Odyssey and lunar module Aquarius.
Fifty five hours in, a routine request to stir the cryogenic oxygen tanks (so the slushy liquid would flow) triggered disaster. There was a loud bang and a shudder; Lovell first thought Haise was pulling a practical joke. The fuel cells were failing, oxygen plummeting, and Lovell looked out to see the ship venting gas into space. He realized "my ship has sustained a battlefield injury, and it is not an injury that we are in a position to fix." Kranz told the controllers to quit guessing and work the problem, asking what was still good, "what's in our back pockets now," and called in off duty controllers and the back room experts for brain power.
The plan: move the crew into Aquarius as a lifeboat, even though the lunar module was built to support two men for 45 hours, not four days. They powered down Odyssey with about fifteen minutes of margin, shutting down a command module in space for the first time, the re-entry vehicle that no one knew would power back up. To turn around, Lovell used the small LM descent engine to reach the free return trajectory, "like trying to fly with an elephant on your back," a maneuver they could attempt only because Apollo 9 had once fired the descent engine while docked. The five minute burn was perfect. John Aaron, the Apollo 12 hero, insisted on an extreme power down, leaving the crew in "an idling car with nothing more than the fans running," and they slowly lost their last comfort, warmth.
Every breath was poisoning them: exhaled CO2 builds in a sealed cabin, and at about 10 percent concentration it brings convulsions, unconsciousness, and death. The lunar and command modules used differently shaped filters, square canisters that would not fit Aquarius's round holes. The back rooms devised the famous "mailbox," a jury rig of duct tape, a plastic bag, a card, and a hose, read up to the crew step by step; the one the crew built and the demonstration model are identical. CO2 fell. But conditions grew clammy and cold, the command module down to 40 degrees, with rationed water, cold food, almost no sleep, and Haise running a fever from a urinary infection. Nixon demanded updates twice an hour.
The most dangerous part remained: re-entry on a heat shield possibly damaged by the explosion, in a command module that had been frozen and dead for three days. Kranz's team agonized over a power up procedure and John Aaron finally delivered one with hundreds of steps, where one mistake could be deadly; Mattingly read it up and Swigert executed it, and Odyssey came alive again. When the service module was jettisoned, Lovell finally saw the damage, a whole panel blown out near the high gain antenna, caused by a spark in a liquid oxygen tank, "basically a bomb." Re-entry would hit 5,000 degrees and a blackout that normally lasts about three minutes. The three minute mark passed, then 3:30, 3:45, four minutes, 4:15; people in mission control and at home thought it naive to believe the crew was alive. Then Lovell's voice came through, and the capsule was on the main chutes. The blackout had run over four minutes, the longest in the program's history, caused by hitting the atmosphere at a slightly wrong angle. The Moon landing failed, but mission control triumphed; their ultimate test turned out to be reaching planet Earth.
Apollo 14: Shepard's seven year wait
After Apollo 13, NASA had to re-prove that a flight to the Moon could be made safely and that it was still worth doing. Apollo 14 launched January 31, 1971, commanded by Alan Shepard, America's first man in space, with rookies Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell. Shepard had been grounded for seven years by Meniere's disease, doing every job but flying as chief astronaut, until experimental surgery miraculously restored him; going to the Moon, he said, was "the top of the pyramid." The mission's purpose was hard science: rock samples from the first two landings had already shown moon rocks resemble Earth rocks and that much of the surface was once molten lava, and scientists were desperate for more to answer why we have a Moon at all.
Docking nearly ended the flight before it began. Roosa had to pull the command module Kitty Hawk from the Saturn V and steer it to the lunar module Antares, and the ships would not latch, five times. On the sixth try, faster than ever, controllers' last idea of brute force worked and the hard dock held. Shepard then attempted the most difficult landing yet, the first in a hilly region (the highlands cover most of the Moon, and earlier landings had stuck to flat plains). He set Antares down cleanly, came down the ladder, and quipped, "Not bad for an old man." On the surface he was moved to tears, in awe of the majesty, before getting his mind back on the job. The crew deployed ALSEP, the experiment package with a seismometer to measure moonquakes (first discovered by Apollo 11) and a device to measure the Earth-Moon distance to within centimeters, broadcasting data for years.
They collected 92 pounds of rock, the biggest payload yet. As one scientist puts it, "the Moon is kind of like the rare book room of the cosmic library," where no moving continents, water, or wind have erased the earliest history of the solar system. Among their samples was Big Bertha, a moon rock containing an Earth fragment, the oldest ever discovered, thought to have been blasted to the Moon eons ago when an asteroid struck Earth. And in a much loved coda, Shepard, a golfer, smuggled up a club head he attached to a sample tool and became the first lunar golfer, hitting a ball "miles and miles and miles" in one sixth gravity.
Apollo 15: the rover, and the Genesis Rock
With public and presidential support evaporating (the famous Apollo 8 photo was quietly removed from the Oval Office, and in 1970 Congress cut the budget and killed Apollo 18 and 19), scientists scrambled to maximize the remaining three missions, shifting geology into overdrive with the new Lunar Roving Vehicle. Engineers had worked on lunar cars since the early 1960s, designing for an environment they knew nothing about; the answer was a collapsible car that fit in a segment of the lunar module and unfolded with a lanyard, with oversized switches for gloves, space age GPS, an antenna to reach Houston, toe holds, and a seatbelt. They literally reinvented the wheel, weaving piano wire on a loom into a mesh tire that sprang back to shape, tested endlessly on sandy beaches.
Apollo 15, led by Dave Scott with Jim Irwin and Al Worden, was "a fresh spacecraft" of upgrades: enough supplies to live on the Moon for three full days and suits good for more than seven hours outside, a full working day. Scott, a geology enthusiast who kept a rock collection and discussed field trips with his wife, would maximize every minute. The launch came three weeks after a Soviet tragedy: the crew of the world's first space station, Salyut 1, stayed a record 24 days, then died on re-entry from sudden depressurization, a reminder that spaceflight is dangerous business.
Scott and Irwin made the first landing in lunar mountains, setting the lander Falcon down and, in another first, Scott poked his head out to survey whether the region was drivable (smooth, rounded mountain tops, no jagged peaks, no large boulders). They unpacked the fragile rover and took the first off world road trip, topping out at 6 mph in what felt "like being in a rowboat on a choppy sea." At Spur Crater, a football field across, Scott spotted a glinting white rock: "I think we found what we came for." It was anorthosite from the Moon's primordial crust, the Genesis Rock, which helped establish that the Moon is about 4.5 billion years old, roughly the same age as Earth, the solar system only slightly older. The rover's camera also captured the first look at a lunar blastoff.
Figure 3. The arc of Apollo science, in the numbers the film states. Apollo 11 brought back about 50 pounds in roughly two hours; Apollo 12 logged eight hours and more samples; Apollo 14 returned 92 pounds. The rover and three day stays of Apollo 15 through 17 pushed the haul and the science further still. (Apollo 12's exact poundage is not stated; its bar is an interpolation between the cited 50 and 92 pound figures and is marked approximate.)
Apollo 16: the geologists were wrong
Nixon, running for re-election, secretly ordered Apollo 16 and 17 canceled, fearful that an accident would threaten his campaign, then reversed himself, afraid of losing votes from the giant aerospace industry, especially in California. So Apollo 16 flew, with commander John Young, Charlie Duke of South Carolina, and Ken Mattingly (finally flying after his Apollo 13 measles grounding). The mission leaned on an improved science support room where Apollo 13's Jim Lovell and other experts assisted. Setting up the experiments, Duke dropped the RTG power package and scientists held their breath, but nothing broke. They deployed a magnetometer to measure the Moon's magnetic field and devices to study solar wind and micrometeorites, with Young's telescope photographing Earth and other bodies, then loaded the rover.
They were in the Descartes Highlands, mountainous terrain where geologists were sure they would find volcanic rock that had shaped the highlands, "like two little kids at Christmas." Over three days they collected hundreds of samples, but could not find the one thing they came for: every rock was a breccia, fragments of other rocks welded together. The biggest scientific surprise of the Apollo program followed: volcanic activity did not shape this rugged region, meteors did. The scientists were wrong. As a curator says, it was vital to go to the Moon with an open mind, to see what was actually there rather than what theory predicted. The samples are still studied today, with hundreds of requests still coming to NASA.
Apollo 17: the last men on the Moon
Apollo 17, NASA's last Moon shot, was commanded by Gene Cernan, with Ron Evans in the command module and, crucially, Jack Schmitt, a trained geologist with a doctorate, the one scientist astronaut best suited to go, who had never flown a plane and had to "start stealing simulator time" on Shepard's advice to prove himself to the old guard. For the first time NASA launched at night, the pad lit by searchlights, a bold but risky choice that cut your abort options in half; the liftoff lit up Kennedy Space Center like daylight. Cernan and Schmitt took the lander Challenger to the holy grail of geology, the highly varied valley of Taurus-Littrow, picked precisely for its variety.
Disaster struck small: Cernan's hammer ripped off a rover fender, and moon dust, very light and powdery, blew up and jammed the gears, threatening to strand the mission, with the nearest replacement 250,000 miles away. Mission control improvised a fender from sturdy lunar maps taped together with duct tape; it worked, and the maps came home to the Smithsonian. Human ingenuity amid space age technology saved the day. Then Schmitt hit the jackpot near Shorty Crater, a geologist's paradise on a landslide. He happened to look down at his feet and found orange soil, "scientific gold," tiny beads of volcanic glass that had originated hundreds of miles below the surface, far deeper than any other Apollo sample, a priceless window into the Moon's interior. The orange color suggested rust, and therefore the presence of oxygen and perhaps water, with far reaching implications: someday those resources might be mined for a Moon base, a springboard to other planets.
Cernan and Schmitt broke camp to head home. Other astronauts left their overshoes on the Moon; Cernan brought his back, still covered in lunar regolith, the last human worn objects to touch the surface. As he took the last steps, Cernan said the words that close the era: "We leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and in hope for all mankind." His were the last human boots on the Moon.
Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and the legacy
Thanks to Apollo, the 1970s brought more. In 1972 (as the film states) America launched its first space station, Skylab, built from repurposed Apollo hardware and flown by Apollo astronauts, where crews went from days to months in orbit so NASA could study long duration spaceflight on the body and study the Earth, Sun, and stars. Then came the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, American astronauts docking with Soviet cosmonauts, a symbol of détente and improved Cold War relations, a goalpost marking the chance to be friends instead of adversaries, to cooperate and not just compete. Its lessons later propelled the Space Shuttle, the Soviet/Russian station Mir, and the International Space Station.
The documentary closes on the meaning of it all. In just a few years, Apollo opened a time portal in both directions: looking backward, it unlocked a cosmic journal billions of years old; looking forward, it forged a path into deep space. These were people, the closing voices say, who flew in service of country and science, and who found themselves by going to space. Most important of all, Apollo gave us new insight into another planet: our own, that breathtakingly beautiful jewel of Earth, suspended in the blackness, with no borders, a single fragile home seen whole for the first time.
1957Sputnik 1 and 2 orbit; America's Vanguard TV3 explodes on the pad and keeps beeping from the wreckage.
1958 NASA forms; Project Mercury opens, recruiting test pilots as astronauts.
1959 The Mercury 7 are introduced on April 9 and become instant celebrities.
1961 Gagarin orbits (April 12); Alan Shepard flies suborbital (May 5); Kennedy commits to the Moon (May 25).
1962John Glenn orbits the Earth aboard Friendship 7, watched by 100 million.
1965-66Project Gemini: first US spacewalk (Ed White), first rendezvous, first docking, the Aldrin spacewalk breakthrough.
1967 The Apollo 1 fire kills Grissom, White, and Chaffee in 17 seconds on the pad.
1967-68Saturn V flies; Apollo 7 redeems the command module; Apollo 8 reads Genesis from lunar orbit and shoots Earthrise.
1969Apollo 9 tests the lander; Apollo 10 rehearses; Apollo 11 lands (July 20); Apollo 12 survives triggered lightning.
1970Apollo 13, the successful failure, brought home alive after an oxygen tank explodes.
1971Apollo 14 returns Shepard to flight; Apollo 15 brings the rover and finds the Genesis Rock.
1972Apollo 16 proves meteors, not volcanoes, shaped the highlands; Apollo 17 ends the program with orange soil and the last footprints.
1972 onwardSkylab, then Apollo-Soyuz, then the Shuttle, Mir, and the ISS carry the legacy forward.
Key takeaways
The whole American Moon program ran from Sputnik in 1957 to the last footprint in 1972, just fifteen years, and from no human spaceflight to a lunar landing in only eight years after Kennedy's 1961 challenge.
It was built by 300,000 to 400,000 people across NASA and its contractors; the astronauts insisted the achievement belonged to all of them.
Failure was the curriculum: the Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 6 "disaster," Gemini 8's spin, Apollo 12's lightning, and Apollo 13's explosion each taught lessons that made the next flight survivable.
The Saturn V was a controlled explosion: 7.5 million pounds of thrust from five F-1 engines, just barely lifting its 6.2 million pound bulk, fifteen tons of fuel burned per second.
Improvisation was as decisive as engineering: mousetrap springs, a drugstore camera, the duct tape "mailbox" CO2 filter that saved Apollo 13, and a lunar map fender that saved Apollo 17.
The science overturned expert consensus. Apollo 16 proved meteors, not volcanoes, shaped the highlands, and Apollo 15's Genesis Rock pinned the Moon's age near 4.5 billion years.
The deepest payoff was looking back: Earthrise and the view of a borderless, fragile planet changed how humanity sees itself. "Going to space, we really found ourselves."
Chapters
Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read. The video has no published chapters, so these markers are estimated by narrative position across the 4 hour 52 minute runtime.
0:00:03 Sputnik shocks America, the space race begins
4:20:27 Apollo 15, the lunar rover and the Genesis Rock
4:33:18 Apollo 16 in the Descartes Highlands
4:38:49 Apollo 17, the last men on the Moon
4:46:57 Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and the legacy
Notable quotes
The real shock of Sputnik is not necessarily the beep beep beep of the very first satellite, but the one-two punch of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 launched within a month of each other.
narrator, 0:00:30
Their worst fear isn't dying. It's not being allowed to fly.
narrator, 0:09:50
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
John F. Kennedy, 0:31:47
How are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?
Gus Grissom, 1:18:00
Nobody at NASA realized that they were putting those three astronauts into a bomb that was waiting to go off.
narrator, 1:20:30
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
Neil Armstrong, 2:55:00
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil Armstrong, 3:02:00
Magnificent desolation.
Buzz Aldrin, 3:05:00
Houston, we've had a problem here.
Jack Swigert, 3:34:29
My ship has sustained a battlefield injury, and it is not an injury that we are in a position to fix.
Jim Lovell, 3:40:00
Not bad for an old man.
Alan Shepard, 4:14:00
The Moon is kind of like the rare book room of the cosmic library.
scientist, 4:18:00
We leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and in hope for all mankind.
Gene Cernan, 4:51:00
Resources mentioned
Naked Science, the channel that produced this documentary.
Strip away the misleading title and this is the clearest single telling of how the United States got to the Moon: not as a tidy triumph, but as a fifteen year sprint stitched together from panic, grief, brilliance, luck, and duct tape. The recurring lesson is that the impossible was made routine by treating every failure as a lesson and by trusting hundreds of thousands of ordinary people with an extraordinary deadline. And the prize, in the end, was not the Moon. It was the first clear look back at Earth, a borderless jewel in the dark, and the realization that going out there is how we came to understand home.
Full transcript
5 Hours Of Mindblowing Space Facts To Fall Asleep To
Naked Science
Full transcript (reflowed). Despite the title, this is a chronological documentary of the American space program from Sputnik in 1957 through Apollo 17 in 1972, with Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as a coda.
This is the sound of Sputnik. The first Soviet satellite arcs over America on a sleepy Friday night in 1957. Eisenhower had already left Washington to go golfing. He went away for the weekend. And a lot of Americans were just home. The Leave It to Beaver premiered that night. And so it came as quite a bit of a shock. Each beep is like a taunt. Americans can hear it with their ham radios. A clear signal that the Soviets have beaten America into space. Sputnik kind of caught people by surprise.
I mean, the Soviet Union was considered to be a technologically backward country, generally speaking, at the time. On top of that, they'd been devastated by World War II. On the other side of the world, America appears to be thriving. It's 1957. The post-war boom is in full bloom. And so there was an expectation among many people that the US would be first in space exploration. But a foreign satellite is now circling the globe, bragging with its incessant beep. It may as well be the sound of a starting gun.
The space race is on. The real shock of Sputnik is not necessarily the beep beep beep of the very first satellite, but the one-two punch of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 launched within a month of each other. This time, the Soviets launch more than a beeping ball. Sputnik 2 carries a dog named Laika. Soviet Union 2, America nothing. A month later, Americans have their first satellite on the launchpad. The Vanguard TV3. They place it on top of a rocket built on a budget. Components include springs plucked from common household mouse traps.
Some are skeptical of the effort. One engineer remembers Senator John F. Kennedy dismissing rockets as a waste of money. On the morning of the launch, rocket fever descends upon Cape Canaveral. Local shops sell out of binoculars. It's a nerve-racking countdown. Lift off. Someone in the control room screams. Another yells, "Duck." The satellite itself is thrown from the blast. And ends up here at Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. The satellite was thrown out of the rocket and rolled and also cracked open.
The antenna were all bent and everything, but the interior transmitter was still operating and it was beeping telling people it was alive. But the damage indicates clearly in the explosion it was heated up quite a bit by the flames of the bursting rocket. There was also an impact damage because this part was split open. This is the way they found it. The TV series was a small vehicle that would be very easy to launch. It was a test to see that the system would work, that it could transmit information back to the ground.
Once Sputnik flew, it created considerable pressure to answer the launch. The fact was that we had to make it work and we and it didn't. The public sees a failure. Scientists see a learning curve. 45 seconds radar drive on just Less than two months later, America tries again with the Explorer 1 satellite. I think we're all clear here, Bob. It's now at the mercy of some 50,000 pounds of fuel that's supposed to explode in the right direction and lift it skyward. 4 3 2 1 America's first satellite is in the air.
Locking on here. The control room waits for orbital confirmation. On orbit here. 60 seconds. Fair launch time here. Someone finally brings in a minute. we're on orbit here. Goldstone has the bird. But the Goldstone tracking station in California isn't the only one watching. We're on orbit 70 seconds. The whole idea that there were satellites rotating around the earth came right out of science fiction. I was an 18-year-old college student in Brooklyn studying physics and I was an amateur astronomer.
Somehow or other we got permission to go up on the roof of the RCA building so we could get a good view from New York City of the satellites as they came over the earth. Steve and others around the world used this telescope to watch history zoom overhead. We were participating in the Smithsonian's Operation Moonwatch, a worldwide effort organized by the Smithsonian to prepare to track the first satellites of the earth. We had a number of these placed along the table so that their fields of view created kind of a a picket fence across the sky.
We knew the satellite was coming. We didn't know exactly where or exactly when, but at least one of the telescopes would catch it when it went by. Steve's own home movies show the thrill of being at the top of the city skyline and trying to look even higher. This was all stuff out of science fiction and all of a sudden it was happening and we were on the cutting edge of seeing what was going on. So that was exciting enough to keep you up all night. America and the Soviet Union dream of launching much more than satellites.
They dream of launching humans to the next stepping stone in space nearly 240,000 miles away. But right now a A is just pie in the sky. In 1958, NASA posts a new position open only to military test pilots. Job title, astronaut. Project, Mercury. America's first human space flight program. At first, it's a secret project on shaky ground. We didn't know how far the program was going to go. For a while, we didn't even know if it was going to go. Job applicants recall the experience in recordings unearthed from the NASA vault.
These three men tried to convince me that neither of them would be able to get in a capsule on top of a rocket. I said, "No way. I'm an aviator. I'm a hotshot flyboy. I'm a test pilot." Now, I was uh ordered to report to Washington. No explanation or anything. I didn't even know we were going to have a space program. After hundreds apply, seven make the cut. Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Alan Shepard, and John Glenn. On April 9th, 1959, NASA introduces its first class of astronauts.
The media is ready. The men are not. This was a big surprise of seven of us sitting on a stage in Washington, D.C. with a bunch of press people. They were there interrogating us. Jokingly, I of course said that I got on this project because it probably be the nearest to heaven I'd ever get and I wanted to make the most of it. John Glenn really shone at that press conference. He was very adept at public speaking and had natural charisma that came across very much. I also agree wholeheartedly with Gus here and I I think we are very fortunate that we have should we say been blessed with the talents that have been picked for something like this.
They quickly become cover stories. They hadn't even flown in space and they were already household names and they were celebrities. But they're also competitors. Project Mercury is just one part. And there were seven guys competing for the first job or whatever that turned out to be. The first job they assume is to be the first human in space. All seven begin a crash course in space travel. Once we were selected, it was sort of open-ended as to what kind of things people could think up for us to do that might have some weird remote application to space flight.
Wally Schirra endures a heat chamber. Gus Grissom tries to fly blindfolded. And John Glenn becomes a human test dummy for G-forces. Astronauts call this centrifuge the beast. You're straining just as hard as you possibly can strain to keep your blood up near your head to keep from blacking out. They spin so violently that their hearts bang into their lungs, knocking the wind out of them. They test for every condition they can imagine in space flight. But, what about weightlessness? The Air Force devises a way to simulate zero gravity.
The Mercury 7 are again the guinea pigs. A C-131 transport ascends to 40,000 ft. Inside are the future astronauts and one nervous reporter with a tape recorder. My hand is shaking. I don't know if my voice sounds funny or not. Then the plane tops out like a roller coaster. And the men begin to float. We are now weightless. Good lord, what an interesting feeling this is. Doctors have no idea if humans can survive long in weightlessness. Will their organs function? Will food stay down if there's no up or down anymore?
They call this the vomit comet. And it's the only way to test the possibilities and problems of zero gravity. The Air Force even tries it on animals. They appear far less enthusiastic. Doctors also worry about the psychological stress of space travel on the Mercury 7. They present memory puzzles for testing. Random drawings for analysis. Ink blots for interpretation. They were also tested for their ability to work with others. They were asked questions like, "Who am I?" and then asked to explain who they were.
What they are is fearless. NASA psychiatrists are astounded by bravery that borders on recklessness. Their worst fear isn't dying. It's not being allowed to fly. They've tested the men. Now, they test the machines. We had essentially a new product. It didn't look very much like an airplane. But, if you were going to put a pilot in, it was going to have to fly somehow like an airplane. As the astronauts check out the space capsule, they realize the initial Mercury missions won't be much like flying a plane.
More like riding a bullet. A rocket will launch the capsule with enough speed to clear the atmosphere. More than 5,000 mph. After mere minutes, the capsule's retro rockets will slow it down for re-entry. A fiery freefall into the Atlantic Ocean. Slowed only by parachutes near the very end. NASA drops empty capsules to test those parachutes. A thin nylon barrier between life and death. Normally, a parachute is a test pilot's last chance to live after ejecting from an aircraft. Now, the parachute is plan A.
There is no plan B. As the old joke goes, it's not the fall that'll kill you. It's the landing. It's very clear what the consequences of failure are to the astronauts and to everybody. So, they test the parachutes over and over again. No one has said it quite yet, but failure is not an option. The American space program is coming to the African bush. Creating the Mercury program meant creating not only the launch vehicles and the capsules and the crew that could go in them, but also creating all of the ground support of a whole network of listening stations and communication stations around the world.
NASA sends new employees far afield to build this new network. One of them is Arnold Aldridge. I didn't know too much about the space program. NASA was only like 9 months old. They arrive in places like Nigeria, Morocco, and Kenya. Fully equipped with pocket protectors, ready to conquer space. We had quite a few just fresh college graduates who were ready to tackle anything, but didn't have a lot of experience and also didn't know anything about what couldn't be done. They join military personnel to be the eyes and ears of Mercury when it tries to stretch flights beyond the Atlantic Ocean.
They will track flights as they come over Africa communicate with the spacecraft and send data back to mission control. Some stations more quickly than others. Only half of them had voice communication with the control center. You couldn't talk to the Cape. They only communicated via teletype. So, you would write out what you wanted to say on a piece of paper. You would hand it to a teletype operator. He'd run over to the teletype machine, type it in and then it would take some period of time and it would type out at the Cape and they'd read it.
Worldwide communication is in its infancy but travel bugs have been around forever. One of the most important piece of equipment we had was the bottle of Kaopectate and it would set up on top of the console. Aldridge's own father wonders what in the world his son is doing so far from home. My dad asked me, you know, when I was going to actually get some real job to work on. I mean, this is nice to work on these esoteric things, but you know, when are you going to go start and actually work on something?
That esoteric something is about to get much more real. A Mercury capsule solar in Florida to meet its fate. A ride atop this Redstone rocket. The empty capsule will launch into space and send back performance data. They have to make sure it works before putting a person inside. The science of rocketry meets the art of capsule design in this critical test flight. Mercury 1 November 1960 ignition The rocket gets no higher than 4 in. (inches) It was pretty embarrassing event overall. We're pretty launch our first Redstone on a suborbital flight to test the Mercury capsule and it doesn't go anywhere but a couple of inches.
Boosters light up then inexplicably shut down. The escape tower shoots off by itself. The capsule's parachutes pop open and drape alongside the rocket. The nation appears to be stumbling into space. The new president, John F. Kennedy, doesn't like the optics. The failure of Mercury 1 was seen as another blow to US prestige and that the US kept on trailing behind the Soviet Union in space exploration and was having a very difficult time catching up. 3 years into their new jobs the former test pilots are getting a little testy.
So far it's been all drills and no thrills. Waiting around is not their strong suit. Some wonder if joining the space program was a bad career move. It was really touch and go there. But we were still highly competitive. There were still seven guys going for whatever flight was available. But will there even be a flight? John Glenn gets fitted for his custom capsule seat with no guarantee he'll ever get launched in it. Remember that in the early days of the program, it was all pretty much up in the air.
Actually, nothing is in the air yet. Before any of them go into space, this chimpanzee will pave the way. His name is Ham. He has a different training regimen than human astronauts, including shocks to his feet if his attention strays from the instrument panel. But his job is paramount. Prove that a primate can function in So this was how you were able to, what they would have called at the time, man rate the vehicle. All three start final lights are correct. Mercury go. Evacuate tower.
T-minus 18 counting. Since the embarrassment of Mercury 1, they think they fixed the rocket. Minus 10, 9. But will the capsule keep Ham alive? Mercury 2 punches through the Florida sky. With the hopes of the program riding on a 3-year-old chimpanzee. The capsule loses pressure. But Ham's space suit He pulls levers and pushes buttons as trained. They know he's conscious but don't know if he'll endure re-entry. Ships find Ham's capsule in the wide-open Atlantic. They whisk it aboard and open the hatch to see if Ham survived.
He was a little dehydrated. He was a little fatigued, but they gave him an apple and he liked that. He has nothing more than a bruised nose. Everyone hopes the first human in space will be so lucky. But who will it be? All seven trainees have been waiting for director Bob Gilruth to announce America's first space traveler. NASA finally picks Alan Shepard. Well, there I am looking at six faces looking at me and feeling totally elated that I'd won the competition. But yet almost immediately afterwards feeling sorry for my buddies.
I mean, they were trying just as hard as I was. Shepard trains with renewed vigor expecting to become the first human into Damn I for re-entry. But NASA delays his flight a month to work out some kinks in the Redstone rocket. During that delay, the Soviets make an announcement. There was another wave of shock, another blow to US prestige that not only did the Soviet Union launch the first satellite, they also launched the first human into space. On April 12th, 1961, the Soviet Union launches a man around the globe and into the history books.
His name, Yuri Gagarin. He did an orbital flight, which is an order of magnitude more difficult than a suborbital up and down flight into Compared to the Mercury astronauts, Gagarin is barely a pilot. He only recently finished flight school. But he's only 5'2, fits into the tiny capsule, and fits the mold for a Soviet success story. He's a son of peasants, he survived World War II. He was kind of the perfect Soviet model for that. And he's a charming, good-looking guy. Gagarin was the perfect person.
The Soviets are stealing the global spotlight. For Kennedy, the shock of waking up to find that the Soviets had put the first man in space was embarrassment enough, but that was compounded very soon afterwards by what became known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. For months, Kennedy was considering a secret plan to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba, a communist country right on America's doorstep. On April 17th, US Navy ships enter Cuba's Bay of Pigs and unload a small fighting force of Cuban exiles to trigger an overthrow of Castro's government.
But the invasion force is quickly defeated. The coup is a flop. The timing, just 5 days after Yuri Gagarin's flight, is coincidental, but it looks like Kennedy is on a losing streak. This was a tremendous embarrassment to this young president who had only been in office for a few months. President Kennedy needs a win. He looks to NASA to deliver one. Just a few weeks later, NASA hopes one man can salvage some national pride. The weather was good. And I remember driving down to the launching pad in a van.
Alan Shepard remembers every moment of Mercury 3. We pulled up in front of the launch pad, and of course it was dark. The liquid oxygen was uh venting out from the Redstone. Searchlights all over the place. And I remember saying to myself, well, I'm not going to see this Redstone again. And you know, pilots love to go out and kick the tires. And it was sort of like reaching out and kicking the tires on the Redstone. As I stopped and looked at it, you know, to look back at this beautiful rocket and I thought, well, okay Buster, let's go and get the job done.
When day breaks, astronauts Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter circle in fighter jets to watch the launch. We couldn't stay close to the pad because there's lots and lots of unknowns and dangers in those days. CO, did you verify you got a border light? Those dangers aren't lost on Shepard. Roger, ready to resume the account STE. At this point, no rocket launch is a sure thing. Okay, Stony, take it over. Roger, 5 seconds. Roger, fantastic. Roger. Thousands are at the Cape. Main command. 30 5 45 45 million are watching on TV.
Main bus 20 And two buddies are hovering nearby. Wally and I were were circling the pad listening to the count. 10 All right, lift off and the clock is started. Here are your zeros on your Yes, sir, reading you loud and clear. At liftoff, Shepard's heart rate jumps to beats per minute. Cabin at 14 psi. Oxygen is go. And the rocket sends him 100 miles up. Leaving Shirra and Carpenter in the dust. And I also got off and going straight up and Wally and I never saw a thing. No one will catch Shepard now.
Seven years fuel is go. 4G. After pulling 6 G's to escape Earth. Cut off. Tower jettison green. He marvels at what he left behind. What a beautiful view. Cloud cover over Florida. Three to four dents near the eastern coast. Obscure is up through Hatteras. He's only weightless for 5 minutes, but completes a tightly scripted series of tests. Switching to manual yaw. He's all business. Okay, switching to manual pitch. Re-entry goes without a hitch. Main chute is reefed. Main chute is green. Main chute is coming unreefed and it looks good.
America finally makes a splash in the space race. Even though it doesn't match Gagarin's full orbit. Being able to answer Gagarin's flight with Alan Shepard's suborbital flight was seen as a US answer, but a somewhat insufficient answer. Shepard grabs his helmet. Says goodbye to his ship. And finds himself at the White House just 3 days later to receive a medal. To Alan Shepard, uh we're uh very proud of him. And so was the president. Paid his respects and said, "I now present you a medal." The thing slid off the box.
It went to the deck. members of the House and Senate And he almost banged heads. Then he said, in his damn Yankee accent, "Yeah, Shepard, I give you this medal that comes from the ground up." It's all quite a show. But privately, Kennedy's not supporting Mercury for the science. It's for the status. John F. Kennedy was very attuned to the importance of image, to prestige, and to public relations. And so, space exploration was sort of used as a measuring stick to understand national strength.
If space is where Kennedy can finally show up the Soviets, he's all in. On May 25th, he strives to the congressional podium with an audacious challenge tucked inside his manuscript. John F. Kennedy's announcement before a joint session of Congress comes really fast. You have to remember that it was only 6 weeks earlier that Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human being to fly in space at all. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
The general tone of the speech was sort of a call to action. He was telling his fellow Americans that they had to to take on grand challenges. This grand challenge now falls on an agency that's not yet 3 years old. Alan Shepard's first flight into space was only 3 weeks ago. NASA had a grand total of about 15 minutes of actual human space flight experience, one And he's saying we're going to send multiple people a quarter of a million miles to the moon and back. The space race now has a finish line.
For NASA, the goal is clear. The path is not. But Project Mercury keeps plugging away. 5 4 3 On July 21st 1 Gus Grissom pilots Mercury 4. Uh Roger, this is Liberty Bell 7 up there. Clock is operating. The biggest problem comes upon splashdown. I'm getting ready for impact here. I can see the water coming right on up. His hatch blows open while waiting for rescue. The capsule flooded with water. Grissom scrambled to get out. He narrowly escaped drowning. The helicopter was able to pull him out of the ocean safely.
But the capsule sank and went to the bottom of the Atlantic. And Grissom was kind of shaken up by the time they got him back on dry land. So far, two Americans have gone on short up-and-down flights. The third is supposed to circle the globe. And no one is more ready than John Glenn. 60 seconds and counting. The final countdown for Mercury 6 crackles in his headset. All pre-start power lights are correct. The ready light is on. Eject Mercury America. Scott Carpenter is the Capcom, the one man in mission control in direct communication with Glenn.
In that period from T minus 18 seconds to lift off, T minus 18 seconds and counting. Engine start. it occurred to me that this fellow named John Glenn was going to have to put under his belt more speed than we had ever given a human before. And it just came to me, You've got speed, John Glenn. He's on his way to exceeding 17,000 miles per hour, pushing Glenn deep into his custom-fit seat. 50,000 crane their necks from the Cape. 100 million more watch on TV, more than double the last launch.
They witness near perfection. Glenn's trajectory is only 5/100 of a degree off. Looks like Glenn's staring is good. Roger. Mission control thinks he's good for seven orbits. Roger, I could not see the tower go. I saw the smoke go by the window. Ground computers estimate he could do a hundred. Roger. So, how about 1 and 1/2 Gs? Go Mercury over. Shepard and Grissom had minutes. Glenn will have hours. The main purpose of my flight was to find out what reaction the human body had to extended weightlessness.
Some of the doctors, for instance, thought that my vision might change during flight. So doctors turned Glenn's capsule, now at the Smithsonian, into a tiny examination room. So this is the actual Friendship 7 capsule that Glenn rode in around the Earth in February 1962. And right in the middle of the instrument panel is a tiny eye chart. And periodically throughout the mission, he had to look at the chart and register how clearly he could see it because the doctors had all kinds of scare stories.
Where his eyes going to go out of focus when they're floating around in zero gravity, he wouldn't be able to see properly anymore. So we had to periodically perform this eye chart test. I have excellent vision on the charts, no astigmatism or any malfunctions at all. As he's going around the Earth, the doctors asked him to swallow a few times. He had actually applesauce and water, things like that to eat. They were worried about whether you'd become nauseous if you moved your head.
So he he turned his head from side to side and to see whether he had any disorientation. This Friendship 7, the head movements caused no sensations whatsoever. Roger. Mission control has a tight script for Glenn to follow. Then he writes his own story in pictures. NASA didn't really feel that images and photographs or video really all that valuable to what they were working on. But Glenn didn't really see it that way. And so after getting a haircut in Cocoa Beach, John Glenn walks into a drugstore to find a camera to take on his mission.
And he purchases this camera and takes it back to NASA. The first thing they realize is he would need to operate it with just one hand. So, they needed to flip the camera upside down to be able to add this handle. And they also needed to add triggers to be able to capture a photo and to wind the film. And so, really you could just hold it with one single gloved hand and operate it with two fingers. Glenn knew that it would be important to carry his experience back to Earth. I still have a brilliant blue band clear across the horizon almost covering my whole window.
As one of the first people to go into space, he wanted to share that with everyone around the world. The sky above is absolutely black, completely black. And taking pictures with a camera that you could buy in a drugstore was the perfect way to do that. All right, say again your instructions, please. Over. At this point, Glenn has better PR instincts than NASA, but they won't help him get home. Attitude and retract the scope manually at this time. Mission control reveals a problem, potentially catastrophic.
that, we're not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed. All right, roger. The landing bag is tucked inside a critical part of the spacecraft, the heat shield. If the landing bag had actually gotten loose, that means the heat shield might move out of position during the re-entry, and then the spacecraft would break up. It would burn up. He would be incinerated. Was the landing bag really loose, or is this a false instrumentation signal? They didn't know. All right, status is go.
Ready for re-entry. Over. All right, roger. After three orbits, Glenn maneuvers the spacecraft to the required 14° re-entry angle. Roger that. 20 miles. A fiery heat glows around him. My condition is good, but that was a real fireball, boy. Roger Aurora 7 clear. Millions on Earth hang on every transmission. after an awful good faith tracking systems around the world. Uh we're standing by. Ships look for the capsule. It's got it 1 second past. Okay. Finally, they see it bobbing in the open ocean.
Reporters break the tension of an anxious nation. US astronaut John Glenn is on the deck, is reported to be a hale and hearty astronaut after his history-making John Glenn's flight had an electric reaction in the United States because it was the one in which the United States finally achieved parity with the Soviet Union. I was 5 years old, I guess, when John Glenn flew. And John Glenn's flight is literally the first thing I remember in my life. My mom tells me that I wanted to be a dump truck driver before that, but after John Glenn's flight, I was hooked.
Capsule, 9 8 NASA begins rattling off Mercury missions with confidence and purpose. I see orbital lift-off. The clock has Scott Carpenter's Mercury 7 flight is so flawless, some dare think spaceflight is becoming routine. Roger how do you read Aurora 7 over? Mercury 8 sends Wally Schirra up for 9 hours and 6 orbits. She feels you're in good shape by Wally. I have good news. I give you a go for 6 orbits. Hallelujah. Mercury 9 reaches the program's ultimate goal, a full day in space enjoyed by Gordon Cooper.
I would like to take this time and say a little prayer. The Mercury missions were really very successful in being able to demonstrate that human beings could go into space, that they could orbit repeatedly, and that they could be brought back safely, and there was a wonderful pattern of the astronaut then being celebrated as he came home having successfully completed those missions. By the end of the Mercury program, Americans can celebrate. They have heroes. They have momentum. Then there is shock.
When President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, the nation really stopped. Here was this young president who was so optimistic in his tone, so visionary in in his outlook, leading us into what he called the new frontier, and space was at the forefront of that. And suddenly he was gone. People were devastated. I grew up in the in the Boston area, so you know, the Kennedys were royalty in where I came from. And my parents, who I thought of as incredibly strong, they were both crying at night.
Other heroes are falling in different ways. Two astronauts have their worst fears come true. Doctors tell them they can't fly. There's a saying there's only three ways to get out of this business. You can retire, you can be killed, or you can be grounded. And the worst of those by far was getting grounded. America's first man in space, Alan Shepard, is diagnosed with Meniere's disease. It causes a lack of balance, dizziness, and some cases nausea. NASA grounded me right away. Shepard joins Deke Slayton, already grounded for a heart problem.
Two of the original seven astronauts are now off the flight roster. Just a week before his death, Kennedy visited NASA. The missions to the moon, called Project Apollo, are on the drawing board for his review, but it's only a sketch. As we're getting to the end of the Mercury program, it realized that the Apollo program is nowhere near ready yet, and we're going to need to learn to do a whole bunch of things to get to the moon. In 1961, Houston, Texas is a free-wheeling oil town. It's not yet a space town.
As NASA's missions were getting more complicated, they knew that they needed new facilities. So, they started thinking about where they could put what they were going to call their manned space flight center. Ideas include San Francisco, Boston, St. Louis, and Texas. It really becomes a very political decision, and it's no coincidence that Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson were very prominent Texans who had a lot of pull in Washington. The practical choice sealed by politics is Houston.
Lyndon Johnson thought that NASA could be one of these driving forces to bring advanced science and engineering to the south. Houston is ecstatic. Some NASA employees are not. They picked it within weeks of Hurricane Carla and this place was devastated. This was Hurricane Carla when it reached the peak of its fury. 170 mph winds and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico crashing into the Texas coast. The specific location for the Man Spacecraft Center was the centroid of this hurricane and there were boats and trees, pictures of snakes crawling.
So this swampy area southeast of Houston, Texas uh suddenly becomes space central for the United States. Thousands stream into the open pastures near the Texas Gulf Coast to build a bridge to the moon. Plans call for 14 buildings that can house more than 3,000 workers. Author Norman Mailer describes it as a marvelously up-to-date minimum security prison. But for NASA, it's home. Astronauts build houses next to each other in the suburbs. Ed White and I bought some property together and split it.
I built my house on one half of it and he built his house on the other. We were good friends and neighbors. For astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Ed White, Houston will soon become shorthand for planet Earth. Houston Capcom, has he egressed? These are gotten up really nicely. As a matter of fact, yeah, looks like Houston down below. The space program is changing gears. Project Mercury already took the first step. This is Freedom 7, the fuel One-man missions to prove humans could survive in space.
You got speed, John Glenn. Now there's a mandate to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. In every aspect of human exploration, it would be a giant leap. In early 1964, Project Gemini is underway. A series of missions to test all the nuts and bolts of a moon shot. They needed a certain set of aptitudes in space, and the only way to get those was to do them. The count T-minus 27 minutes Two-person crews in bigger capsules. This is Gemini control. Walter left off. As you're docked inside it.
Longer missions. 57 Houston, you have just exceeded the world's man space flight endurance record. Rendezvous and docking. Okay, Gemini 8, you're looking good on the ground. Go ahead and uh Survive outside the spacecraft. Rates of the damp down rather nicely. I think we got a pretty good chance this time. Testing all these capabilities, answering all these questions was essential for the next step, which was going to the moon. From the other side of the world, the Soviet Union is racing to get there first.
The two nations, locked in a Cold War, take the rivalry into space. The United States and the Soviet Union are trying to solve the same technological problems simultaneously with no communication with each other and with the solutions being entirely state secrets. NASA's next step is no secret. Expand. There's a huge necessary build-up of personnel and development of new technologies. And also, NASA just swelled in a very short amount of time. So is the astronaut core. At first, there were just seven.
Now, there are 30. Each of the astronauts took some individual responsibility for different systems. Gus Grissom is the taskmaster for the Gemini capsule. Gus was extremely well respected as an engineer and as a guy who was really focused on details. And so, the astronauts referred to the Gemini capsule as the Gusmobile. For astronauts, space travel is a difficult task. For toy makers, it's an easy sell. Here's a special out of this world free offer. This moon rocket kit, both a toy and an exciting game.
Commercial companies saw that space was popular. So, you know, you'd see things like the satellite motel. It might be in the middle of Wisconsin someplace, but they'd put up a sign that looked spacey and it became part of the culture where everybody was excited about space. America has moon mania. And many want a piece of it. Commercial companies responded by creating toys, games, household objects, ways for consumers to really bring the space age home. So, this kind of a box model kit is a rather unique piece because it allowed you to have figures of the Apollo astronauts and also to build the kind of lunar roving vehicle that they would have actually had on the moon.
You could break them off of the little trees, sand them, paint them, and then add them to a diorama that you might be creating of the actual moon landing scenes. But, this is one of my favorite objects from the excitement about the first human space flights. This is a McCoy pottery cookie jar that was created in the shape of John Glenn's Friendship 7 spacecraft. And this came to the museum from Dr. David McMayan, who told me this was something that was purchased by his mother at a Woolworth's.
His whole family had space fever, as he said. And he remembers as a child coming in and having this full of her warm cookies after school. And so, it really makes it a wonderful example in its wear and tear that this has been used and was actively a part of one family's celebration of the space age. Halfway around the world, Soviet children were just as excited about their space program. This is an example of a Soviet toy. It's a Soviet Lunokhod. It's a lunar rover, and it's modeled on the actual lunar rovers that the Soviet Union sent to the surface of the moon during the early 1970s.
We all think about them not sending a human to the surface of the moon, but they sent rovers, and they returned samples without the aid of human beings. We think that the designers of the toy worked very closely with the designers of the actual Lunokhods because they have details in terms of the gearing and the proportions that wouldn't have been made public at the time. This airplane has the look of a toy, but it's real and ingenious. Nicknamed the Pregnant Guppy, it's wide enough to carry space hardware.
And comes apart to get that hardware in and out. First, the stages of a rocket. They'll have to put it together like building blocks. Then, a Gemini capsule. Everything looks right out of a kid's toy box. But this is full scale. Exceptionally complex. Uncommonly expensive. And Gus Grissom is about to make it really fly. Grissom joins rookie John Young as America's first two-person crew for the maiden voyage of Project Gemini. 4 3 1 0 Ignition. Gemini 3 pierces into the sky, flying straight and true.
We think the launch flight was very smooth, smoother than than we had any reason to expect. And there isn't a jiggle or a bump in the whole first stage flight. I have your backup times on back angles and times reverse back angles. Astronaut Gordon Cooper, one of Grissom's best friends, guides them around the globe. Hello there. Then, they land 52 miles off target. We're 50 miles from the spot there. By the time the Navy finds them, they've been pitching in deep swells for 30 minutes, costing Grissom his breakfast.
recovery, go ahead. Uh monitor, we have both Astros and C low at this time returning to the carrier. Roger. Doctor aboard the helo, report all well. Very good. The capsule shows the scars of re-entry, but passes the flight test. It's airworthy and airtight. Few know that on the next Gemini flight, they'll open the hatch on purpose in It was actually a kind of secret effort, and the rest is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole history of NASA. Astronauts are already training to walk on the moon, where gravity is only 1/6 of Earth.
If you were heading to the moon, you wanted to be able to get out and walk around. You didn't want to just sit in the car and look out the windows on your vacation. You wanted to get out and be able to do something. But no one knows if someone could even leave the capsule and survive. Project Gemini will test the concept. It's called extravehicular activity, or EVA. Common translation, spacewalk. NASA anoints Ed White, a new astronaut, to be the world's first spacewalk. On the ground, he spins like a circus performer.
In a lab, he tests a new idea, a propulsion gun. So, they put him on a special contraption that rode around on a very smooth floor on a cushion of air. In a plane on a roller coaster flight path, he gets a feel for zero gravity. It looks like Ed White will float into the history books as the first human to walk in space. Until the Soviets puncture the plan. In March of 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov beats him to it. That feat was such a PR victory for the Soviets. It was such a It had such impact.
I mean, here was a human being floating around outside a spacecraft for the first time in history. The Soviets notch another space first. A few months later, Gemini 4 rises to try to even the score on space walks. Ed White is paired with old friend Jim McDivitt. My relationship with Ed was couldn't have been better. He was the best friend I ever had. We lived just down the street from each other. Now their lives depend on each other. This is the first flight run out of Houston's new mission control center.
Challenger, we're ready to have him get out when he is. And the first time an American will try to exit a spacecraft in space. This is Gemini 4. This is the actual spacecraft from which Ed White made the first spacewalk by an American. To do that, they had to depressurize the spacecraft. That meant letting all the oxygen out of the spacecraft and then uncranking the door and pushing it open. Okay, we're giving you a go for your EVA Now they can push open the hatch, but first they had to unlock it and the locking mechanism jammed and would not move.
Gemini 4, what is your status now? McDivitt, however, had studied this mechanism because they had the same problem in a vacuum chamber on the ground when they had simulated the whole EVA and he was able to help White unjam the locking mechanism. Finally, White could push the door open and float up out of his seat. Okay, I'm out. I was comfortable out there. There wasn't anything to be fighting out there. I was just floating free in Okay, I rolled up. I'm rolling to the right now. White isn't the only thing to escape the capsule.
There goes a Looks like a thermal glove, Jim. The propulsion gun works for basic thrust, but not fine-tuned motions. Okay, I think I've exhausted my air now. I had very good control with it. I just needed more air. Now, he's just floating. Right now, I'm spinning on my head. I'm looking right down. Looks like we're coming up on the coast of California. Gemini 4, Houston Capcom. Gus Grissom keeps trying to get their attention to no avail. Gemini 4, Houston Capcom. They're having too much fun.
I feel like I'm a million miles Gemini 4? This is the greatest experience I've ever known, Jim. Let me take a closer picture there. Yes, Jim. Okay. You're very tight for the hot day swimming in the junior. Gemini 4, Houston. Is he taking pictures? Finally, Grissom breaks their spell like an impatient parent calling his kids inside for dinner. Gemini 4, get back in. Back in? Back in. Roger, we'll be talking to you for a while here. I'm coming back down on the spacecraft. You smeared up my windshield, you dirty dog.
McDivitt hears boots banging on the outside of the spacecraft. It's much harder to get in than it is to get out because you have this space suit that's inflated in space. It's now hard and forcing your body to bend to get yourself in position is a lot of hard work. McDivitt had to help him get his feet under the instrument panel and sort of wedge himself back inside the White and McDivitt return to Earth for a victory lap. They make spacewalks look easy. They pause to receive their accolades.
But NASA races ahead. They table spacewalks for a while and pivot to another Gemini goal, rendezvous and dock. They won't land on the moon without it. In orbit, the astronauts will detach the lunar excursion module and will rendezvous and dock with it. Getting one ship into space is hard enough. Getting two to connect is just a theory. On October 25th, that theory gets a major test. Wally Schirra and Stafford climb aboard a loaded rocket. Behind them, another rocket launches The plan was to launch an unmanned target rocket called the Agena first, and then have the astronauts launch and chase it in orbit and catch up with it, and then finally move in and dock.
Instead, the Agena breaks up on ascent. Now, Gemini 6 has no rendezvous target. They stand down. Schirra and Stafford were obviously disappointed, but very quickly a new plan emerged. NASA will do something out of character for its 1960s crew-cut and white-shirt crowd. It will get radical. NASA has never put two crews in space at the same time. Until the failed Agena rocket launch forces a new plan. And the plan was, look, why not use Gemini 6 to rendezvous with the mission that's going to fly after it, Gemini 7.
Two crews, two ships, one mission. Find each other in space. Gemini 7 will go first. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell will try to break the endurance record in A 2-week marathon stuck inside their tiny capsule. Jim Lovell called it 2 weeks in a men's room. Now they just sit skimming the globe waiting for Gemini 6. It was boring. You know when you're just drifting tumbling through space, time goes slow. It doesn't help that Borman can't change his clothes. This is the space suit that Frank Borman wore during the Gemini 7 mission.
He wore it for 14 days. This suit was designed with the idea in mind that they had to make the astronauts comfortable in order to do meaningful work in space. Probably the most remarkable design characteristic about the suit is this construction of the helmet as part of the suit and it would lift up over the astronaut's head like a hoodie and they would be able to work in space just with the helmet hanging on their backs. And that helmet gave an impression of an insect. The suit became known as the grasshopper suit.
The grasshopper suit is more flexible than a standard spacewalk suit. But nothing is comfortable for two straight weeks. Lovell and I had been up there for 11 or 12 days. I don't remember how long. We were tired. It was a real high point to see this bright light look like a star came up and then eventually we could see it was a Gemini vehicle. They came up and we stayed together. We each took turns flying around each other to see how nicely the spacecraft would control on something like that.
Wally Schirra piloting the newly arrived Gemini 6 can measure his moves in inches. Again it was tiny tiny thrusts. I call it a micro mouse fart. You've got to have these very slow changes where you don't waste a lot of fuel. They even get close enough for the former servicemen to heckle each other. Spaceflight's first rendezvous is a win. The joint mission also proves that astronauts can survive a moon length marathon, two weeks of space camping. I don't know how on the world we could, but in that small area, somehow we lost a toothbrush.
So, we ended up sharing toothbrush. Next step, learn to dock. Gemini 8 sends up two rookies, Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong. I really believed that we wouldn't have any trouble with the docking based on the simulations we did. This is Gemini control, Houston. About 2 minutes ago, Neil Armstrong called in and he was able to confirm that radar lock had been established. The scene unfolds as if in slow motion, We've got a visual on the Agena. even though both spacecraft are flying 10 times faster than a bullet.
Armstrong and Scott nailed it. Flight, we are docked. Roger, big brother is watching. I'll bet those lucky guys are just jumping up and down. Mission control celebrates the first docking in space, a necessary skill for Apollo's moon shot. Then Gemini 8 drifts around the Earth out of contact with Houston. Murphy's law says bad things always happen at the worst possible time. Without warning, the two docked spacecraft begin to spin. We first suspected that the Agena was the culprit. They shut down the Agena's control system, but the spinning gets worse and the astronauts get dangerously dizzy.
When the rates became quite violent, I concluded that we couldn't continue. We had to get ourselves separate. I was afraid we might lose consciousness. With blurry eyesight, they ditch the Agena thinking that's the culprit. So they back off from the Agena and rather than the the spinning slowing down, it speeds up. When Houston gets back in range, they find the crew in crisis. The problem isn't the Agena. One of the capsule's own thrusters is stuck open and they don't know it. It's now spinning once per second and the crew is in danger of blacking out.
Neil realizes that the only way he's going to stop the spinning is to use the big thrusters. The big thrusters are meant only for re-entry, but Armstrong has to engage them to wrestle Gemini 8 back from the brink. The mission rules were that as you engage the uh system, that's the end of the mission. So, they have to come home making the US space program's first emergency landing. A lot of unexpected things happen, and usually they're not the ones you practice. 1 minute to level out.
How you For the next four missions, crews keep practicing rendezvous and docking. Launch still uh going back and forth, but uh we haven't had any lock on. Okay. Chase it down. Okay, you're coming up on the view. Okay, I got it. Line it up. I'll bring it hard left. Three. And stick the landing. It becomes a well-choreographed dance in space. But NASA is about to resume the spacewalk program with two left feet. Gemini 9, Houston, go. A year after Ed White's easy EVA, Gene Cernan tries it with a list of chores.
But he became so overheated, his visor fogged up to where he couldn't see. And he had to, you know, mark out a little spot with his nose on the visor to kind of wipe it clean, so he had to make his way back to the spacecraft. And the pilot visor is completely fogged over, really frozen over. He's flying nearly blind, so they cut the spacewalk short. I had a lot of problems that we didn't anticipate. They surprised me on Gemini 9. They surprised a lot of people. On another mission, Dick Gordon tries tying a tether from the Agena to Gemini's docking bar.
It becomes another harrowing high-wire act. Somebody wants to know how it felt to tie your shoelace with one hand. How you doing? Tired, Pete. All right, just rest. I needed both hands to put the tether on. When I let go of the docking bar to do that sort of thing, I was floating away and had to grab the docking bar again. How you doing? I'm really tired. Yeah. And NASA was slowly getting the realization that hey, maybe this spacewalk business isn't what we thought. With the spacewalk program faltering, astronauts visit a pool in Baltimore to try something new.
Underwater training. One of its pioneers is astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a veteran scuba diver. I think it's very ideal for zero gravity. When you get somewhere, you're doing it real slowly. And then you get there and you want to anchor yourself. The bottom of a pool becomes the training ground for the top of the world. Roger, Conrad, we burned out the On Gemini 12, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell try to conquer spacewalk. They said let's devote a lot of time on 12 to find out how we can really work outside the spacecraft.
Lovell watches Aldrin rewrite the rules. Let me know when you're ready. Don't try to do too much. All ready? Use slow, deliberate movements. Stay grounded with the new handholds and footholds installed on the spacecraft. So, it was a major turning point in the ability to work outside the spacecraft. What kind of a day do we have? It looks pretty clear up there. Okay, we're Over a four-day mission, Aldrin gives a master class in spacewalk. Then, he says goodbye to space for now. And films Project Gemini's final return to Earth.
On 12 November. I had a camera and I felt that it was perfectly okay and safe to hold that camera in my hands and to take pictures of the re-entry out the window. Strapped in for the rough ride. Aldrin captures the end of an unsung chapter of space history. Okay, you're a little high on your It was an absolutely remarkable string of successes. It was 10 missions in in 20 months. Each one more ambitious than the last. Within just a few short years, the US was able to develop essential capabilities for lunar exploration.
Check the box and we're ready to move on to Apollo. Next stop, the moon. But a million things have to go right. Only one has to go wrong. After 6 years on the learning curve with Mercury and Gemini, the Apollo program nears its first Veteran Gus Grissom will lead the first Apollo crew into space. We've been working very closely together for some time and we all get along very well. Joining Grissom is Ed White, America's first spacewalker. Then I was told that I was going to be on the first Apollo flight crew.
Roger Chaffee is a rookie on his first assignment. I'm 31. I'll be 32 here in a few days. I guess I'm pretty near the junior man in our office. They've been getting their arms around the most complicated spacecraft to date. The Apollo spacecraft is being designed to go to the moon and back and this is a very difficult job. Vehicles are very complex. The command module has nearly 2 million parts and miles of wiring. But no one wants to be the slow link in the production chain between NASA and its contractors.
The deadline to reach the moon is only 3 years away. You can become so focused on the schedule that even though you think you're doing everything possible to safeguard the people involved, you're actually missing things that are right in front of you. It's a Friday in Cape Kennedy, Florida. We've taken the spacecraft now down to the Cape and we're in preparation for launch. The Apollo 1 crew ends a long week with a test of the command module. A weekend with family is on their minds.
I seem to get busier all the time and I find that I'm home less and less and that's about the way it's been going. This is footage from another test a few months earlier. They will simulate space flying conditions inside the capsule. The mission is less than a month off. As Friday morning turns to afternoon, they ascend the launch tower. We plan one altitude chamber tests on the spacecraft. We'll be running another one and then we'll start our final preparations for launch. They enter the capsule on top of the It's not fueled yet, so the test is considered non-hazardous.
They close the hatch and pressurize the spacecraft with pure oxygen, exactly how it will be in space. This is Pad Leader off by three. Uh Don, we're getting ready to pick up on a countdown here. Uh are you ready, Donny? Yes, three battery open. gets underway. All right, Roger. Ground control and the Apollo one crew begin a long checklist. All right, Roger. Uh panel 25, EDS one battery closed. Uh EDS one battery uh is already closed. All right, Roger. You do not have a launch vehicle guidance light at this time.
Flight, I don't have the rate light. Uh negative, launch vehicle guidance All right, uh Communication problems cause delays Flight, I'm off. and frustration. That's us. Okay, Gus. You're pretty garbled. More than two hours into the test, Grissom goes off script to express his annoyance. How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings? Then there's a surge of voltage somewhere in the electrical system. Spotty communication reveals the capsule is on fire.
Fire! I've got a fire in the cockpit. We're on fire. Get us out. Ground control tries to hail the Neil, we're go. They call the workers on the launch pad. It's only 17 seconds from the first call of alarm to radio silence. It's already too late. That fire erupted. It didn't just spread. It was an explosive combustion. The hull of the spacecraft had ruptured from the pressure of the fire. The temperature got up to 1200°. There were puddles of aluminum that had melted during the fire. It was sparked by an electrical Fed by pure oxygen.
And contained by the heavy hatch designed to lock out space. Instead, it locked in fire. Nobody at NASA realized that they were putting those three astronauts into a bomb that was waiting to go off. This is a CBS News special report. This is Mike Wallace at the CBS Newsroom in New York. America's first three Apollo astronauts were trapped and killed by a flash fire that swept their moonship early tonight during a launch pad test at Cape Kennedy in Florida. NASA lays out the evidence.
They find its design flawed with flammable material in a pure oxygen atmosphere. You lost the crew and vehicle on the ground with people only feet away, but pushed back by the flames. They find its construction rushed. There were problems that people knew about, but they hadn't been able to slow the train that was barreling down the track. And they find NASA and its contractors culpable. And it was one of those moments when you have sudden clarity about what you've been doing. This is what accidents do.
You have this moment when you say, "My God, how could we have done this?" Three weeks before they were to launch into space, the first three Apollo astronauts are lowered into the earth. They were their friends, their neighbors. They were public figures that everybody knew. It was a really tough time. Most astronauts are in full military dress for a duty they wish they didn't have. burying their brothers Ed White and I were good friends, neighbors. You're much more likely to accept loss of friend in flight, but it really hurt to lose him in a ground test.
We didn't do the right thing somehow. Astronaut Gordon Cooper stands behind the minister mourning Gus Grissom. Gus Grissom might probably my closest friend of all of them because I'd been with him for a number of years previous and we had done a lot of flying together. We've been in school together. So, we were old long-time friends. Out of the solemn quiet comes a roar of salute. President Lyndon Johnson tries to comfort Grissom's widow and two young sons. Then, he drives away to face a crucial decision.
Should Apollo continue? As vice president, Johnson was the man behind the original mission outlined by President Kennedy in 1961. of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. When Kennedy was killed, Johnson took office and his support for NASA never wavered. Johnson looked at the space program as part of the launchpad to his great society, improving race relations and improving health care and all sorts of things. He saw space exploration as part of that larger mission and driving it in a way.
Now, he'll have to steer the nation through the wreckage of Apollo 1. I don't know that there was ever a moment where they thought the program couldn't go forward, but there certainly was a realization that it could not go forward in the form it was. NASA's new form begins to take shape. More inspections. More follow-through. More diligence. Neil Armstrong remembers the dedication. You could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was cuz people didn't leave at quitting time in those days.
People just worked. But NASA has only 3 years to recover, rebuild, and reach the moon by the end of the decade. A redesigned slows down spacecraft construction. But the rocket is on the fast track. The moment of truth for any new launch vehicle is the flight test. In the short history of rocketry, some have gone better than others. The bigger the rocket, the bigger the risk. The Mercury rockets could take one astronaut into space. Project Gemini demanded a bigger rocket to take two men and more payload around the Earth.
Getting all the way to the moon with three men will take a three-stage powerhouse, the Saturn V. It is 6 years in the making. There's no time to test it stage by stage and still make the moon landing deadline. There were a few audacious decisions that leapfrog the US program ahead. One of those was the decision to have that vehicle really tested in its entirety at one time. It's as tall as a 36-story building and loaded with nearly a million gallons of fuel. On top is an empty redesigned command module, its first test flight since the Apollo 1 tragedy.
On the bottom are the engines that have to lift it all. So, this is the F-1 engine. These are five of these gigantic rocket engines powered the Saturn V's first stage. Each one produced a million and a half pounds of thrust. Together, 7 and a half million pounds of thrust was needed to lift a vehicle that was over 6.2 million pounds off the launch pad. That's a big controlled explosion. If one of those engines failed or if it ran into the launch tower, the Saturn V could blow up with the force of a small nuclear bomb.
It was the first launch since the astronauts died in a launch pad fire and it was absolutely critical that everything go right. Its maiden flight is called Apollo 4. The public and press are thought to be safe, 3 miles away. T minus 10, 9, 8, 7. Water shoots onto the launch pad. If they didn't pour water over the concrete on the launch pad, the sound waves once they would have reflected off the concrete, bounced back up and destroyed the bottom of the rocket, and blown it up. Ignition.
The force of fire rips through the air. As the rocket's accelerating off the launch pad, it's basically tearing air apart. You can hear the kind of ripping sound. The F-1 engines are guzzling 15 tons of liquid fuel per second. It lumbered off of the launch pad because there's so much mass 3 miles away, the press trailers shake as if by earthquake. Ceiling tiles fall around Walter Cronkite. The Saturn V picks up speed, stays on track, and lifts the hopes of Apollo into the stratosphere.
Roger roll, into the clouds at 3,000 ft. Man, it's moving. Look at it go. The spectators screech into the sky as the roar still resonates. Seeing something that big go up was an absolutely transformative experience for people. The Saturn V sheds the spent stages high above the Earth. The test is a thundering success. It was a tremendous shot in the arm for NASA. It was an absolutely flawless launch. When the command module reaches its high point, it sends back a few postcards. This is planet Earth from more than 11,000 mi away.
The first color shots from this distance. A film camera rolls on automatic. No human is in the capsule. No human has yet ventured this far. But the plan is to go even farther. Project Gemini set the stage. And we go from very limited experience in space to being very experienced in space and being able to get to the moon. Apollo 1 set them back. It really was a devastating blow. But the Saturn V begins to dig NASA out of the ashes. It was a really bright spot at the end of a very dark year.
one of the most tumultuous years the world has ever seen. Bitter divisions threaten to fray the social fabric beyond repair. was the bloodiest, most traumatic year in modern American history. We were in Vietnam. Martin Luther King died. Bobby Kennedy died. The cities exploded in violence. Campuses exploded in violence. The world was coming unhinged. Amid the turmoil, NASA tries to stay focused. Its high-profile Apollo program is hopelessly far behind. Not one part of its moon-capable spacecraft has been tested by humans in flight.
President Kennedy says we're going to the moon by the end of the decade, and we've got 2 years to get all these missions flown and make it to the moon safely and get back And everybody at NASA felt that um intensely. Thousands of people press hard to meet the deadline and fulfill the president's promise. For NASA, The command module is one of the biggest delays. NASA has been working on it for nearly 8 years. The command module is where the crew lived, it's where the navigation equipment was, and three seats for the crew.
All the control panels were there. So, that was the living and working compartment. It's also the only part that ever comes back to Earth. Engineers work furiously trying to balance speed with caution. An accident nearly 2 years ago is still very much on their minds. They knew they were doing risky work and that they were pushing the boundaries and that they were pushing fast. But, nobody expected that accident. It was a huge shock. Flaws in an earlier design caused a devastating fire killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee before they even left the ground.
There was a a problem with some of the wiring. The hatch was very, very difficult to open and it sealed and the astronauts were not able to to get it open in time. Now, the command module has been redesigned with new wiring, a fireproof interior, and a hatch that's easier to open from inside. The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum gives visitors a chance to take a close-up look at this engineering feat. The command module was an extraordinarily complex machine that had to be very compact in order to be launched to the moon, and it had to accomplish feats that had never been accomplished before.
Its body's honeycomb structure protects it from the 5,000° re-entry and the icy cold of space. Altogether, it has over 2 million working parts. Now, NASA believes it has the perfect design. And they're ready to risk sending it on its first human space flight. It will orbit the Earth in a mission called Apollo 7. The mission of Apollo 7 was to just get this thing up in space, let it stay up there for 11 days, and make sure that it was spaceworthy. The stakes are really high. There was the need to regain confidence, both of the public and also of the NASA team itself.
To command it, NASA needs someone who can fly a textbook-perfect mission. They choose the celebrated spaceman, Wally Schirra. Wally Schirra was one of the great veterans of space flight, right? I mean, he'd flown um a six-orbit mission on Mercury. Then he had commanded Gemini 6. Rookies Don Eisele and Walter Cunningham round out the crew. Don Eisele and Walt Cunningham were both members of the third group of astronauts that had been selected in 1963. They were all very gung-ho and ready to fly.
In the press room, Schirra holds forth with bravado. Happy to be in the public eye. I think you'll find that you'll uh see a good performance out of this total crew, and we've tried very hard to make this machine work just the way it should. The Apollo 7 team knows the risks well. Uh towards this end They were the backup crew for Apollo 1. And lost three good friends in that fire. Wally Schirra and his crew were really under the gun to make sure that that mission goes as smoothly and as successfully as possible.
October 11th, 9:00 a.m. Schirra, Cunningham, and Eisele arrive at the launch pad. Make their way to the launch tower. And ascend to their fate. On the surface, the crew is calm and measured. Underneath, emotions run high. No astronaut has lifted off from Cape Kennedy in nearly 2 years. Just a thousand feet away from the launch pad, directors run the final checks. At 11:00 a.m., the spaceship gets the go. 1 minute 10 seconds and counting. We still are go at this time. 3 2 We have ignition.
Apollo 7, Houston, how do you read? Roger, Gemini 7, beautifully. Did you leave us? Roger, she looks real good. Little bumpy ride. You're looking real fine, Apollo 7. Roger, she's riding like a dream. Just minutes after lift off, Apollo 7 orbits the Earth at over 17,000 mph. I remember my thoughts the first time I looked out filling my window was the Sinai Peninsula. And I remember thinking, "Gee, it looks just like in the drawings they had in the paper." Apollo 7, Houston. As mission control calls for the first test, wonder quickly turns to workload.
First, Schirra must separate from the last stage of the rocket and turn around in space. That's a critical test. Is the command module maneuverable enough to do what you need to do? Beautiful. That was outstanding. All right, real fine. Outstanding. Impressive. Next, the crew must test the spacecraft's engine. That engine has to fire to get you into orbit. And more importantly, it has to work to get you back away from the moon, back to Earth, because otherwise you're stuck in lunar orbit forever.
Apollo 7, Houston. Astronauts burn the engine and head back to the last stage of the rocket. Future moon missions will require the two spacecraft to rendezvous and dock. It's a difficult move. But NASA's faith in Schirra's team pays off. Coming in right down the line. How about that? Wally Schirra had experience with rendezvous. He carried out the first rendezvous on on Gemini 6. And so, this was kind of revisiting old territory for him. Roger, Houston. This is Apollo 7. How do you read this time?
By day two, it's clear that the command module works. Plan to uh re But things with the crew are not going well. And then shut it down. Wally Schirra came down with a monster head cold and was not a lot of fun. Schirra's cold is misery in orbit. In the zero-gravity capsule, his sinuses just won't drain and he quickly becomes irritable. On Earth, astronauts might turn to comfort food when they're sick. In space, there's really no such thing. Today, we're looking at a selection of space food from early Apollo missions.
So, the space foods on the table here represent different parts of a meal and different meals throughout the day. So, we have sugar-coated cereal, sausage patties, so this would make a nice breakfast. We have chicken stew, which would have been a lunch or a dinner item, and then butterscotch pudding and grapefruit drink. First experiments in space food were cautious. Could astronauts even swallow in space? Nobody really knew. In 1962, John Glenn proved that astronauts can eat, at least from a tube.
He could choose applesauce or pureed beef. Early space food isn't very appetizing. Scientists freeze-dry and dehydrate it into bite-sized morsels and coat it with gelatin to stop down crumbs. In space, crumbs don't fall, they float. And air filters could pick up those crumbs and it would just create a maintenance problem for the astronauts where they would need to clean those filters more often. And when you're really busy in space, the last thing you want to be doing is adding more activities to your routine every day.
By the time of Apollo 7, added features make space food a bit more delicious. Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham could rehydrate things that had a bit more flavor and dimension to them, dishes that might be more enjoyable and have some added flavors as Quite a lot of concern down here. But none of it is mom's chicken soup. The mood in the command module quickly goes south. There was some some real bickering back and forth between Wally and the ground. Wally was already starting to feel effects.
He was cold, and Wally was obviously into the who is in charge mode. And for just somebody for tomorrow can work on a sleep plan. Right. I asked for an hour and a half sleep for each of us last night, and I probably would have ignored it. It made Schirra in particular a little bit grumpy. Okay. And that also spread to some of the exchanges between the crew and mission control. Also, Three days into the Apollo program's first human space flight, the mission is threatening to crack. Any problem that came up is going to threaten this carefully planned sequence of missions.
All we had left that point was 14 months to get men to the moon. That was almost no time at all. Second night, I got to do better than that. Apollo 7 always agreed with you on this. The Apollo 7 flight crew is in a battle of wills with mission control. NASA is ready to start its first live public broadcast from space. But astronaut Wally Schirra is sick, overworked, and not in the mood to comply. Well, we do not have the equipment out. We are not even at this point. I refuse to follow up our timeline at this point.
You have to remember these guys are test pilots, and test pilots normally don't broadcast to the public about what they're doing in their test flights. They're usually doing the mission on a test flight, making sure things work properly. Flight director Glynn Lunney isn't used to hearing no. Even from one of NASA's stars. It was the first time we actually had a serious falling out between uh ground crews and the flight crews. Uh I was kind of upset with uh with uh what went on. Mission control really is essential to carrying out the mission successfully.
And I think it came as a a bit of a shock to some of the people on the ground that you have a a space crew that's not necessarily going to do everything you want them to do. There it is. There it is. A day later, the crew relents and agrees to squeeze in some time on camera. We're receiving the picture. It's a little bright. Could you bring it in a little? Giving the public its first real-time look into space. Roger from the lovely Apollo room high atop everything. Even though some of the astronauts were critical of having the live television broadcast, NASA saw it as a priority to to share the experience of space exploration with the world public.
And this openness was in direct contrast to the Soviet Union's more closed program. they're going to pick you up. You're looking good. It's a good picture. Okay, Tom. The broadcasts are a hit. But behind the scenes, trouble. I think we can work that out. Schirra thinks the workload is way too much. Uh whoever thought of the idiot famous who thought up this test, I want to find out and I want to talk to the person when we get back down. Wally was one of those who was like kind of a general bull moose complex.
So, when Wally had a cold, everybody had to be miserable. And it was Schirra with a helmet on either, that one. On the final descent, mission control tells the crew to put on their helmets. We tried them on this morning. The crew refuses. If we had a open visor, I'd go along with that. Schirra didn't want to do this because they needed to be able to clear their ears as the pressure changed during the descent. Okay, I guess you better be prepared to discuss in some detail when we land why we haven't got them on.
But it sure is neck, and I hope you don't break it. Thank you. Even before the astronauts are back on Earth, mission control or swear that none of them will ever fly again. It left a kind of a sour taste in in people's mouth. When you're in front of the whole world, this is a way to make a point that's less confrontational. 11 days after takeoff, Apollo 7 splashes down just 350 miles south of Bermuda. Sailors from the USS Essex are quickly on hand. The crew may have gone rogue, but they flew an almost perfect mission.
Proving that the command module can weather the world of deep space. After the experience of Apollo 1, Apollo 7 made it feel like the country was back on track and that lunar mission was within reach. But while NASA savors its success, US intelligence reveals a shock. The Soviet space program appears to be back on track, too. The common conception was that the Soviets had sort of dropped out of the space race. That's anything but the truth. The latest reports say that the Soviets may be ready to send one of their spacecraft around the moon.
The United States have been trailing behind the Soviet Union since 1957 with the launch of Sputnik. They sent the first human into space with Yuri Gagarin. They sent the first woman into space. They had the first extravehicular activity. And so, there was a lot of concern that this would be yet another blow to US prestige. Russian eyes would have been the first eyes to see the far side of the moon. During the space race, that made an enormous difference. After eight years of effort, NASA is determined not to come in second.
But the plan they had for the Apollo 8 test flight isn't going to work. They've flown the command module in Earth orbit. The next logical thing is to test the lunar module in Earth orbit. It was clear that the lunar module wasn't ready. Nobody knew what they could do until the LEM was ready in order to advance the mission. NASA's brain trust coolly considers its options and revisits a radical idea. They came together with this really bold plan of, "Okay, we don't have a lunar module.
Let's take this command and service module. We're going to put three guys on it. We're going to send them to the moon." The command module has flown only once. And navigation to the moon has yet to be mastered. The thinking was, "It's the riskiest mission. It's the scariest mission. But it's a mission we should be able to fly. And we are going to fly it because it's what is needed." The scheduled launch, December 21st. The crew will spend Christmas circling the moon. NASA has just 16 weeks to make the shift.
Astronauts, software teams, flight planners, all step into high gear to accommodate the change. In terms of planning for a space mission, that was like saying, "Here's our plan on a Monday, launch it on a Thursday." That's how tight it was. Most of the US Navy's Pacific Fleet scrambles to accommodate the efforts. Canceling their shore leave to head out to the Pacific Ocean to help in the recovery. Every element of the great NASA space machine had to move ahead at a speed that it was not accustomed to moving.
December 21st, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Nearly 4 miles from the launch pad, a quarter of a million people line up to watch NASA attempt something no one has ever done. Put men in orbit around another celestial body. Blasting them into the heavens. NASA's mighty Saturn V making its very first human space flight. This 36-story behemoth weighs 6 and 1/2 million pounds. 5 and 1/2 million of them are fuel. The amount of energy that was generated was the equivalent of re-channeling every river in the United States through a single hydroelectric dam at the same moment.
It was huge. It was terrible. It was wonderful. It was violent. It was remarkable. The five massive engines in the first stage alone produce over 7,500,000 pounds of thrust. Putting a crew on top of a new rocket is a risky venture. The Apollo 6 test flight 6 months ago shook so much that the crew could have been killed. Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations at NASA, was never a man to put any kind of favorable spin on something. And after that Apollo 6 test, he said, "I will not call it anything but what it was.
It was a disaster." 4 hours before the launch, the crew gathers in the space center. First, a medical check. Then, they're ready to put on their suits. Leading the team, astronaut Frank Borman, commander of the 14-day Gemini 7 flight. He's a cold warrior with a focused mission. My reason for joining NASA was to participate in the Apollo program, the lunar program, and hopefully beat the Russians. Uh I never looked up for any individual goals. Joining him, Jim Lovell, a naval aviator and test pilot.
He flew with Borman in Gemini 7 and commanded Gemini 12. We were so curious, so excited. We didn't have any kind of fear or are we going to get back or not. It was just just to be there. Bill Anders is the rookie. The Air Force fighter pilot is one of NASA's third group of astronauts. Apollo 8 will be his first time in I frankly thought that, well, there's probably 1/3 chance of a totally successful mission. There's probably a 1/3 chance that you went but you didn't accomplish the goal, and there was a 1/3 chance that you didn't come back.
Cape Kennedy, Florida. 65 years to the month after the first American airplane lifted off, humankind is on its way to the moon. All eyes are on the new rocket on its first manned flight. The spacecraft races upward at 7,000 ft per second. Okay, and our first stage was very smooth and this one is smoother. Understand, smooth and smoother. Looks good here. Apollo 8, Houston, your trajectory and guidance are go. Over. So far, the Saturn V rocket works. Yeah, you're looking real good, Mike.
118 mi above the Earth, the crew settles in for the flight. All right, Houston, we're recording altitude HA 1026, HB 96.8. RBI 25560. All right, Jared, Apollo 8. If all goes well, Apollo 8 will orbit the Earth two and a half times and speed off 233,000 mi into deep space. Once they reach the moon, they will orbit 10 times and then head back to Earth. Apollo 8, Houston. This is 8, go ahead. In Houston, mission control monitors the spacecraft's progress. The crew is about to face its first major maneuver, the TLI, or translunar injection.
It will shoot them out of the Earth's orbit. Flight controllers watch as the spacecraft strains against the bonds of gravity. Two and a half hours into the flight, it's time. Apollo 8, Houston. Go ahead, Houston. Apollo 8, you are go for TLI, over. Roger, understand and we're go for TLI. Minutes later, the map on the wall of mission control changes to something NASA's never used until now. The flight path to the moon. It was quite a quite a sensation to to think about, you know, and you had to pinch yourself.
Hey, we're really going to the moon. On day three, the crew crosses an invisible border, becoming the first humans to feel the gravitational pull of another celestial body. And by the way, welcome to the moon's sphere. The moon's sphere? The moon's sphere. You're in the influence. At some point, the moon's gravity begins to be a bigger effect. They can see in the windows that the moon is getting bigger, and the Earth is getting smaller, and then all of a sudden, wow. This is the moon, and it's really close.
Navigating a quarter of a million miles through the vastness of space has never been done before. And they're trying to hit a moving target. The smallest deviation from the flight path can result in missing the moon by thousands of miles. To help, astronauts rely on a tool used by centuries of explorers. This is a sextant from an Apollo command module, and it was used to navigate from Earth to the moon and back by taking readings on stars just the way ships at sea did for centuries.
When I look at this artifact today, I'm just amazed at the incredible mechanical complexity of it. It's built like the finest Swiss watch. The craftsmanship was incredibly detailed. The fact that it had a a very complex network of gears and mirrors so that you could line up a star on the crosshairs by turning something to make it line That's quite an achievement. To determine the spaceship's position, astronauts located a specific star using a single power wide field telescope and then took a fix with the sextant.
The astronauts had to memorize the the constellations and the major stars were given numbers and they would key those numbers into the computer. The computer sent that information down to tracking stations at various locations all around the Earth. These tracking stations worked with mission control to verify the spaceship's location with extreme precision allowing it to make micro adjustments to its course as it flew. It was quite an effort by a lot of people to do the planning.
We may take that for granted today because you've got your car has a navigation system in it or something, but this was quite a an achievement for it today, and it still amazes me that they were able to pull something like this off. There is Rigel 137 311. Manning the guidance and navigation station on Apollo 8 falls to Jim Lovell. Uh Apollo 8, Houston. Go ahead, Houston. Mission control has some good news. He's on an almost perfect course. Apollo 8, Houston, you're looking good here right now.
Roger, over. Roger, Apollo 8. Now, it's time for one of the most critical maneuvers of the entire mission, to fire up their engine and then slow the spacecraft just enough to enter lunar orbit. The mood in the control room is tense. The spacecraft must fly into this orbit at a precise speed and location. Going too close or too slow will cause it to crash into the moon. Too far or too fast will send it on a one-way journey into space. Making it even more complicated, astronauts won't have mission control to help.
The key maneuvers had to take place when the astronauts were behind the moon. So, they were completely cut off from Earth. A really critical flight maneuver is happening, and there's no way to know until after it's all over. All the training has built up to this moment. Now, the crew will be on their own. Uh Apollo 8, Houston, uh you're riding the best bird we can find, over. People had navigated across oceans. People had found their way across continents. Nobody had ever found their way across a quarter of a million miles of interplanetary interworld void before.
On Christmas Eve, mission control gives the go-ahead. Apollo 8, Houston, 1 minute LOS. All systems go. All right, safe journey, guys. Thanks a lot, Dooks. We'll see you on the other side. Christmas Eve, 1968. The men in mission control wait anxiously to see if Apollo 8 has survived its journey to the far side of the moon. The worst thing that could happen, of course, would have been if they heard nothing. That would have meant that the astronauts had crashed on the far side of the moon.
That was very real possibility. 32 minutes after losing contact, ground control sends a test call out into Apollo 8, Houston, over. Go ahead, uh Apollo 8, this is Houston. Roger, we hear your voice. It was a critical step in being able to land on the moon. Deep space travel would ultimately require having the ability to enter orbit around another world. You okay, Jim? Well, somebody tell me what we're doing here. 60 miles above the moon, the astronauts take in the lunar landscape, I'll take Jim for a little bit.
documenting for humanity a radically different world. By the time of Apollo 8, astronauts had a variety of photographic equipment. Using Hasselblad 70-mm cameras like this one, they could take a series of photographs of the lunar surface that geologists and scientists could study in order to learn about the moon, but also to plan for future missions. Hasselblad did things like adding large buttons and dials to be able to allow an astronaut, even with the gloves of a space suit, to operate a camera like this.
As the capsule orbits, astronauts try to capture every nuance of the pockmarked landscape. Uh Apollo 8, Houston, uh what does the old moon look like from 60 mi? Over. Okay, uh Houston, the moon is essentially gray. No color. Looks like plaster of Paris. You see quite a bit of detail. The equator craters are all rounded off. There's quite a few of them. Some of them are newer. Many of them look like uh especially the round ones look like uh hit by meteorites or projectiles of some sort. All right, you're understand.
On the third orbit, Borman tilts the spacecraft to adjust its trajectory. And a startling object slowly appears above the lunar horizon, taking astronauts by surprise. Give me a roll of color quick. Oh man, that's gorgeous. Where is it? Quick. Anything. Quick. Bill Anders is the mission photographer. He begins to shoot. I just started snapping pictures and changing the F-stop. Oh, that's a beautiful shot. 250 at F11. And uh fortunately one of them was chosen by NASA to read the iconic Earthrise picture.
Earthrise, it's one of the great most iconic pictures in history. There weren't political boundaries from space. It really showed that the that we were all on one planet Far away on the fragile blue planet, America settles in for a special Christmas Eve broadcast hoping to get a glimpse of the heavens. We were told by NASA that we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice before on Christmas Eve. And the only instructions that we got from NASA was do something appropriate.
At 9:31 on Christmas Eve, astronauts turn the camera toward the moon and begin the broadcast. We had this slow metric TV camera going out the window watching the craters go by and slowly slipping into daylight. That is Okay, Frank. There we we got it. It's coming in loud and clear. We look like we're looking at you. Each one of the crew takes a turn sharing a single message. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.
decided that they should read from Genesis. And God said let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light. Yeah, the idea behind that was that it would um resonate with as many people as possible. And God called the light day. And the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Because Genesis was It's of the foundation of multiple world religions. God saw that it was good. That it wouldn't be just a Christian message, but it'd be a message for all mankind.
these days, God saw that it was The Christmas Eve broadcast reaches over a billion people in 64 countries. Good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth. Two and a half days later, the three men are back on the good earth. Apollo 8 was a huge success and a big confidence booster. In effect, we might actually put people on the moon before That was a really big accomplishment. It's the best Christmas present that NASA could have. The second perfect test flight.
The flight team indulges in a rare celebration. Tomorrow, they'll be back at work. They have just 1 year left to put a man on the moon, and they still have to test the lander. There were huge parties. And then everybody was going to be running flight simulations because Apollo 9 was launching 10 weeks later. December 1968. While the astronauts of Apollo 8 celebrate their trip around the moon, another team is hard at work preparing for the next launch. It was like, we just got through one major set of accomplishments, and before we had time to savor and enjoy the the accomplishment, we were off working on the next one.
The command module and the Saturn 5 rocket have made it through their test flights. Now, NASA must prove the lunar module as Knowing what they want the lunar module to do is easy. But it takes a 7-year sprint to figure out how. The lunar module was designed to be a basically a little shuttle vehicle to get you from lunar orbit down to the moon and back up again. It's a puzzle that taxes even the brightest minds. Building something on Earth that will only work in the vacuum of space.
And they're trying to you know, create this thing uh in that atmosphere where the requirements that they need to meet are not really clear By March 1969, engineers believe they have the perfect Behind me is the lunar module, which is LM-2, the second one created and developed, and this is a real lunar module that could have landed on the One of the questions that we often get is that can't be real, and that can't be the way that it really flew because it doesn't look like what people expect a spaceship to look like.
With its stubby body, spindly legs, and gold foil wrapped around its waist, the lunar module looks like nothing that's ever flown. The fact that the lunar module didn't need to be aerodynamic was a challenge for the engineers because they were so used to building that into how they would construct a vehicle for aviation or for spaceflight. So, this really required some out-of-the-box thinking about what would a spacecraft look like. Testing the 16-ton taxi, astronauts Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart.
They'll take it above the Earth for a test flight close to home. Dave Scott once described it as the connoisseur's mission. They had to take this untried vehicle, they had to fly it around the Earth separating from the safety of the mothership, and then redock and come home. The mission starts with a disappointment. The launch has to be postponed when all three astronauts come down with colds. Flight directors are still reeling from Schirra's performance on Apollo 7. They don't want to chance another difficult flight.
All engines running. Commit. Lift off. We have lift off at 11 On March 3rd, the flight team tries again. This time, it's a go. Roger, go all the way. Everything looks good. Roger. It's not a moon shot, but if the LEM doesn't pass the test, there won't be one. And uh Rocky, uh everything is going real great. 3 hours after launch, the flight crew separates from the third stage of the They turn the command module around and dock for the very first time. And this is Houston. All right, Roger.
It's out there and uh we're turned around and uh proceeding with the station keeping and docking. Uh tremendous uh command, thank you. Scott slowly accelerates the command module extracting the 16-ton LEM from the rocket and into its new home in space. All right, 59 understand hard dock. Next, Schweickart and McDivitt clear the tunnel between the spacecraft. Making sure the two ships are locked together tight. Two solar cells on the hot fire now. Uh we're ready to go, Chris. Now, mission control calls for the next test, an EVA or extravehicular activity, commonly known as a spacewalk.
Plan B to keep astronauts from getting stranded in space. If you had a problem docking when the lunar module came back from the surface of the moon, you had to be able to spacewalk from the lunar module back to the command module. And so it was a what if exercise to say, "We've got to test this out to make sure it works in case we actually do have a problem on one of these landing missions." The spacewalk falls to Schweickart. He'll be testing a brand new suit for the very first time.
All other astronauts who had ever walked in space had been attached to their spacecraft via umbilicals. In order to walk on the moon, you had to cut that tether. You had to have a complete life support system on your back. Rusty Schweickart, proceed out the hatch. Rusty got out of the lunar module. He was going to be the first to test the moon suit in the vacuum of space. Meanwhile, Dave Scott was sticking out of the command module hatch and photographing and observing while Rusty checked out the suit.
Dave was supposed to take movies of it so that we would document the stability of being able to do this. I started up the handrail and Dave said, "Uh, uh, the camera jammed." And so, Jim said, "Okay, Dave, you got 5 minutes. Rusty, don't go any Stay right there." Scott ducks into the command module, leaving Schweickart to an out-of-this-world experience. I just spun around and I looked at the Earth and I just said, "My job right now is to just be a human being, just be a person." Uh, and I just you know, I stopped being an astronaut.
There I was, a human being in space saying, "Absorb this, you know, just soak this up. Just let it all come in." That 5 minutes was, uh, was a very, very special time. Uh, Apollo 9 and the Houston Soon, the astronauts are back inside the spacecraft. Mission control can breathe easier now. But their biggest test is yet to come. Schweickart and McDivitt make their way into the lunar module. Scott stays in the command module. The plan is for the two spacecraft to go their separate ways, a critical part of the mission.
Up until this point, NASA been flying missions that were largely, you know, one spacecraft at a time. When you get to Apollo 9, then we're actually having multiple spacecraft with multiple crews on board. So, it's a really complex change of pace. With two spacecraft now in operation, the team needs new code names to tell them apart. You're talking to them on the radio, which one are you talking to? So, they had to come up with call signs for the separate vehicles and the crew said, "Well, the command module kind of looks like a big gumdrop.
Um and so, we're going to call that gumdrop." And the lunar module looks sort of like a spider. So, when they were flying separately, they were called gumdrop and spider. Spider and gumdrop are in Now, the crew must begin the maneuver. They slowly undock. Until now, the crew had the security of being in a spaceship they could land in. But, Spider isn't designed to come back from space. Rusty Schweickart and Jim McDivitt, they were the first human beings inside a spacecraft that was unequipped to bring them home.
The lunar module, that was just foil origami. There was no possibility of entering through the atmosphere in that spacecraft. Oh, very good. Hi, you. It's a tremendous picture, uh Spider. McDivitt and Schweickart start a broadcast down to Earth as they fly Spider more than 100 mi away. Going down the checklist there like a good pilot. Right. Scott sits patiently in the command waiting for Spider to return and redock. They both knew, "If we cannot rendezvous and dock with Dave again, we will die.
Dave will come home alone." For that spacecraft to come back with just one person inside, it would have been a wrenching national trauma. Spider, Gumdrop, I can see your jet. A burst from its ascent engine brings Spider close to target. The redocking goes even more smoothly than planned. All right, Spider, up on the belly band and we get back to maybe about the right attitude to leave this plane. A buzzer indicates that the docking is complete. All right, yeah. Good work. The crew stays in orbit for five more days.
And then splashes down in the Atlantic After Apollo 9, NASA is confident that the lunar module's tough design process has finally paid off. It would not have surprised anybody if they'd come back from Apollo 9 and they'd said, "You know what? We got to do another Earth orbit mission um before we can go to the back to the moon." But Apollo 9 went perfectly. That's three perfect test flights in just under five months. The extraordinary thing about the Apollo missions was that they came in such Gatling gun sequence.
They were basically achieve one amazing thing, come home, shower up, hit the books, send the next three guys up, and do it again. July 1969. Nearly a million gather to take part in one of history's most epic moments. In just hours, NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft will blast off with three Americans inside. In the suit up room, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins ease into their spacesuits. The mood was very much high stakes, high tension, and a very real possibility that they weren't going to survive.
Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins carry the hopes of an entire nation. When President Kennedy challenged the country to go to the moon, he did it with a deadline attached. We had to get there by the end of the decade. NASA was working under the inherent pressure of having committed to this really ambitious, audacious program, and they were very aware that 1969 really needed to be their moment. Over the last 10 months, NASA has tested each component of its daring new The command module had been tested in Earth orbit.
The command module had been tested in lunar orbit. The lunar module had been tested in Earth But the complete spacecraft has never been tested at the moon. Which was critical uh before we landed on the moon for full end-to-end test of of almost everything you can do before you touch down the surface. Before Apollo 11 can land, NASA plans one last mission, a dress rehearsal, Apollo 10. The mission is scheduled for May 1969. Flying it, three veteran astronauts with five spaceflights between them.
Commander Tom Stafford had flown two missions before. He was backed up by John Young, who was known as just the astronaut's astronaut. And then Gene Cernan, who was the third member of that crew. The Apollo 10 crew was the most experienced astronaut crew that had ever flown a mission. The weeks before the mission are intense. The Apollo 10 crew spends countless hours rehearsing every detail in flight simulators. A tool at the core of each astronaut's training. We're looking at the instructor's operating station.
Where the team that ran the simulated missions to the moon operated all of the equipment that was designed to provide the astronauts with a very realistic simulation of what they would experience during an Apollo mission. Astronauts squeezed into mock-ups of each different spacecraft. Supervisors cook up the worst case scenarios to see how the astronauts respond. The astronauts would move their controllers or flip a button. The computers would analyze what that would have done to the real system and then display the results both here and in the command module.
And then afterwards there would be a debriefing and they would say, "You did the right thing. You did the wrong thing. Had you done this, you could have saved the mission. What you did was a disaster and you wound up dead." 10 9 We have ignition sequence start. Engines on. The fuel valves open on the mighty Saturn V rocket sending Apollo 10 to set the stage for a moon landing. Lift off. We have lift off 49 minutes past the hour. I'm everything's going pathetic. Roger. It looks good to be back up here, Charlie.
Yeah, I bet. Just like old times. It's beautiful up You guys sound ecstatic. Man, this is the greatest, Charlie. As soon as it lit off you can feel it riding that Saturn 5. It's It's It's like a mistress. It's like a love affair right out in the middle of Eight and a half minutes into the flight, the ship enters a parking orbit, 118 mi above the Earth. Yeah, and uh Houston, the Saturn's in great shape. You're configured for orbit. Uh we're all go. Uh Roger, just looks beautiful. The 42-ton spacecraft orbits the Earth one and a half times and then speeds towards the moon.
That off? Roger. You're burning. Roger, burning. We're on the way. Soon, the crew must unpack the spacecraft. The command module will separate from the booster rocket, flip around, dock with the lunar module, and pull it out into space. These were all extraordinarily delicate procedures that had to be executed precisely. Okay, and the S-IVB ought to be coming in here in a second. Roger. Three hours after liftoff, mission control calls on the command module, nicknamed Charlie Brown, to dock with the lunar module, called Snoopy.
Roger, we're docked. At the beginning of 1969, there were no more popular cartoons than Charlie Brown and Snoopy. So, they decided that the lunar module should be Snoopy because it was going to go down as low as it could and snoop around the Houston, Charlie Brown, I've As the crew begins the docking, they wow the world with a first from space, color TV. You're on air, babe. Giving viewers a close-up view as they dock with the lunar lander. color? Yes, sir. It's uh looking great. Good resolution, that's what they were.
In the mid-1960s, all three of the major television networks start broadcasting in color. And NASA including a color television camera on Apollo 10 literally brings it to life, to color, for American audiences. Right here. They dock in a second, I hope. Can we can read the numbers on the lander docking window? Now, I got a one When we first got started with the television on board the spacecraft, there were mixed views with the within the control center. But once we started using it, it was hard to imagine getting along without it.
Why have we waited so long to get these cameras on board? We can see what's going on. Your picture's coming in real good, real clear. I thought it was fantastic. Over a billion people tune in to watch the astronauts living it up or down. One of our problems is trying to figure out which way is up and which way is down. You have your choice. If you don't like things right side up, you can go upside down. Okay, we got one of you in each direction. It's really a ball up here living in It's the only way to fly.
You can see how relaxed they were on camera. They had been in space before, so they adapted relatively quickly, and they were really able to sell to the American people what they were doing and show off their personalities. Tom, the flight surgeon here wants you to be sure to log all your exercise. Arriving at the moon means getting back to business. The crew prepares to undock the lunar module and descend to just 50,000 ft. Now, in a real landing mission, that's when the final descent would begin.
That was a good place to say, "Okay, we're not going to go any further than this." We'll take pictures and the astronauts will observe the landing site that's been picked out for Apollo 11. Mission planners considered giving Apollo 10 the nod to land. We had the debates that you could expect like, "Well, if we're going all the way there, why don't we go ahead and land?" The idea was that let's bite off a reasonable amount here and then let's leave the next big bite for the Apollo 11 mission.
Landing on the moon is much more complicated and much more risky than orbiting the moon. And being able to launch off the lunar surface was also untested at that point. I Charlie Brown, uh Houston, what's your cabin pressure? Over. Cernan and Stafford climb into the lunar module And I got a set pad and prepare to separate from the command module and John Young. Okay, Charlie Brown and Snoopy, uh 3 minutes going over the hill. Just before undocking, mission control notices a serious issue.
Charlie Brown, Houston, uh we're concerned about this apparent slippage of the uh docking ring. Roger. There was a misalignment in the docking mechanisms and in the docking pins that would lock the spacecraft together. Mission control tries to diagnose the problem. Separating the two spacecraft might shear off the latching pins, making it impossible for the two ships to redock and come home. Charlie Brown, uh Houston, Houston, it's apparent that the interface has slipped around to about 6°.
Do not undock. Over. If these two very different spacecraft, with this apparatus that was supposed to click them together, didn't fit precisely, you'd have a real problem. 60 mi above the lunar landscape, the Apollo 10 crew waits anxiously to learn if it's safe to undock their spacecraft. It was very important to make sure that the seal between the two spacecraft would guarantee the safety of the crews as they tried to transfer back and forth. Okay, troops, now we'd like you to get an active integrity check in the command module.
Over. That'll be all right. Mission control huddles to assess the problem and determines that separating the two spacecraft is worth the risk. Okay, Cernan and Stafford, you go for undocking and then we'll see you right outside. All right. Alone in the command module, astronaut John Young watches Snoopy break free. Have a good time while we're gone, babe. Yeah, don't get lost up there, John. Roger. That was a tricky situation, being alone in the command module. No one had done it yet in lunar orbit, and that was a scary business because if your crewmates do not make it back, you are going to have the dark and heartbreaking responsibility of flying home alone.
We'll see you back in about 6 hours. Don't you worry. Cernan and Stafford fire up their engine and guide Snoopy enticingly close to the moon. We is going We is down among them, Charlie. Roger. I hear you weaving your way up the freeway. It's only the second time they've flown in the module and and they're flying where the lunar module was intended to be. That's a pretty unique honor, you know. It's only two people got to do that, and it was them. Roger, we're coming up to the Snoopy races above the moon's surface at nearly 4,000 miles an hour.
Documenting the invisible path they hope the next crew will take to land. Tom, if you got a chance to talk a minute, could you describe the landing site to from 8 miles? Yeah, okay. I think the approach angle looks a lot smoother than some of the orbital photos show. If you come down in the wrong area and you don't have the hover time, you're going to have to shove off. We copy. 8 hours later, Stafford and Cernan complete their work and prepare to reunite with Charlie Brown. But as they rise, something goes terribly wrong.
Son of a Something's wrong with that yaw rate They suddenly experienced a wild gyration of the spacecraft. They went in to an out-of-control tumble just 50,000 ft above the moon. We're in trouble. The lunar horizon flashes by eight times in just 15 seconds. God damn. Stafford immediately punched the button and he was able to stop the gyration and get it under control. What the hell happened? Babe, I don't know. Okay, Charlie, we're with you. I think we got all our marbles. And I thought that was wild.
It turned out that the whole thing was caused by a mistaken switch setting. You know, it was a scary few moments for them, but it turned out that they were okay and the mission could continue. Let's go up and get them. This is precisely the kind of imperfection in the flight plan that that final test was supposed to determine. your close run with a radar. And that kind of accident never happened again. Eight hours after Snoopy and Charlie Brown part ways, the latching pin snapped the two spacecraft together and the lander safely redocks.
There were so many things that could have gone wrong. The flight was a tremendous success. Three days later, the crew arrives back on Earth. It was very clear that it was a step towards the ultimate goal that Kennedy had set out in 1961, which is to land humans on the moon. Now, the next three astronauts step into the limelight. Their mission, attempt a lunar landing. The position of first man on the moon was one of those odd positions that had been bookmarked in history. From the time of the ancients, people were saying who is that person going to be.
If the mission goes well, that person will be Neil Armstrong. A former naval aviator and test pilot with a Gemini mission under his belt, he'll command the historic Apollo 11 We were very excited about it. We tried to be as focused as we could, work on the things we could do something about, and not worry about the things that were beyond our ability to change. Armstrong's co-pilot, Buzz Aldrin, the first astronaut with a PhD, the Gemini veteran and spacewalk expert took the first selfie in space.
All of us we're going to do the best we could. We certainly don't want to get overwhelmed with the grandeur of success before we've succeeded. As Yogi Berra says, it's not over till it's over. Piloting the command module, Michael Collins. A West Point grad and former Air Force fighter pilot. After a Gemini mission, he trained to fly on Apollo 8. But fate stepped in. I had a disc come loose between two cervical vertebrae and that grounded me for a couple of months. And then I returned to the selection pool about the time for Apollo 11.
All three of the astronauts on Apollo 11 were veterans. And that gave them an extra measure of confidence that came in very handy when you're trying to do the ultimate test The confidence doesn't come cheaply. It's the product of hundreds of hours spent practicing every aspect of the While the Apollo 11 crew had been training for their mission for several months, um the real intense level of training sort of kicked off after Apollo 10 happens and they're they're really sure what their mission's going to be.
The eight weeks leading up to it were an exercise and continuing to test the protocols, continuing to tease out those last elements of unknowns, those last elements of risk. Collins focuses on the command module. Armstrong and Aldrin try to master the lunar module. Knowing that it can be only so realistic They're pilots, they They trained to fly in Earth's atmosphere. Those and skills are completely useless on the moon cuz there's no atmosphere. They needed something called the lunar landing training vehicle.
Which was a special machine designed to replicate flying in the moon's 1/6 gravity even though you were still on Earth. Astronauts call it the flying bedstead. In the center, a big jet engine that points straight down with a pilot's seat bolted on top. Each flight is a precarious venture. There was no safety net. If you tilted too far, you could just fall out of the sky. You really had to be on your toes. In 1968, Neil Armstrong prepares for his 21st flight in the lunar lander trainer.
The first 20 went well. But this one suffers a rare malfunction. All of the sudden it lurched, kind of tipped over on one side. He almost perished. He was able to eject just in time and with no no time to spare. He was really close to a fatal accident. Neil Armstrong had a particularly cool head. He went back to his desk and finished out his work day because he didn't see any reason that having just narrowly escaped death, he would clock out and go home early. In the days leading up to the launch, the control center at Cape Kennedy buzzes with NASA VIPs, including administrator Thomas Paine.
Outside the gates, another VIP arrives. Civil rights activist Reverend Ralph Abernathy brings a small group of demonstrators to ask for a piece of the moonshot's multi-billion-dollar pie. This is a donation can that the Dr. Ralph Abernathy and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference used to help raise money during the Poor People's Campaign. The Poor People's Campaign was an anti-poverty movement um that would bring people of multiple races and cultures across the country together to fight for education, health care, job training, and a number of other issues.
They showed up at the Apollo 11 launch because there would be a lot of media attention, and so this would be an opportunity for Abernathy and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put poverty on an international platform. Thomas Paine meets Abernathy's group to discuss their concerns. Captain, please permit me to express my profound thanks and appreciation to you. The protest wasn't really against sending people to the moon. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference understood the importance of these missions.
It's just really an opportunity to provide a platform to have conversations to make this nation better. We would like to see you hitch your wagons to our honors. Thomas Paine was pretty understanding. I really believe that the old bag and the NASA program is an indication of what this country can do. He actually invited Abernathy and all the folks who had come with them to watch the launch. So, at one very important moment, those two groups were able to begin the dialogue that would lead to some kind of reconciliation.
Launch day. [music and applause] Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins board the van for the At 9:32 a.m., man begins the greatest adventure in his history. There are thousands upon thousands of persons gathered here. They hope to get a glimpse of that ascending rocket on this historic day. In the grandstands, ex-president Lyndon B. Johnson and vice president Spiro T. Agnew joined by more than 3,000 reporters from 56 countries. Having a global audience to be able to follow it was seen as really essential by President Kennedy with his goal of influencing and winning the hearts and minds of the world public and political leaders.
Armstrong leads the way to the command module trying to balance excitement with calm. You always feel that the chances of actually lifting off are are fairly distant or remote, and you're tempering your enthusiasm with the realization that, in fact, you may be coming back in and trying to go another day. Power transfer is complete. Guidance is internal. 10, 9, ignition sequence 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. All engine running. We have a lift off. Well, then Houston, thruster's go. All engines are looking good.
All right, I think you're loud and clear, again. A decade of humanity's hope disappears into a blinding sky. But, the mission's success is far from assured. Spaceflight can be a very unforgiving place, and there are very real chances that the mission might not succeed. After a 3-day journey, Apollo 11 slips smoothly into lunar orbit. The crew marvels at the landscape below. Looks very much like the pictures, but uh like the difference between watching a real football game and one on TV, uh and that's that's the difference for actually being here.
Uh Roger, we certainly wish we could see it firsthand, also. 11, Houston, looks like you're pretty crowded in there. You bet. Armstrong and Aldrin head over to the lunar module to make final checks. We'll put up a couple of hoses and the command module Tomorrow, if everything goes as planned, they will attempt to do something no one has ever done. Big problem with for landing on the moon is that you only have one chance to do it right, and if you do it wrong, you are never coming home again.
Uh Roger, let us know when you're ready to copy. We have a deal. July 20th, 1969. Landing day. Procedures for landing, Are you secure the doors? Roger. The doors to Mission Control have been firmly locked. Flight Director Gene Kranz and his team don't want any distractions. They're facing one of the most audacious engineering challenges in history. And I called the controllers and I I told them that I believed that from the day we were all born, we were destined to meet in this room and that we would remember this day forever.
And I said whatever happens I will never second-guess any of your calls. Now let's go land on the moon. Apollo 11 this is Houston. Do you read? Over. A quarter of a million miles away the crew of Apollo 11 is feeling the pressure, too. We were certainly aware that this was culmination of the work of 3-400,000 people over the decade and that the nation's hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. Looking good. Roger, Neil. On its 13th orbit, Apollo 11 carefully undocks Neil, we got a if you'll give us crew and data and becomes two separate spacecraft.
Roger, back. The command module, Columbia and the lunar module, Eagle. Neil, how does it look? Neil? Go ahead, Buzz. Eagle carries just over 12 minutes of descent fuel. Okay, I'm ready to start my yaw maneuver. 12 minutes to land, abort, or crash. The final descent to land was far and away the most complex part of the flight. The unknowns were rampant. There were just a thousand things to worry about. 3:30. 6 + 2. Collins watches his friends begin their perilous journey downward. Roger, you're go to continue powered descent.
You're a go to continue powered descent. With 7 minutes of fuel remaining, Armstrong's voice suddenly becomes tense. Program alarm. It's 12:02. They look down at the computer display and it's flashing an alarm code, 12:02. They don't know what that code means. Flight controllers desperately scan their checklists. If they can't diagnose the problem, they may have to abort the mission. You have to make very rapid, time-critical type decisions. And we're doing it in front of the entire world.
12:02 basically translates into the computer saying, "I have too many things to do in my computation cycle. If this keeps recurring, I'm going to abort the landing." The ground crew weighs the risks and decides to gamble on a safe landing. Roger, we got you. We're going on that alarm. Roger, 6425. The astronauts continue downward, but just moments before the scheduled touchdown, Armstrong discovers that he's overshot their landing zone. When Armstrong looked out the window, he saw a field strewn with small boulders and a crater that was just right in the path of where they were going.
Pretty rocky area. It's 1201 and 19. Mission control stands by as Armstrong weighs his options. There's a smoother landing spot a half mile away if the astronauts can reach it. The problem, they're running out of fuel. And Neil and Buzz are in the lunar module saying, "Is this something that means I can't land? Or is there just enough fuel left that I can get over to that spot over there where the boulders aren't so big and I can land safely? 35°. A tense and listening world holds its breath.
Coming altitude velocity 47 forward. 1 and 1/2 down. Aldrin calls out the diminishing altitude and fuel. 100 ft, 3 and 1/2 down, 9 forward. Altitude light. I don't know suddenly I start becoming intensely aware of the clock. 60 seconds. We have 60 seconds before we're either going to land or we're going to abort. 6 forward. 40 ft down 2 and 1/2. Picking up some They came down closer and closer. 30 ft, 2 and 1/2 down. 4 forward. 4 forward. Good lights on. Finally, a blue light Contact light. on the instrument panel lit up.
ACA out of detent. And that light was labeled lunar contact. Okay, engine stop. Engine arm off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. Roger, Twank Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot. They estimate that they had somewhere between 17 and about 47 seconds of fuel left. Man on the moon. That is really something. What? The world stopped in its tracks and no matter what country they were in, they said, "Oh my god, the Americans are on the moon." Apollo 11 has just made its historic landing on the moon.
At the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Mission Control isn't ready to celebrate. I said, "My God, we're actually on the moon." And we have to make sure almost instantaneously whether spacecraft is safe to leave on the surface of the moon or should we immediately lift off. Those guys are staying focused because they had a job to do. Are all the systems working properly? Is it tilted too much to one side or the other? One of the first things they're doing is they're running through stay no stay checklists.
Okay, T1, they know stay retro. Stay flight director. Stay Stay. Stay. Stay. Stay. Stay. Capcom where stay for T1. It's now clear that it's safe to stay on Roger Eagle and you are stay for T1. Over. Eagle you are stay for T1. From inside the lander, astronauts look out at a landscape that has been undisturbed for billions of Those first few seconds when Neil and I touched down and there were a numerous things that we needed to do, but we also needed to pause for a moment. We gazed out the window and it was just a a magnificent view.
The flight plan calls for a 4-hour rest. But the adrenaline of landing has the astronauts eager to explore. Houston tranquility. Go tranquility over. Uh roger uh Our recommendation at this point is planning an EVA about 3 hours from now. The time change means that the moonwalk will now happen at 9:30 p.m. Houston time. Prime time viewing for the United States. It would be a live television broadcast for the whole world to see. So everyone that had a television could tune in. Good evening, Mission Control.
It gave a spacecraft permission to go for the extravehicular activity. That is for the walk At 9:54 p.m., NASA broadcast the exchange between the astronauts and Mission Control. Neil, this is Houston. What's your status on hatch opening alert? Over 500 million people listen in. Cabin pressure completely uh too low enough pressure to uh open the hatch. It's about 0.1 on our gauge now. The talk is technical, but gripping. Behind it is the promise of a moment that the world has been anticipating for years.
Uh do you think you can open the hatch at this pressure about uh 0.12 psi? Uh we're going to try it. And we're getting a picture on the TV. Okay, Houston, I'm on the porch. Roger, Neil. At 9:56 p.m., 38-year-old Commander Neil Armstrong steps out of the lunar module. Now, hold it just a minute. Okay. And at that point, hundreds of millions of people on Earth saw this silhouette of Armstrong's boot and leg as he started to descend the ladder. Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.
Roger, we copy. It's a pretty good little jump. Holding on with one hand on the ladder, he picked up his left boot, raised it over the foot pad, and placed it on the That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. We're here. Armstrong later said that he had intended to say one small step for a man. But, probably in the excitement of the event, he left out that little little word. There seems to be no difficulty Just 9 years after the start of NASA's audacious Apollo program, Wow.
the first human being stands on the Yeah, listen, Houston, we're copying. Okay, I got the Aldrin takes photos through Eagle's tiny windows. Okay, ready for me to come out? All set. 20 minutes after Armstrong's first steps, it's Aldrin's turn to head out. That's a good step. Yep. Beautiful. You see that something? I got to be careful not to slide down Magnificent desolation. The astronauts don't have long to marvel. They have only 2 hours to complete a long list of tasks. They had to deploy the American flag, take pictures, set out a couple of very basic scientific experiments, and get a decent collection of rocks that they could bring home for the scientists on Earth.
While Armstrong and Aldrin make the most of their time, Collins orbits in the command module, waiting to see if his friends will return alive. My concerns were not within the command module, simply that something might go wrong with the lunar module, and these two guys might get stuck on the surface of the moon. The Smithsonian owns the ship that Michael Collins made famous, and is bringing its 50-year-old secrets to light. A Smithsonian conservation team scans every nook and cranny of Columbia's body.
Assembling the digital files into a highly detailed 3D model. Now, anyone can explore the artifact's intricate interior. Including a surprise. Space graffiti. The astronauts of Apollo 11 wrote love notes to their home in space. Reminders about essential operations. Warnings about things that could ruin the mission. And tried to track time in a place that had no day or night. I wrote the calendar and the other scratchings on the wall in there I would I would blame those on Neil Armstrong or or Buzz Aldrin.
But calendar put a day that we were in a some sort of perspective. How many days have we done? How many days we have left? Sort of thing. Columbia, this is Houston. I guess you're about the only person around that doesn't have TV coverage of the scene. That's all right. I don't mind a bit. 60 miles below Collins. Armstrong and Aldrin move through the moonwalk as quickly as they can. You do have to be uh I don't know that careful. Time it takes about two or three paces to make sure that uh you've got your feet underneath you.
The astronauts are running well behind schedule. When mission control interrupts them with an important call. Uh Neil and Buzz. Uh the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you. Over. That would be an honor. Uh right, ahead, Mr. President. This is Houston out. Nixon called the astronauts during their EVA and mentioned that it was probably the most historic phone call ever made. For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.
And for people all over the world, I am sure they too join with the American in recognizing what an immense feat this is. Nixon had originally suggested that they play the Star-Spangled Banner and have a more elaborate ceremony, but the NASA liaison said that it was a dangerous, risky mission and that they should keep the ceremonial activities as brief as possible. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man's Thank you, Mr. President. With only an hour left in the moonwalk, the two men try their best to document every nuance of a world they will never return to again.
We would like to have been out there longer, but we knew that uh this is a disciplined mission. You got to do what you're told to do. The crew brings back over 50 lb of soil and moon rocks and takes over 100 dramatic photos, including one of humankind's most definitive images of exploration. And we call it the visor picture because the reflection in the visor will show the landing craft and it'll show the white-suited astronaut Neil that took the picture. Neil and Buzz, this is Houston.
I'd like to remind you The 2.5-hour moonwalk goes by too quickly. Mission control gives the cue to wrap up. All right, press on with closing out of They left these footprints in this very fine soil, which will remain for perhaps a million years. Kind of an ultimate kind of immortality. Anything more before I head on up, Buzz? Negative. Head on up the ladder, Buzz. Armstrong and Aldrin head back into the lunar lander to get some rest. Tomorrow they have a task just as tough as the landing.
Taking off from the moon. Six days into Apollo 11's mission, flight controllers prepare for the very first launch from another world. This was the trickiest part, to separate the two halves of the lunar module, the descent half that would be left on the moon, and the ascent half that would come back home. It was a very complicated procedure, and it had never been tried at the moon. The success of the mission depends on If Eagle can't get off the moon, the mission will come to a terrible end.
They still had to avoid that terrible prospect of two men being stranded on the moon. They can't reach the mothership, they can't come home. Eagle, Houston, you're cleared for takeoff. Roger, understand. We're number one on the runway. Roger. The adrenaline in the control room is building up. You could feel it. It was palpable. It was almost like a heavy fog. It was so real. All right, eight seven six five four stage engine arm ascent, proceed. The lunar module's engine fires. That's our beautiful.
26 36 ft per second up. Very smooth. Mission control breathlessly watches them rise. That's right. There's that one crater out there. Roger Houston, everything's looking I'm going right down US 1. As he waits for his colleagues to join him, Collins marvels at the sight. The thing I remember most visually is seeing the horizon, the lunar module, and the Earth all in a row. I thought that was something that would rarely be seen again. Eagle and Columbia redock without a hitch. Astronauts settle back in the command module and release Eagle to crash back into the moon.
On the last night of their three-day journey back to Earth, the astronauts make one final broadcast This trip of ours to the moon may have looked to you simple or easy. I'd like to say to you that that has not been the case. We've come to the conclusion that this has been far more than three men on a voyage to the moon. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. We'd like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built those spacecraft.
To those people, tonight we give a special thank you. And to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Goodnight from Apollo 11. Eight days after launch, Columbia blazes through the Earth's atmosphere at 36,000 ft per second. It splashes down in the Pacific. The USS Hornet is waiting. The Navy deploys a Sikorsky Sea King and three swimmers to retrieve the triumphant crew. Before the crew can board the ship, they must put on a new kind of suit. A biological isolation garment designed to prevent the spread of germs from outer space.
We were the first crew, of course, that was going to be exposed to the lunar surface material. And there was a fair amount of scientific debate as to whether that might anyway pose any hazard to people back on Earth. Apollo 11's voyage for the ages ends in this trailer. Called a mobile quarantine facility. On view at the National Air and Space Museum. NASA knew fairly well that the environment on the moon was quite hostile to life with the bright ultraviolet rays from the sun, which we use on Earth to kill germs all the time.
But uh just to be sure, they agreed that it would be prudent to quarantine returning astronauts. I could have stayed in there a lot longer. That was fine. A hot shower. That was the main thing, really. Because uh I love hot showers, and uh of course there there's not one on the Command Module, so I was grubby and glad to be back. Hot shower, gin, and steak. Wow. There was a little kitchenette there. They had a very state-of-the-art modern convenience of a microwave oven. To have microwave cooked meals was a real treat for the astronauts after their journey.
And then there were bunks to sleep in. For them it was spacious compared to all the time they had spent in the command module for a couple of weeks. Soon, quarantine ends with a roar. The returning astronauts are treated as heroes. Their goodwill tour takes them to 24 countries in 45 days. Through it all, astronauts stress that the achievement doesn't just belong to three men on a rocket. One thing that Neil Armstrong would emphasize again and again and again is that it wasn't just the two of them landing on the moon, but it was hundreds of thousands of people had worked around the clock and through the weekend for years to make sure that everything would go right.
With the success of Apollo 11, NASA dreams up new missions, each more ambitious than the last. They want longer missions. They want to make new tracks and to learn what the moon can tell us about the mysteries of the universe. NASA's leadership never saw Apollo 11 as the end. They saw it as the proof of concept. Now they could really begin the program of lunar exploration and science that they had been preparing for. Landing on the moon once seemed like an impossible dream. But NASA's faith, work, and imagination have accomplished a feat that transcends any nation.
They came down at about 30 at this stage. Roger. 20th, 1969. Half a billion people watch America beat the Soviets to the moon. Really easy. That's one small step for man. Apollo 11 returns to a jubilant president. Wearing isolation garments, the crew enters quarantine in case of lunar infection. President signaling for applause from the crowd. Astronauts gather at the window. Neil, Buzz, and Mike, I was thinking as as as you know as you came down and we know it was a success and it had only been 8 days that this is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.
When Michael Collins heard President Nixon say that that that it had been the greatest week since creation, he was really taken aback and it was hard for him to focus on anything else the president said. Three weeks later, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin leave the cocoon of isolation for the crush of fame. Nixon was very interested in having the astronauts travel around the world almost immediately after their flight. It was a very strategically planned tour. He was very hands-on in the planning of it.
The White House even loans the crew Air Force Two. They visit 20 countries and receive an outpouring of gifts. One of which is in the National Air and Space Museum. In Australia, command module pilot Michael Collins received this boomerang. The first aerodynamic shape conceived by I just have a fun spot in my heart for Australia. They were so welcoming there as were people in 20 some other cities that we visited. Traveling with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was was very fulfilling.
Uh Neil was more our spokesman and he had a a wonderful quality of talking to people in such a way that they felt that they were actually part of this adventure. They were on board the spacecraft with us. That added to the feeling of we did it. Wherever we went, we we did it. We we humans. They shared with us the jubilation of the success of the event and felt very much a part of it. I think living here on Earth. And we were doing this for all mankind. Flush with success, NASA rolls out Apollo 12.
The first of a new breed of science-based missions. It's goal, push beyond Apollo 11's accomplishments. Saying uh zero two now. Apollo 11 was get to the surface of the moon, pick up a few samples, prove it can be done, and then get back home safely. With that out of the way, the Apollo 12 crew was free to to go do its thing. Apollo 12's gutsy commander is Charles Pete Conrad, who's flown twice in space. Like most of the astronauts, Conrad was a Navy test pilot. But his skill and charisma always stood out.
Pete's a legend in terms of his sense of humor and his ready laugh, but very serious guy who really knew his stuff. Incredibly brilliant. Actually went to Princeton and is kind of a odd duck in some ways among astronauts because of that background. On Apollo 12, Conrad will fly with Navy buddies Richard Gordon and Alan Bean. For 6 years, they've trained for every emergency imaginable. Except the one they'll face. Apollo 12 spacecraft and that Saturn V launch vehicle is all still going well When you're flying to the moon, no matter how many times you've done it, it's not simple.
November 14th, 1969. Kennedy Space Center on the Florida Apollo 12 counts down under darkening skies. The count is going well, but the weather appears to be deteriorating. The front that has been northwest of us appears to be coming in. For the first time, a sitting president attends. We have a report that the president of the United States has arrived. He had clearly, really in 1969, had benefited heavily from the successful Apollo 11. Great triumph on foreign policy front. And so he goes to the launch as the only sitting president to go to an Apollo launch.
Pete Conrad has completed his guidance and control checks in the Navy prides itself on its all-weather operation and when the weather was suitable to launch, we went. Countdown for Apollo 12 still going at this time. Mission sequence start. Five, four, three, two, one, zero. All engines running. Commit. Liftoff. We have liftoff. on 110 and 28 AC outstanding sign. Pete Conrad reports the yaw program is in. Pitch and roll program in this baby has really gone. Within 20 seconds, clouds swallow the ship.
Rolls complete. Roger, Pete. In Houston, Mission Control scrutinizes Apollo 12's data. Apollo 12 was an extremely routine flight for the first 36 seconds. Altitude a mile and a half now. Velocity Then a burst of static signals a major problem. We just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here. We had everything in a world drop out. Data turns to gibberish. And Conrad lists all the alarms. Fuel cell lights and AC bus fire fuel cell just AC bus overload one and two, main bus AC And Pete Conrad said that there were so many warning lights on the instrument panel, it was like a Christmas tree.
He'd never seen that many lights at once. The cockpit was incredibly complex. Panel just inches away from their faces, packed full of circuit breakers and switches and indicators and dials. The crew is going 5,000 mph, but they can still abort. Pete Conrad's over there. He's the commander. He's got the abort handle. And he's he's like, "Do I pull the abort handle or don't I pull the abort handle?" That was a real test. All eyes turn to the controller in charge of ship electricity. A guy named John Aaron.
And John Aaron was suddenly looking at his console and all of this data had turned to garbage. Just a meaningless mush of numbers. Suddenly, Aaron remembers seeing this before during a training session the previous year. So, it wasn't that I understood exactly what had happened. I recognized a pattern and how to get out of it. And John Aaron flashes back to that practice countdown and what he had learned. And he says to the flight director, Jerry Griffin, "Flight, tell them to try SCE to auxiliary." Jerry Griffin doesn't know what that means, but he dutifully repeats it to the Capcom, Jerry Carr.
Jerry Carr doesn't know what it means, but he radios the instructions up to Apollo 12. Apollo 12, Houston, try SCE to auxiliary, over. SCE to auxiliary. SCE, SCE to auxiliary. Conrad is confused. Pete Conrad responds, he says, "NCE to auxiliary." And Carr goes, "No, no, SCE, SCE to auxiliary." As the crew careens into space, they can't navigate. But their rocket can. Curator Paul Ceruzzi stands next to the Saturn V's navigational computer, which is completely separate from Conrad's. We are looking at the Saturn V instrument unit that is really the brains of the Saturn V rocket.
This unit was mounted on the top of the Saturn V rocket and contained a number of components including a set of gyroscopes, accelerometers, a digital computer. So, it's a very complicated system that we're looking at. The massive computer was built so the rocket could steer itself. And it's the only thing keeping Apollo 12 on course. We forget how important this was during the launches is all the Saturn V's. they all worked perfectly and the computers never malfunctioned, the gyroscope worked and it really was crucial to the whole success of the Apollo program.
The Saturn V navigates during the launch phase. But that's about to end. The crew now has 60 seconds to save their flight. What? What, Charlie? Houston struggles to fix Apollo 12's computer crash. He just said indicator, what do you want? The main bus. Main bus to aux. They've been asking the crew to find an obscure switch. Try SCE to auxiliary on. Try SCE auxiliary. What the hell is that? Hang on. Hang on. 32. Flight commander Pete Conrad can't find But crewmate Alan Bean can. And Alan Bean goes, "Oh, I know where that is." Click.
Boop. The power all comes up, things all work again, and voila, they're on their way to the moon still. Yeah, I don't know what happened. I thought we were hit by lightning. Conrad is exactly right. I think we need to do a little more all-weather testing. Amen. NASA later realizes the launch caused a phenomenon no one knew existed. Triggered lightning. About 30 seconds after lift off, the Saturn V was trailing this huge plume of ionized gas. And as Pete Conrad later said, they became the world's longest lightning rod.
The launch actually triggered two bolts of lightning. 36 and 52 seconds after lift off. SCE to aux allowed for a reset of the entire system. Apollo 12, Houston, you're right smack dab on the trajectory. You're I use doing a beautiful job. Okay, and we're all chuckling up here over the lights. We all said there was so many on we couldn't read them. They're laughing the rest of the way into orbit. And it's just a great moment of this crew, these three best friends who got to go to the moon together, and they just got through kind of a close call, and this is the the sense of relief and also mastery.
All was very great. You're go for DOI. Five days later, Apollo 12 circles the moon preparing for NASA's most ambitious goal yet, a pinpoint landing. 1 minute. Altitude 32. NASA insisted on it after Apollo 11 when they couldn't figure out where the crew had landed. Apollo 12's target is Surveyor crater, named after a robotic spacecraft called Surveyor 3. It landed 2 years earlier paving the way for Apollo. And one of its engineering models is at the Smithsonian. From 1966 to 1968, NASA sent seven Surveyors to the moon, five of which worked perfectly.
Before these landings, there actually was very little understanding of how deep the dust was on the surface of the moon, and whether or not the surface of the moon would be stable enough to hold a craft that would weigh several tons. So, if you were going to send astronauts up to the moon and have humans walking around on the moon. You wanted to know both that their craft was able going to be able to land and not sink into the moon, and also that they themselves were not going to sink into the surface of the moon.
So, it was pretty important to actually send a craft up and test those things. The artifact is undergoing conservation for the first time in 50 years. We are in the conservation space of our restoration hangar out at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. This is where our museum's conservators and our restoration experts make our artifacts display ready. So, we've had this engineering model of Surveyor since 1968, since the end of the Surveyor program. So, it's been with us now for almost for basically 50 Um and during that time it's been almost constantly on display.
So, one thing we did recently was we took this and some of the other lunar artifacts off display so that we could give them a good clean and make sure that all the materials, all the paints, metals, plastics were in good shape and we could stabilize anything that needed to be stabilized. The original Surveyor 3 remains on the And for Apollo 12, it would serve another purpose. He said it's command override on. As Pete Conrad's landing We throttle up to 26. Conrad and Bean steer the lunar lander, named Intrepid, towards Surveyor 3.
I think we're right on that crater right where it's supposed to be. It's just beautiful. 10% 257 ft coming down at 5. 240 coming down at 5. Come on down, baby. Okay. 10% fuel. Coming down at 3. You can come on down, okay? Contact light. Roger, copy contact. And traffic, we read you loud and clear. Conrad nails it. TV starting to Landing even closer to Surveyor than planned. It's good. It's where we wanted to be. I got I've I've got you. When I get down to the bottom of the ladder, I see the Surveyor.
We're about 25 ft from the Surveyor. Well, good, Pete, just like you wanted It's clear out here. For the second time, men walk on another world. Copy that. How handy, man. Got the arm on. It is full. I liked it so much, I'd go back tomorrow, right now. I enjoyed the lunar surface activities, not just for the fun of bouncing around, but the real work that we could do up The astronauts have another first planned. Color TV from the moon. Bean unpacks a new camera, but points it at the sun, ruining it.
I was probably one of the only geeky people, in fact, I know I was the only geeky person in my junior high school who sat there and actually watched the crooked line of going on the TV screen, so I could listen to the um the crew talk while they were walking on the One network has a backup plan to fill the airtime. Actors in spacesuits. Some viewers can't tell the difference. Others change the channel. Despite the snafu, Conrad and Bean will take some of Apollo's finest still photographs.
How is Holy, cow, is beautiful out here. It still is. It's something else. They perform 8 hours of moonwalks, triple the time of Apollo 11. Thing I thought was erased about the lunar surface is that we got 8 hours on it. We got all our job done plus a little more. The men's last task is a moonwalk to Surveyor 3, where they remove a camera. It's now at the Smithsonian and one of the few objects that spent years on the It was a really critical milestone just to show that you could land at a pre-chosen spot.
All the rest of the missions that the scientists were going to pick out the most interesting places that Apollo could go to, they had to know that they could really reach those places and Apollo 12 showed that. So, they really should be able to do it. There you see splashdown. Apollo 12 has ended its flight to the moon and has returned to the mid-Pacific. The astronauts redefined what a moon mission can be if NASA can keep flying them. After Apollo 12, the agency is preparing for eight more lunar landings.
They want to push further on the moon with improved space suits and new lunar rovers. But, space enthusiasm is waning as mass protests and social change divide America. Although there was a a of interest in in 11 and there was still quite a lot of interest in Apollo 12. There were so many other major major issues people were grappling with at that time. Issues like civil rights, the economy, and the Vietnam War. All over the country protests were staged against the war. The president questions Apollo's worth just as NASA unveils bold long-term plans.
The agency pushes for reusable spaceships and space stations. Some even dream of space colonies. But the president is not on board. NASA comes up with a very ambitious plan that they lay out and the Nixon administration does not respond to that plan. They basically just sort of ignore it. Nixon and the nation are distracted. But the next mission, Apollo 13, will get unprecedented attention. April 1970, Apollo 13 prepares to launch. The commander is NASA's most experienced astronaut, Jim Lovell.
He flew on Apollo 8, the first time humans orbited the moon. Jim is a natural engager of people, and that I think is what made him the exceptional astronaut he was. On Apollo 13, his crewmates are Fred Haise and Ken Mattingly. They've been training for a mission packed with geology and new experiments. 72 hours before lift-off, some bad luck. Mattingly, the command module pilot, is grounded after being exposed to the measles. Backup pilot Jack Swigert replaces him. Jack happened to have written the malfunction procedures for the command module.
So, he knew the command module pretty good. After Apollo 12's lightning strike, NASA launches in pure sunshine. The skies are clear, but the crowds are thin. At previous launches, the bleachers and roads were jam-packed. Apollo 13 is go. 3 2 1 0 We have commit and we have lift off at 2:13. The Saturn 5 building up to 7.6 million pounds of thrust and it is clear the tower. Apollo 13's target, a mountainous region of the moon, and its mission is almost entirely scientific. The computer is telling me we're 121,000 Two days later, Marilyn Lovell and Mary Haise visit mission control to watch their husbands' TV broadcast.
The astronauts give a tour of the command module Odyssey There he is. We see him. and the lunar module Aquarius. But none of the networks carry it. With Apollo 13, a lot of the interest, at least within the United States, has started to wane a bit. People weren't following the flight. There was a broadcast, but it didn't show on primetime TV. We're at 55 hours and 38 minutes into the flight of Apollo 13. In mission control, veteran flight director Gene Kranz and his team enter the last hour of their Ken Mattingly, showing no signs of the measles, sits in.
Roger South data. This is the crew of Apollo 13. Everyone in there uh I see everything but The astronauts' families say good night to mission control. The team's next task is routine ship maintenance so the crew can sleep. Odyssey is powered by three fuel cells that run on hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is stored here as a liquid in cryogenic tanks that need to be stirred. The slushy liquid oxygen would sometimes separate a little bit. It would be a little bit more liquidy on the top.
It would be a little more icy on the bottom. And in order for it to flow properly, you had to run a fan inside it and swish it around like a blender. Only one controller communicates with the crew, a fellow astronaut known as Tonight, it's Jack Lousma. A command went up to the ship to stir the tanks. Gene, we've got one more item for you when you get a chance. We'd like it there stir up your cryo tanks. Mayday, we both have a problem. I have lost fuel cell one. And it looks like fuel cell two three is gone, too.
Hey, yes, we have had a problem here. Can you say again, please? I hear that we have had a problem. Stand by, they got a problem. 73, it hasn't moved. Has it reflected anywhere? Negative. No, negative. There was a loud bang. The whole spacecraft shuddered. Lovell's first thought was that Haise was scaring them with the cabin repressurization valve as a kind of practical joke cuz he'd already done that once. But, he looked down the tunnel at Fred Haise and he could see Haise's expression as if to say it wasn't me.
We had a pretty large bang associated with the caution and warning there. Computers crash. And when they reboot, controllers and crewmen don't trust the data. Nothing made sense in those first few seconds because the controller's data had gone static briefly and then it when it was when it was restored, s- many of the parameters just didn't indicate anything that we had ever seen before. Okay, flight, we've got some instrumentation lights. Let me Let me add them up to go. DCS, what do you got?
Brownie, you copying this? Air to ground, The monitors show something unbelievable. The command module's main power sources, its fuel cells are failing. I want to start out what those fuel cells are doing here. Yeah, see the end bell simultaneously. That can't be. I I can't believe that right off the bat. things get even worse. Oxygen levels plummet and Lovell looks outside. Well, it's pretty obvious looking out the uh ax, so we are venting something. We have Well, we are venting something out into the into space.
He comes to a chilling realization. When he saw that, he knew my ship has sustained a battlefield injury and it is not an injury that we are in a position to fix. This ship will soon die. Okay, can Can tell us anything about the venting? From there, things just cascade and they soon realize that not only are they not going to land on the moon, but they're in a life or death situation. Stand by, 13. We're looking at it. Flight director Gene Kranz presses his team for answers. All they know is that an explosion has crippled Apollo 13.
We might have a a pressure problem with one of the fuel cells, it looks like. Yes. And I called the controllers up there and tell them that okay, you guys, quit your guessing. Let's start working this problem. Can we review our status here, Sy, and see what we've got from a standpoint of status? What do you think we got in the spacecraft that's good? What he meant was what's in our back pockets now? What's functioning? What can we use or reapply or reimagine? Stand by, I just changed configuration.
You got battery A? Kranz calls for reinforcements and off-duty controllers crowd in. Again, you called in your backup EECOMs now. See if we can get some more brain power in this thing. We got one here. Roger. Mission control relies on dozens of other experts called the back rooms. One of the never fully appreciated aspects of mission control were the back rooms. Each man at a console had a backup team in his back room that was working for him and the way they were all working for the flight director.
Okay, 13, we've got lots and lots of people working on this. We'll get you something develop as soon as we have it and then you'll be the first one to After heated debate, Kranz and his team develop a rescue plan. Then, they retreat to a back room to sweat out the details. All right, controllers, I'm handing over to Glynn. I assume the majority of all the team guys Flight director Glynn Lunney takes over. If you were designing a test case, it was perhaps the maximum test case you could provide in terms of damage and the amount of margin that existed to solve your way through it and get back alive.
Lunney's first job, move the crew out of Odyssey, the dying command service module. Aquarius, the lunar module, will be their lifeboat. We'd like to go ahead and power down the CSM all we can except leave that battery charger on. Go ahead and leave them a little light. The move is complicated and time-consuming. The crew needs to power down one spacecraft and power up the other, an hours-long procedure. Panel 11 and panel 16 They're in the midst of the steps when Lunney gets dire news.
Odyssey is losing power faster than anyone thought. We figure we've got about 15 minutes worth of power left in the command module, so we want you to start getting over in the LEM and getting some power on that. But they still have to transfer critical navigational data. Panels 11 and 16, next lunar button. Swigert copies coordinates from Odyssey and shouts them to Lovell in Aquarius. Have we got anybody over in the LEM yet, Jack? Can you tell? Somebody else climbed over there? They're both over there.
Still working on that flight. Houston double-checks the numbers. We've got them both over there. Okay. They've just taken the procedure for the activation of the With only minutes to spare, they finish. For the first time, a command module, the crew's re-entry vehicle, is shut down in space. No one knows if it will power back up. But re-entry won't matter if the crew can't turn around. They're flying away from Earth at more than 20,000 The crew's only shot at survival is a gravitational path that will swing them around the moon and back to Earth called the free return trajectory.
To reach it, Lovell has to do something risky. Steer with the small LEM engine. They had to figure out a way to do that to turn that entire stack of spacecraft at just the right angle. Jim described it as trying to fly with an elephant on your back. The LEM wasn't designed for this, but NASA tested it anyway four missions ago. One of the things they did on Apollo 9 that was really important was they tried firing the lunar module's engine, the descent engine, while it was still attached to the command module to be able to check out what the dynamics were.
You know, how the spacecraft responded to that unusual configuration for a rocket firing. If it doesn't work, Apollo 13 will be lost in space. Something Lovell's already weighed. My thoughts were this. If everything failed and we still had life support in the lunar module, but we couldn't get back to the Earth, I said that we will send back information. We'll keep on operating as long as we can. And then that's the end of the deal. Aquarius, we'd like to verify that your throttle is in the min position.
Houston queues the engine burn. Roger Aquarius, and you're go for the burn. 40% We have ignition at low throttle point. Okay Aquarius, you're looking good. He's got it. Auto shutdown. Hey, you're looking at 1685 now, Jack. Don't uh trim them, is that right? That's affirmative, no trim required. The burn takes 5 minutes and it's perfect. This is why you put test pilots and military aviators in command of these spacecraft. Then we'd like you to uh power down the CMC. The crew is headed home.
Now they have to stay alive long enough to get there. Aquarius was only designed to support two men for 2 days. Never thought about trying to use the lunar module for a 4-day mission to get back to the Earth because the lunar module was only built to last 45 hours. Only built to support two people. John Aaron, the controller who saved Apollo 12, insists on an extreme measure, minimal electricity. Even though we didn't train on this specific thing, the flight control team were trained on how to handle problems and it paid off.
The astronauts will gradually lose their last comfort, warmth. Basically, they were in an idling car with nothing more than the fans running. The crew has survived one night of the crisis and Earth is still 3 days away. The next morning, America awakes to news of the Apollo 13 emergency. Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and John Swigert tonight Televisions click on across the country. The command ship was all but dead after a mysterious accident last night forced cancellation of programmed moon landing.
Now, everyone was on the edge of their seat and they were watching and they were hoping that the astronauts would return home safely. And so, it really captured attention again for a very different um reason. Nixon demands updates twice an hour. Reports are that President Nixon was very upset and did not want to lose a crew on his watch. President Nixon was really uh sort of concerned and moved by uh Apollo 13. He followed the flight very carefully. He was really worried about the astronauts' safety.
He had uh he was quite fond of all the astronauts and he was um he was concerned about the outcome of the flight. In Houston, mission control faces another problem. Every breath the astronauts take is poisoning them. When a crew is in a spacecraft, they are inhaling good, clean, fresh, life-giving oxygen from their supposedly functioning oxygen tanks and they are exhaling carbon dioxide into a contained environment. Do that long enough, the carbon dioxide will build up. It only takes a concentration of about 10% CO2 in room air for convulsions, uh unconsciousness, and ultimately death to result.
Both the lunar module and command module use filters to scrub out CO2, but they're different shapes. Now, in the dead command module, they use in their environmental system square canisters. Had plenty of them, but you can't put a square canister in the round hole of the lunar module system. Big engineering goof, why we had square there, we had round over there, we'll never know. Out of the back rooms, a solution emerges. A makeshift filter. They call it the mailbox because of its rectangular Houston also makes one for the Smithsonian.
Carbon dioxide was building up fairly rapidly at a alarming rate in the lunar module monitored by equipment. And so, the folks on the ground collected in one place all of the equipment they knew to be available to the astronauts and tried to jerry-rig a system. So, all of these components are really quite simple. There's duct tape, there's plastic bag, there's a card, there's a hose, and that's basically all that they really needed to save the day. Houston tells the crew how to build the filter.
You use plastic as a covering for the whole thing. Swigert and I started to build this thing and we just according to the instructions. So, the instructions were very explicit. And if you look at the one that the crew systems had made to show the people in the control center, and you look at the one that's hanging on the lunar module wall, they're identical. Soon, CO2 levels fall. The astronauts breathe easier, but their living conditions deteriorate. Very sort of clammy, very cold.
Temperature kept dropping all the way They attempt to sleep in the command module, but it's only 40°. Actual sleep was very, very limited. Maybe I had 1 hour if you want to count it at 40. Exhaustion and dehydration set They ration drinking water and force down cold food. Fred Haise spikes a fever, the result of a painful urinary tract And the most difficult part of the mission is still to come. Nationwide headlines report Apollo 13 will approach Earth at noon the next day. Aquarius, Houston.
But the crew still faces the most dangerous part, re-entry. When you're coming back from the moon, you are slamming into the atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour. The only way to survive that is not so much to go down in more or less a straight re-entry. You kind of have to ride it like a roller coaster. Um it's called a skip re-entry. And re-entry depends on Odyssey, the command module that's been shut down and freezing for 3 days. Kranz's team has been agonizing over a power-up procedure.
And John Aaron finally delivers it. It was up to John Aaron to figure out, how can we bring back a fully functioning spacecraft that can work on limited energy? What can we leave out? There are hundreds of steps, and one mistake could be deadly. Ken Mattingly will read the procedures. Mattingly begins. Hello, Aquarius, Houston. How do you read? Okay, very good, Ken. Let me take it from the top here. Just there might be some overlap. Hours tick by. Primary evaporate water. Swigert fights exhaustion, double-checking each step.
All right, this is on 382. Okay, let's repeat it. Stand by. Get up. Okay, perform IMU power up. The procedure works. Odyssey is alive again. The time has come to release the crippled service module. Roger, yes, Houston. Uh, that's affirmative. You can uh, jettison the service module when you're ready. Roger, Tomcat. For the first time, Lovell sees the catastrophic damage. When jettison the service module and it floated off by and we saw this big gaping hole, this panel blown out. And there's one whole side of that streetcar citizen.
Right by the high gain antenna, the whole panel is blown out almost from the uh, base to the engine. The photos will later shed light on the cause of the explosion. Faulty components inside the oxygen tank. When the crew stirred the tanks, they lit a fuse. When you have a spark inside a tank of liquid oxygen, it's basically a bomb. The explosion may have done additional damage to the heat shield, the one safeguard during the fiery That worried us that our heat shield was damaged and there was nothing we could do about that.
If we were aimed for the Earth, we were going to come into the Earth. That was the end of the deal. If if we were going to burn up, we were going to burn up. And uh, Jim, uh, when you have leisure to copy, I have your uh, now 46 The crew and Houston do final Okay, go ahead. So, you know, here we are at 30 years old, you know, dealing with this problem of national significance. We trained and thought and prepared ourselves to be able to handle eventualities as bad as that with the confidence that if there was a way to thread through it, that we would find it and be able to make it.
For the astronauts, one last task, release the ship that saved them. Apollo control, Houston at 141 hours, 31 minutes into the flight, we've had lunar module jettison. And for Apollo 13, the age of Aquarius ended at 141 hours, 30 minutes ground elapsed time. Farewell, Aquarius. We thank you. As re-entry creeps closer, the crew also thanks Houston, just in case. All of us here want to thank all you guys down there for the very fine job you did. That's affirmed, Joe. Tell you, we all had a good time doing With 14 minutes to re-entry, the world pauses and prays.
Range to go now, 3,271 nautical miles. How do you see Houston? Your disky is doing all the right Controllers have done all they can. Okay, thank you. Now, the crew hopes for something they've lacked, luck. Apollo 13 is 7 minutes from Earth and may have a damaged heat shield. Onboard display now shows a velocity of 33,383 feet per second. Houston gives one last round of reassurances. Odyssey, Houston, over. Go ahead. Okay, we just had one last time around the room and everybody says you're looking great.
During re-entry, the capsule will reach temperatures of 5,000°. That will cause a communications blackout, which usually lasts 3 minutes. No returning Apollo spacecraft had ever gone through a blackout that lasted more than say 3 minutes and 15 seconds. The 3-minute mark comes and goes. And then 3:30 passed. And then 3:45 passed. And then 4 minutes passed. And then 4:15 passed. There were surely people in Mission Control and in the homes who thought, "We've never hit 4 and 1/2 minutes.
It's naive to think these guys are still alive." Specialized tracking aircraft called Aria search for Odyssey's signal. We will attempt to contact Apollo 13 through one of the Aria aircraft. Apollo 13 should be out of blackout at this time. We're standing by for any reports of Aria acquisition. Houston tries again. Odyssey, Houston, standing by, over. Okay, so far so Okay, we read you, Jack. That was Jim Lovell responding with the okay, Joe. Odyssey Houston, we show you on the mains. It really looks great.
Extremely loud applause as Apollo 13 on main chutes comes through loud and clear on the television display here. NASA will later learn the cause of the agonizing delay. It hit at a slightly wrong angle when it first hit the atmosphere and that caused the longest re-entry blackout in the history of the space program. The floor of the mission operations control room now crowded and there are visible smiles on the faces of the flight controllers and astronauts in this room. I knew I was home free.
Actually, home free completely when the spacecraft bobbed up and I saw water on the windows and the thing didn't sink. For another moment, Apollo brings the world together. And here they are. James Lovell, John Swigert frankly somewhat overwhelmed at the response of people around the world during the course of the Apollo 13 mission. That was really gratifying. The next morning in Houston, the president gives the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mission Control. Afterwards, he goes to Pearl Harbor to honor the crew.
Privately, Nixon wants to cancel the the six Apollo missions, But, his advisers dissuaded him. Your mission served the cause of the space program. Because of what you did, it means that future manned flights to space, which will be made by our space program, will be safer. Apollo 13's moon landing failed, but mission control triumphed. For eight years, NASA had been shooting for the moon. Little did they know their ultimate test would be reaching planet Earth. Ready for me to come out?
Afterwards, the agency looks ahead with cautious optimism. There was a lot of hope and a lot of expectation that the the United States would continue to push the bounds of outer space and and exploration as hour away from the Apollo 14 lift off. January 31st, 1971. There is some cover, but it looks pretty fair. On Cape Kennedy, NASA counts down to a make-or-break mission. That's our status. This is Kennedy Launch Control. Inside, the Apollo 14 crew suits up. Commander Alan Shepard, with rookie Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell.
One thing weighs on everyone. NASA's last moon shot nearly killed the crew. Nine months ago, an explosion tore through Apollo 13 in deep space. Houston, we've had a problem. Stand by, they got a problem. The crew couldn't land on the moon, Okay, stand by, they're working. but Houston did get them home. I think that it's probably NASA's finest hour. It was just as important as stepping on the moon on Apollo 11. T minus 55 and counting. All still proceeding very satisfactory with Apollo 14.
Now, NASA has to prove space travel is still worth the risk. They needed to prove everything after Apollo 13. First of all, they needed to re-prove that a flight to the moon could take place safely. All going well with Apollo 14. They also had to prove to the politicians that it was worth still doing this. There were a lot of people who said, "We did it. We're done." And they were right in terms of the geopolitics, but they were wrong in terms of the science. For NASA, reaching the moon was just phase one of their plan.
Phase two is hard science. Rock samples from the first two landings revolutionized our understanding of the They revealed moon rocks are similar to Earth rocks. And that much of the lunar surface was once covered in molten lava. And being able to have those physical samples, being able to actually work with them, is a whole new kind of science that really begins as soon as those samples start to come back to Now, scientists are desperate for more, certain that Apollo can answer some of our biggest questions, including why do we have a moon?
And what can it teach us about our own planet and solar system? The driving questions of space exploration have always been questions that are really very much about us. Who are we as humans? How did we get on this And what sense can we make of ourselves by knowing more about the solar system we're in and the universe in which it exists? 40 seconds and counting. Entire branches of science depend on Apollo 14. Alan Shepard reports that he's performing his final guidance alignment. For the first time in months, the ground shakes on the Cape.
Ignition sequence Lines commit. Lift off. We have lift off with Apollo 14, 3 minutes past the hour. The tower is clear. I verify I have good thrust in all five engines. Everything looks good here on the Good show. Go orbit. Booster safe. The crew enters Earth orbit and Alan Shepard exhales. He's been fighting for this day for 10 Shepard shot to fame in 1961 with America's first step into space. I thought, "Okay, Buster, let's go and get the job done." We have a lift off. His Mercury flight really was just a quick suborbital kind of up and down, you know, 15-minute flight with 5 minutes above the atmosphere.
Shepard was training for his next flight when he developed a debilitating illness called Meniere's disease. It causes a lack of balance, dizziness, nausea. It was so obvious that NASA grounded me right away. Shepard took a desk job as astronaut chief, overseeing crew selection and training. For 7 years, he did everything but fly. Being grounded was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Finally, he'd had it and risked experimental surgery. Miraculously, it worked. He longed for a chance to show what he could do.
And going to the moon was the top of the pyramid for being an Aboard Apollo 14, Shepard turns to a critical task, docking. Roosa, the command module pilot, will lead the maneuver while Shepard and Mitchell assist. I picked a couple of bright guys to go along with me. There was really a lot of confidence. They've docked hundreds of times, but only in simulators. First, Roosa has to pull Kitty Hawk, the command module, away from the Saturn V. Then, he needs to flip around and carefully steer Kitty Hawk towards the lunar module.
It's named Antares, after a star. The two ships must latch in order to About 12 to 15 ft away. Roosa separates Roger that. and moves in. It's uh right in the middle and steady. Okay, about 5 ft. And Houston, we're about to dock. Then, a serious problem. We did not latch. The ships won't connect. Hey Houston, we did not latch. So, I'm going to back back out here and try it We're just not getting uh getting the capture latches in there. Baffled, Roosa tries again. And 7 by 1. And again. Well, we better back off here and uh think about this one, Houston.
Roger. If this mission fails on the heels of Apollo 13, the rest of Apollo could be killed. Okay, I'll back down a little bit and let you watch it. Houston scrambles to find a solution. And here we come in again. Controllers pull out a docking model and resort to one last idea. Brute force. We're thinking of uh having to just dock without the aid of the probe. Roosa tries a sixth time, faster than ever before. Close is the hard dock. Roger, that's great. Super job, too. Thank you. Have the people wiggle it The relieved crew spends 5 days hurtling through space.
They circle the moon, the closest Apollo 13 got, and prepare to land. Are you ready now? Okay, go ahead, buddy. We're ready to go. Okay, we seem real steady. I'm going to back off from you. Antares, with Shepard and Mitchell on board, pulls away from Kitty Hawk. Okay. And we're free. Shepard will attempt the most difficult moon landing yet, the first in a hilly region. Roger, Antares. So far, Apollo has only reached low-lying plains, flat, safe landing spots. Okay, we're a little fast, about 10 ft per second.
Now, they're heading to the highlands, craggy terrain that covers the majority of the moon. We'll take the title at 26. We were starting to climb and you get all kinds of different geology. 60 seconds. But this rugged region could crash a ship. The future of Apollo depends on Shepard. 40 ft. This is really a wild place up here. 3 ft per second. Mitchell navigates Looking great. 20 ft. as Shepard steers. 3 ft per second. Contact light out. Engine stop. We're on the surface. Okay, we made a good landing.
Roger, enter. That was a beautiful one. America's first man in space nails his moon landing. Okay, Al, beautiful. We can see you coming down the ladder right now. It looks like you're about on the bottom step. And on the surface. Not bad for an old man. Okay, you're right. Al is on the surface and it's been a long way, but we're For Shepard, it's a dream a decade in the making. Of course, the first feeling was one of a tremendous sense of accomplishment, I guess, if you will. Realizing that hey, not too long ago, I was grounded.
Now, I'm on the moon. To look up in the black sky, there's no diffusion, no reflection, and seeing another planet, planet Earth. It certainly is a stark place here. I think it's made all the more stark by the fact that the sky is completely black. And tears came to him. He started to cry. And you know, for a few moments, he just was standing there emotional, in awe of the experience he was having, and the majesty of the place around him. And then he finally got his mind back on the job and went back to work.
Shepard and Mitchell deploy Apollo's experiment package, called ALSEP, instruments placed at each landing site. A seismometer measures moonquakes, first discovered by Apollo 11. Another device calculates the distance from the Earth to the Moon within centimeters. A central station will broadcast data back to scientists for years. We're starting to pal now. The crew's next task, collect samples from surrounding craters. The forces that make craters blast ancient rocks to the surface.
Shepard and Mitchell collect the biggest payload yet, 92 lb of rocks and soil, which could help scientists determine what forces shaped the Moon and Earth. The Moon is kind of like the rare book room of the cosmic library. None of the things that have erased the earliest history on the Earth. The motion of continents, the action of water and wind, those things haven't happened on the moon. You go to the moon and you can start paging through the earliest history of the solar system, beautifully preserved.
Among their samples, a stunning find. One moon rock, dubbed Big Bertha, contains an Earth fragment, the oldest one ever discovered. Researchers think the fragment landed on the moon eons ago when an asteroid hit Earth and blasted pieces of it to the Stand by. With his tasks complete, Shepard takes time for one more thing, a quick game of golf. My left hand I have a little white pellet that's familiar to millions of Americans. I'll drop it down. Going to try a little sand trap shot here.
The backstory is inside the Smithsonian. So, Alan Shepard was a golfer. The idea came up, wouldn't it have been fun to be able to hit a golf ball on the moon? Imagine how far you could make that fly if you were in 1/6 gravity. On any space flight, astronauts only had a small amount of space and weight to think about what they might personally want to bring on board. And so, Alan Shepard very cleverly figured out that if he brought just the head of the golf club, he could attach that to a tool that was going to be on the mission anyway.
He really was able to pick something that would be very small and you can almost picture kind of the two golf balls would only make a volume that would be the size of something that could fit in your hand. That looked like I sliced the moon out. There we go. There you die. One more. Miles and miles and miles. So with that last swing, Al Shepard becomes the first lunar golfer. While Shepard stows his club, NASA revels in the mission success. It's a big sigh of relief being breathed around Apollo 14 was a very important mission geologically and it was a very important mission to really begin doing the hard science on the moon.
Okay, Houston. You have done a great job. Shepard has laid the foundation for more landings and more advanced scientific study. NASA seems to be hitting its stride. But America is hitting a wall. Inner cities are crumbling while violent crime soars. The Vietnam War expands to Cambodia engulfing President Richard Nixon in controversy. The Nixon administration, it was pretty clear that they were not keen on uh the space program and the lunar program because they had lots of other issues to deal with.
There was a lot of concern about how much the US government was spending on space exploration and Project Apollo in particular. Part of this is Project Apollo was such a highly visible program. It was sort of a touchstone for critiquing wasteful government spending in general. Privately, the president talks about canceling Apollo. Publicly, he's silent. Then, a subtle sign of his position. For years, a famous photo from Apollo 8 hung in the Oval Office, it's quietly replaced with a landscape.
For NASA, the writing is on the wall. In 1970, Congress delivers a gut punch to the space program. Another big budget cut. The agency is forced to kill its last two lunar missions, Apollo 18 and 19. Scientists scramble to make the most of the remaining three Apollo missions. Just nine more days on the moon. It's time to shift geology into overdrive with the brand new lunar rover. Engineers began working on lunar cars in the early 1960s. But it was mostly a project in guesswork since no one had been to the Early engineering like, let's design a car for an environment we know absolutely nothing about.
That takes a certain amount of hubris, but hubris is where it begins. Early models were too heavy, too big, or too unwieldy. Plus, there was no way to get them to the moon. The lunar module had limited storage space. Engineers finally came up with an ingenious idea, a collapsible car. It fits inside a segment of the lunar module and unfolds with a lanyard. And that's just one of its futuristic features. It has oversized switches for clunky driving gloves, space-age GPS, and an antenna that can tune in Houston.
To keep astronauts from bouncing off, NASA installs toe holds and a seatbelt. Engineers also literally reinvent the wheel. One of the major problems about riding on the lunar surface is that there's no exact knowledge about what you would be going over. So, the wheels had to be flexible and transformable. What they came up with is using a mesh of basically steel wire, the kind of wire that you use in a piano, woven on a a loom, formed into a cylinder, and then wrapped around a hub so that it forms sort of a shape of a tire.
The nice thing about being woven is that it comes back basically to the shape it was before. And there was enormous numbers of tests on sandy beaches and various terrains on Earth to see how much traction a wheel like this would have. The rover is a game-changer for the next mission, Apollo 15, led by Dave Scott. With this increased capability for exploration came a chance for the astronauts to become lunar field geologist as never before. And that opportunity for discovery was not lost on Dave Scott.
Along with the rover, Apollo 15 has dozens of other upgrades. So many that scientists call it a fresh The lunar module now had enough supplies to actually live on the moon for three full days. The spacesuits were upgraded so that you could go outside for more than 7 hours at a stretch. So, really we're talking about a full working day out on the surface of the moon. The crew will attempt the longest lunar stay yet. And Scott plans to maximize every minute. He takes intensive geology trips with lunar module pilot Jim Irwin.
Exploring terrain similar to their landing site. Dave Scott became a geology enthusiast. He started a rock collection. He used to talk to his wife about what they were learning on these field trips. The astronauts learn to spot ancient rocks. Similar lunar samples could answer questions like how old is the moon? And what can that teach us about Earth? And Haise and Irwin were both very caught up in the chance to solve mysteries, cosmic mysteries that could only be solved by going to the moon.
Two months before lift off, Scott's crew is prepped. And their ship fully loaded. Custom built for science. But they aren't the only ones pushing scientific boundaries. In the Soviet Union, all eyes are on three cosmonauts preparing for launch. Their destination, the world's first space station, Salyut 1. It's a glimpse into the future. Humans living in space long-term. They stay a record 24 days, performing dozens of experiments. Then, upon re-entry, something goes terribly wrong. The crew is found dead, killed by sudden depressurization.
Russians are shattered, and the world is reminded spaceflight is a dangerous business. Three weeks after the tragedy, Dave Scott leads the crew of Apollo 15 to the We have complete clearance for launch. We are go. Engines on. 5 4 3 1 All engines running. Liftoff confirmed. Liftoff. We have liftoff at 9:34 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Endeavour Houston, we're ready for auto and nav gain, please. After 5 days, Scott and Irwin attempt the first landing in lunar mountains. Okay, got a good spot.
They steer their ship, Falcon, to the surface. Hello, Houston. Apollo 15, the Falcon is on its perch. Then, Scott does something brand new. Oh, boy. What have you? He sticks his head out of the Falcon to assess whether the region is actually drivable. All of the features around here are very smooth. The tops of the mountains are rounded off. Uh there are no sharp jagged peaks. There are no large boulders apparent anywhere. After surveying the geology, Scott makes the call. The rover is a go.
He descends first, and this is exploration at its greatest, followed by Irwin. Oh boy, it's beautiful out here. Reminds me of Sun Valley. Now, the next big test. Unpacking the rover. Easy, Jim. Easy. Here, let me help you. Take it easy. The car is made up of lightweight pieces that could easily rip off, making it undrivable. Just pull real real easy with your Looks like she's coming down okay. Okay, that's good. Roger. Despite some snags, they unfold it and head out for the first off-world road trip.
They hit top speeds of 6 mph. But on the moon, that's a wild ride. Yeah, this is really a rock and rolling ride, isn't it? Your heading is beautiful. Continue on. It was a very strange sensation to drive on the moon. It was almost like being in a rowboat on a choppy sea. Geologists believe this particular region contains some of the moon's oldest rocks, which could help determine its age and origins. We want to go back to the birth moments. We want baby pictures of the moon. And in the case of the moon, you get baby pictures through very old rocks.
We stopped and let's take a view to our route and see which way we ought to head. Scott's obsessive geology training pays off. His careful descriptions provide key data. There's debris all the way, and it looks like some outcroppings directly at about 11:00 and within the vertical face I can see other small radiations. Beautiful, Dave. Beautiful. To understand the story that a rock tells you, you have to know its context. You have to know where it came from, what its environment was like.
That's a piece of the puzzle that the astronauts could solve by describing what they saw. One of their science stops is Spur Crater, the size of a football field. Oh boy, it's a nice crater, isn't it? Sure is. Here, geologist believe ancient rocks litter the ground. Wow, what a beautiful sight. If they're right, the samples would shed light on how the moon formed. Okay, Gerry, let's go to work. Oh man, I look at that. Within minutes, something catches Scott's eye. Look at the glare. Ah, almost straight.
Twirling in there. Guess what we just found. And Dave Scott suddenly turned and saw what looked like a glinting white rock. I think we found what we came for. Crystal on a rock, huh? Yes, sir. You better believe it. Scott and Irwin find something no other astronauts have seen, a white rock that could be from the moon's formation. This is what they came for. They came for a kind of white rock that was thought to have been absolute earliest crust of the moon. It proves to be geologic treasure, a rock called anorthosite from the moon's birth.
Dubbed the Genesis Rock, it helps geologist determine the moon is around the same age as Earth, 4.5 billion years old. The solar system itself is only slightly older. They had actually found a piece of the moon's primordial crust and a chance to look back almost to the formation of the moon itself. Bag number 196 is a special bag. Yes, sir. Okay, Jim, let's get on the rover and get back. Oh, look at the mountains today, Jim, when they're all sunlit, isn't that beautiful? Apollo 15 samples will be studied for decades to come.
We went to the moon as trained observers in order to gather data, uh not only with our instruments on board, but with our minds. Captain, how do you read on box? The astronauts have to leave the rover behind. But its camera provides one more thing. The first look at a lunar blastoff. Ready to do supply. 10 minutes to go for lift off. Apollo 15 paves the way for the most advanced lunar studies yet. But in the court of public opinion, science is a tough sell. Well, the science takes a long time.
Science takes years. Science takes decades. J-2 is installed. And one of the issues that arose with some of the later Apollo missions that were more focused on science, the results of them were more difficult to explain. It was more complex. It was also harder to get people enthused and excited. And presidential support is evaporating. The greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon is running for re-election and thinks the last two Apollo missions are too risky politically.
Nixon was worried that if there was an accident during Apollo 16 or Apollo 17, it could threaten his re-election as president. So, he pushed for um canceling the Apollo program uh early, ahead of schedule. The president tells advisers to scrub both flights. Project Apollo is on the chopping block The Apollo 16 crew is training, unaware the president has secretly ordered an end to Apollo. John Young is mission commander, flying with South Carolina native Charlie Duke, and navy pilot Ken Mattingly.
Political climate was changing a little bit toward space, but we were focused getting us off and on schedule. Then, Nixon abruptly changes his mind, fearful of losing votes from the giant aerospace industry. He thought the jobs created by the space industry in California in particular were important to his re-election. Apollo 16 and 17 will fly. Copy. Now moving into the final minute of the count. Duke and Mattingly prepare for liftoff. Sequence has started. Engines are armed. We have a launch commit and we have a liftoff.
The swing arm moving back. I'm picking up that altitude a little bit now. 16 now maneuvering to its proper flight path attitude. The saints, we are going. Five days later, Young and Duke undock. 23, 22 down at 500 ft. It's over here, John, a couple of big boulders. 93, that comes a shadow. Contact. Oh, Houston, we 16 has arrived. Roger 16. This mission relies on a new and improved science support room. Here, Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell and other experts assist with the demanding scientific tasks.
First, Young and Duke unpack equipment. Young sets up a telescope to photograph the Earth and other astronomical bodies. Meanwhile, Duke begins setting up the Apollo experiments called ALSEP. He's carrying the RTG package, the power source for the instruments. Suddenly, it falls. Scientists hold their breath. Luckily, nothing is broken and the crew can carry on. Young and Duke set up a magnetometer to measure the moon's magnetic field along with devices to study solar wind and micrometeorites.
Then, they load up the rover and head out. So, we felt right at home. And once we landed, it was awesome. We were just wow, wee, golly, gee whiz, you know, that was our attitude. We were like two little kids at Christmas. The men are in the Descartes Highlands, mountainous terrain where rocks could answer a tough question. What formed this area? Scientists think they know. The theory that the geologists came up with was that they would find a kind of volcanic rock that had shaped the this highland region.
Yeah, unless the rake's the best way. That's what I got. Young and Duke begin their search for volcanic rocks, hard evidence that would prove the geologists right. Super job, John. Good job. 340. Okay, back 340. Now, you found a real rock. Over 3 days, they find hundreds of valuable samples. 4 cm chip. Great rock. But they can't find the one thing they came for, volcanic rocks. There were no volcanic rocks to be found. Every rock they came across was a kind of rock called a breccia that's made up of fragments of other rocks that have been welded together.
All these in this area look the same. What they do find delivers the biggest scientific surprise of the Apollo Volcanic activity did not shape this rugged region. Meteors did. The scientists were wrong. It was very important to go to the moon with an open mind. That they were going to go to the moon to see what was actually there, not necessarily what the geologists thought would be there. Yeah, I can get that for you. Apollo 16 helps scientists better understand the forces that shaped the moon, still being debated today.
Like in to take your time and make sure we get everything. Uh we're still studying the samples from the moon. There's there's still hundreds of requests that we hear from NASA to look at the Apollo samples. I was extremely proud to have been part of it. To think that a young man from a little town in South Carolina could do something like that was uh very very rewarding. I'm going a little bit closer. Okay, here we go. A big one. Here we go. The crew of Apollo 17 is days away from NASA's last moon shot.
The commander is Gene Cernan. Ron Evans is command module pilot. And Jack Schmitt, lunar module pilot. Like most of their peers, Cernan and Evans are pilots first and geologists second. Schmitt is an outlier. He's a scientist trained to be an astronaut. They had selected a handful of science astronauts in 1965, and the one guy in that group who was the best suited to go to the moon was Jack Schmitt. His father had been a geologist, he was a geologist, he had a doctorate in geology. But he'd never flown a plane.
After NASA trains him, Schmitt still has to prove himself to the old guard. Al Shepard uh called me in the office and said, "You better start stealing simulator time." Very rapidly dropped off everything else I was doing. The countdown continuing to move along well at For the first time, NASA is launching at night to reach the northeastern part of the moon. Out at the pad, the space vehicle is surrounded by searchlights producing It's bold, but risky. Your options in case you had a problem or whatever at night are cut in half.
Safety indicates that we have a go. Now in the final minute of the countdown. All engines are started. We have ignition. 2 1 0 We have a lift We have a lift off and it's lighting up the area. It's just like daylight here at Kennedy Space Center as the Saturn V is moving off the pad. It has now cleared the tower. Everything had come alive beneath us. When you're lying there on your back, you could feel the engines moving down a football field below you. Ready. She's lined up on that. Traveling more than 20,000 miles an hour, they make good time.
Should be able to see it now then. Cernan and Schmitt depart in the lunar lander named Challenger. Challenger, we'd like to have Dolly now. You look just as pretty in Earth light as you do in sunlight. This is Apollo's last chance to dig up the moon's mysteries. So they target the holy grail of geology, a narrow valley called Taurus-Littrow. It was the most highly varied site of any of the Apollo sites and it was specifically picked to be that. 20 ft Going down at 2 10 ft. Hey, Houston, the Challenger has landed.
All right, that airplane looks good. Oh my god. Unbelievable. Okay, that's where it's going, Jack, right there. The astronauts set up the experiments, load the rover, and drive off. Not a bad day start. I'm getting a light driving this machine. Their first few hours are picture perfect. And I understand all your lights Then an accident brings things to a screeching halt. Oh boy, that's going to be terrible. That is really going to be bad. Cernan's hammer ripped off one of the rover's wheel coverings.
Look at that, Henry. The fenders were really important cuz moon dust is very light and very powdery and it was blowing up and it was jamming gears and they really couldn't have used the rover if they couldn't get this fender replaced. Well, it was broken. It just wouldn't go back on. Yeah. Without a fender, the last Apollo mission is stuck in the dust. The closest replacement is 250,000 mi away. Cernan leans on mission control. See a fender, that's what I need. Figure out something we can make a fender with.
Are we making this They brainstorm and come up with a clever solution. It's now inside the Smithsonian. There were extra maps on the lunar module that were provided on very sturdy paper and so they taped two of them together with duct tape in the form of a fender. So, it was an ingenious solution. It worked very well and lucky for us, they brought back the maps that they used and so we now have those in the collection. Amid space-age technology, human ingenuity saves the day. I think it'll stay.
Bob, do you have TV? The astronauts take off hoping to shed light on a nagging question. What's the moon's interior like? One of their science stops is Shorty Crater, which sits on a landslide. Schmidt deems it a geologist's paradise. Part of your jolly is you're gotten by trying to anticipate everything you possibly anticipate, but then you get a new surge of adrenaline when you find there are things that you never could have anticipated. They've just started collecting samples when Schmidt hits the jackpot.
Sheen was at the rover getting some of the equipment that they needed. Jack had walked up to a boulder that he was examining and he happened to look down at his feet. On the moon, orange soil is scientific gold. It turned out that the orange soil was composed of tiny beads of volcanic glass. Those beads of orange glass were a priceless window into the moon's interior. The volcanic glass originated from hundreds of miles below the surface, far deeper than any other Apollo sample. It will offer the best insight yet to the moon's interior.
The astronauts share a eureka moment. In Houston, scientists realize they're onto something new. The orange color suggests the presence of two life-sustaining elements. And we know that rust is one of the things that can create an orange tinge in a rock, which would indicate a presence of perhaps not only oxygen but water on the lunar surface. Yeah, that's The discovery has far-reaching implications for NASA's grander ambitions. What is that right there? Someday, the moon's water and oxygen may be mined for a moon base, which could serve as a springboard for sending humans to other planets.
I mean, we'd gone from nobody ever flying in space before in, you know, 1961 to landing people on the moon in 1969. At that rate of progress, you can imagine all kinds of things happening. Thanks to Apollo, the 1970s bring other bold achievements. In 1972, America launches its first space station, called Skylab. Built from repurposed Apollo hardware and flown by Apollo astronauts. We were trying to to figure out how to use this Apollo hardware and do long-duration flights, study this Earth, study the sun, study the stars.
On Skylab, astronauts go from spending days in Earth orbit to months. This would enable NASA to study the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body and plan for future exploration, as well. brings international cooperation with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. American astronauts dock with their long-time competitors, Soviet cosmonauts. Apollo-Soyuz was a joint mission between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it symbolized détente and sort of the improved relations during the Cold War.
It was a kind of a goalpost that had now been set to say from this point on we have the opportunity to be friends instead of adversaries. We have the opportunity to cooperate and not just compete in space. The project is a precursor of what's to come. Lessons learned from Apollo later propelled manned spaceflight to the space shuttle. Space Station Mir and the International Space Station. When humans go back to the moon or beyond they'll follow a trail blazed in a singular spectacular moment in time.
Basalt is in bag 512. Cernan and Schmitt break camp to head home. I was strolling on the moon one day in America I saw Now, hey. Hey. Surrounding them are imprints of an unmatched era. Other astronauts left their overshoes Cernan brings his home. These are the overshoes that Gene Cernan wore on the surface of the moon that made those iconic images of the boot impressions left on the surface of What is most fascinating about these is that they are covered with lunar regolith, lunar dust, and you can see the dust on the soles of the shoes, around the sides, and the impression of the footprints.
These are the last human-worn objects to touch the surface of the moon, and that makes these objects even more precious. Dean, we're ready for you and your test pilot to ace him back to the LM and dust each other and climb in. Project Apollo is extraordinarily impressive. The more you learn about the challenges that had to be overcome and the new technology that had to be developed, the more impressive it becomes. Ignition. In just a few years, Apollo opened a time portal in both directions.
Eagle has landed. Looking backward, it unlocked a cosmic journal billions of years old. That is a crystalline rock if I've ever seen a crystalline rock. Looking forward, it forged a path into deep space. Beautiful view. Isn't that something? I have goosebumps right out here. I think we will always hear the siren call of sending human beings into space. In the beginning, These guys all flew in service of country, in service of science. How can you not love that? Most importantly, Apollo gave us new insight into another planet, our own.
And there was the whole circle of the earth just suspended in the blackness of It's just a breathtakingly beautiful jewel of earth. And so, going to space, I think, to a great extent, we really found ourselves. As I take man's last steps on the surface, I like to just let what I believe history will record as America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. We leave as we came and God willing as we shall return with peace and in hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.
