The story of the Apollo program is the story of America at its boldest. In the shadow of the Cold War, the United States seemed to be losing the space race. The Soviet Union had stunned the world with Sputnik, then sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit before an American had even left Earth. Our early rockets too often ended in failure. For many, the dream of reaching the Moon felt impossibly far away.
Then, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge that redefined the era: America would land a man on the Moon and return him safely home before the decade was out. It was an audacious promise, one that demanded new technology, untested methods, and a level of national willpower rarely seen in peacetime.
The journey forward was marked by triumph and tragedy. In 1967, a fire during a ground test claimed the lives of three Apollo 1 astronauts. Rather than ending the program, the disaster galvanized NASA to push harder. The following year, Apollo 8 carried three men around the Moon, their Christmas Eve broadcast reminding a fractured nation of what unity and shared purpose could achieve.
The moment of fulfillment came on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong’s first step, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” was the culmination of years of sacrifice and failure. Over the next three years, five more Apollo missions reached the Moon. Astronauts drove rovers across alien landscapes, gathered hundreds of pounds of lunar rock, and expanded the history of space exploration in ways once thought unimaginable. Even near-disasters, like the crippled flight of Apollo 13, became testaments to human courage.
The Apollo era ended in 1972, but its legacy endures. It showed that the United States could rally against impossible odds, mastering the challenges of space travel and inspiring generations to look upward. Dr. Sky shares the story.
📖 Read the Transcript
Lee Habeeb (00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to share your stories with us, send them to OurAmericanStories.com.
Lee Habeeb (00:22):
We love hearing them and we love playing them.
Lee Habeeb (00:26):
Up next, a story of perhaps our greatest adventure as a country, conquering the final frontier and not only getting a man on the moon, but returning him safely to Earth. This epic journey began out of a place of fear in the nineteen fifties. Here to tell the story is Steve Kates aka Dr. Sky.
Lee Habeeb (00:49):
Take it away, Steve.
Steve Kates (00:51):
During this period of time in nineteen fifties, as many people who were old enough to know, there was great tension between Russia and the United States and something that was eventually described as Cold War.
Archival Audio (01:01):
Any attack upon Cuba will be regarded as an attack upon the Soviet Union be responded to by all the weapons of their command.
Archival Audio (01:08):
There is, before all people is a precious chance to turn the black tide of a Vif if we failed to strive to see this.
Archival Audio (01:14):
Champ, the judgment of future ages will be harsh and sad.
Steve Kates (01:19):
To say, the entire United States military and the Russian military, or Soviet military at the time, was hell bent on developing and continuing to build many nuclear weapons. But the real changer in the game, the game changer that I like to describe here is what happened when the Soviet Union launched the very first artificial satellite, known as Sputnik one, that of course changed everything. It was a small sphere, maybe twenty four inches in diameter, and it had three antennas and weighed about one hundred and eighty five pounds. What it was doing was it was sending and transmitting radio signals to ground stations on the Earth, just to test the ability to actually hear or listen to communications from space. There weren’t actual voice communications. This is all the pre dawn of color communications in space. It was amazing to people, particularly here in America and say other free countries around the world, to imagine that their violated airspace just became that that something from another country was up over the top of them. And in the spirit of the Cold War, this obviously brought about ideas that maybe they could drop a hydrogen bomb or an atomic weapon from space right on top of your head. And at that time we had nothing that we could do about it. Until the continuing evolution of the space program, we really were in a race. I mean, let’s not say that the United States military was asleep at the switch or asleep at the wheel. We had plans to build rockets, and whether they were just for military purposes or a future space exploration, the sad state of the affair is that men any of the early American rockets ended in failure. And there’s so many videos had to say on YouTube that archives every day or other places around the world where the archival sixteen millimeter films are still kept, people were actually seeing the explosion pretty regularly, more the norm than anything else of rockets on the launch pad. And why did that happen? Was it that we had bad science? No, it was that the Russians at the time, the Soviets, they were simply ahead of the United States at that point in time. They had the ability to develop these rockets. I would say that they were at least ten years ahead of the United States in the ability to actually have a readily available military vehicle to go into space. But let’s also remember the primary thing, as Nikita Khrushchev said many many times over, and I’m not going to quote him, but I’m going to give the best general description here so our listeners can understand it in the simplest way. The primary mode for them was not necessarily just to put something into space. They wanted to have superiority within their intercontinental ballistic missiles ICBMs, and that those launch rockets that they had were simply the rockets that were to deliver their nuclear weapons that they had developed. I would repeat it again. Their main mode of operation there was to build a delivery system to deliver nuclear weapons to the United States and other places in the world that weren’t friendly to the Soviet Union.
Lee Habeeb (04:20):
All right, I left off.
Archival Audio (04:22):
When the clockets started, any allowed Claire.
Steve Kates (04:25):
The first American manned spacecraft, of course, was a Redstone rocket, in which one of the most famous of all astronauts, Alan Shepard, launched into space on a small, simple, little Redstone rocket. But on that historic date of May fifth, nineteen sixty one, Alan Shepard does what’s called a suborbital flight.
Frank Borman (04:43):
And what is that.
Steve Kates (04:44):
Obviously, the Russians, the Soviets at the time, had put Yuri Gagarin into space back on April the twelfth of nineteen sixty one, he actually orbited the Earth for an hour and forty eight minutes in what they called was a Vostok spacecraft. Alan Shepard did his by doing a suborbital flight. And let me describe that for everybody listening. Alan Shepard’s flight was not a circumnavigation flight around the Earth. It was simply launched to a certain altitude, break the barrier when you get up above what they call the Kármán line, which depending on who you ask, the beginnings of space start relatively between fifty and sixty miles above the Earth. So Alan Shepard, he of course ignited so much enthusiasm and success, But there was also a bunch of guys that were also part of an early program called the Mercury Project, in which they launched on rocket similar to that so many of those astronauts, of course, John Glenn, Wally Schirra. We could go on and on, but the important part of what happened with the early part of the Mercury program is that they used initially, they used the basic Redstone rocket to get their Mercury capsules to go up into orbit. And I should say that’s when they did go into orbit around the Earth. After Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight, so that particular part of America’s space program was called Mercury. And then when it transpired into something even more phenomenal, we used what was originally an ICBM type missile called the Titan II and the Gemini, of course, meaning twin you had a two manned capsule, the Gemini capsule to test out how we would maneuver in space and do docking in space, but to answer the question that people are probably wondering out there. Apollo was the next mission, and that all started with inspiration by John F. Kennedy, President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University back on September the twelfth of nineteen sixty two, when the words that I won’t quote exactly why some say the moon?
Archival Audio (06:41):
Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why thirty five years ago fly the Atlantics? Why does Rice play Texas?
Archival Audio (06:54):
We choose to go to the moon.
Lee Habeeb (06:57):
We choose to go to the moon, and this pay and do the other things.
Archival Audio (07:02):
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal well served to organize and measure the theft of our energies and bills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are willing to postpone, and one we tend to win and the others doill.
Steve Kates (07:24):
So Apollo began our incredible journey to the Moon, and.
Lee Habeeb (07:28):
You’re listening to the story of Apollo. More of the story after these messages. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture and faith are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of the Apollo missions with Steve Kates’s aka Dr. Sky. When we last left off, Steve was telling us about how the space race got started.
Lee Habeeb (08:21):
After the launch of Sputnik.
Lee Habeeb (08:24):
We were behind the Soviet Union by nearly a decade, but President Kennedy promised that we’d land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. That year was nineteen sixty two. What kind of man could go to the moon? Let’s return to the story here again is Steve Kates.
Steve Kates (08:45):
Well, we all seen the right stuff as a movie, or at least I hope we have or read the book. They’re looking for people that have discipline. Now that’s a broad based statement. What’s a discipline? They want people from a military background, who know how to solve problems, who can take orders. That’s an important thing too. You not only had to meet those criteria intellectually. I mean, I’m sure there were great many IQ tests given, and many people passed and many people failed.
Narrator (09:10):
Here’s Jim Lovell, astronaut on Apollo 8 and courtesy of NASA Johnson’s Space Center Oral History Collection with more.
Jim Lovell (09:19):
That physical was nothing like anybody had ever heard of before, you know it was. What they did to us was unknown to the medical profession because they knew that they had guinea pigs.
Steve Kates (09:32):
You have to have the ability not to be claustrophobic. I mean that comes to a personal thing that if people go into let’s say, a large MRI machine for a medical procedure and they have a difficulty going through that type tube. Well, you might simply be categorized as being claustrophobic, but these astronauts have to be able to handle critical situations.
Jim Lovell (09:52):
They knew we’re going to go into an environment that was completely strange, so they did things just for background and you know, from data. And I went through there. But when I got there, the next selection was to go onto down to a second group at Wright Patterson Air Force Base for some more tests and things like that. That doctor caught me and said, well, you’re finished, And I said finished? Why I might not accept it now? Now? I said, what’s wrong? And they said, well, you have a high bilirubin. I said, I don’t even know what a high bilirubin is. What is it? It was too much pigment in your blood.
Steve Kates (10:31):
And actually you needed to not be too tall. I know that sounds a little maybe unusual to people, because well maybe not because the average height of these astronauts was not six foot four. So many NBA players would probably be, you know, simply not able to do that, even if their capabilities mentally and physically, we’re there. You have to be able to fit into the “spam can”. So many medical experiments were done on these people, putting them in pressure situations. They had to sit in a thing called the centrifuge, which was this small all capsule intentionally making you feel uncomfortable, and it starts spinning around in a room in a circle. And that particular object had three dimensions, so it could start moving, not as you’re going around just in a circle, but it could start rotating in a different axis like you know, roll, pitch and yaw and you certainly they wouldn’t want to be the person who obviously had, you know, the most nausea, because that might disqualify you. But some of the interesting stories, I thought it appropriate to honor the Apollo 1 crew because this is an amazing story and most people never heard it or they weren’t even around at the time when it happened. Three American astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White were put through a series of tests to test out the small capsule that would be part of the command module. We find these three astronauts over and over going through this testing where they had to get into spacesuits, climb into this small very strange, triangular looking little spacecraft, the Apollo capsule, And this didn’t happen in space. This happened on the ground and on January the twenty seventh of nineteen sixty seven, through all this trial and errors, the astronauts are strapped into their seat. It’s known that Gus Grissom was complaining that they couldn’t talk between their capsule and the command center, which was about twenty five feet away with wires.
Archival Audio (12:22):
Get the moon.
Archival Audio (12:22):
We can’t drive.
Steve Kates (12:24):
How are we going to get to the moon? And he used a few choice words in there.
Lee Habeeb (12:27):
That I’m leaving out.
Steve Kates (12:29):
How can we get to the moon and communicate if we can’t talk within twenty feet. Well, on that very same day, something very sad happened, and it’s open to how this really evolved. The three astronauts were strapped into their chairs and they were breathing at the time one hundred percent oxygen. And the design on this particular capsule had two hatches. There was an inner and outer hatch for brevity, and if you needed to get those hatches open, it would have taken a lot longer than today, just opening like a car door or even a few levers would move out as the modern day capsules, I’m sure have. Well what happened. Allegedly some sort of wire short or some kind of a fire broke out underneath their couches, and sadly, those three astronauts, It’s one of the most horrific things I’ve ever heard, and they perished because they couldn’t get them out of the capsule. The Apollo program might have been canceled in its entirety after this.
Jim Lovell (13:38):
The fire took place in nineteen sixty seven. We had a commitment made by President Kennedy that we would land a man on the Moon and bring it back home safely before the end of the decade. And when the fire occurred in January of sixty seven and we did know really what it was going to do, everybody was really down on the dump sand Holy Cow.
Steve Kates (13:58):
But the government, NASA and others talked about what their wishes would be, and they certainly wanted to continue the space program. But just remember those astronauts and a few others that died in training accidents in military aircraft to train are some of the unsung heroes that never really get to be talked about. Because space can be a dangerous place, and it’s not for everyone. But the positivity that we’ve shown as a nation and other nations around the world is to move away from this planet for good reasons, to colonize the space like the early explorers did in the ocean.
Jim Lovell (14:31):
You have to go by faith. You have to believe in what the people are going to hand you.
Archival Audio (14:37):
You know.
Jim Lovell (14:37):
Al Shepherd’s old old joke was, you know, how does the field have sit on top? Is help built by the lowest bidder, But the lowest bidder is pretty expensive. But you have to believe that whole thing.
Steve Kates (14:47):
And I did Apollo 8 is quite fascinating.
Jim Lovell (14:51):
We’re going to do four thousand miles so that we could test the lunar module of the command module and then come back in a high rate of speed so that, you know, we could test the each shield and things like that. I recall this very vividly. The three of us were out testing our spacecraft and Frank Borman got a call to go back to Houston. We so Bill and I still stayed out there. We were working out there, and Frank came back again back to Downy and said things have changed, And we said, they said what he said? Where if everything goes all right with Apollo 7. Apollo 8, we’ll go to the moon.
Steve Kates (15:26):
Nacimated decision that they would send three astronauts on a journey around the Moon for ten lunar orbits in nineteen sixty eight, around Christmas time.
Jim Lovell (15:34):
I was elated. I thought, man, this is great. I mean, I already spent two weeks and it’s basing geventy seven with Frank Borman. I didn’t want to spend another eleven days or something like that. You’re going around the Earth again. I said, this is fantastic. And on the way back, on the way back of the T thirty eight, when it was by a turn to sit in the backseat and either Bill or Frank or flying, I drew the Apollo 8 Insignia.
Steve Kates (15:56):
Apollo 7 was to test out the entire Apollo capsule to come out module where you live, the appetation module, and then to be able to maybe move and separate that little spacecraft in eventual missions, which is the Lunar Lander.
Jim Lovell (16:09):
The lunar module wasn’t ready, and the lunar module was supposed to go up there, you know, and be tested on. And we had intelligence and information that the Russians were going to put people around the Moon. They were really attempting to land people on the Moon and had tried all sorts of things to get there. And we’re building a huge rocket called the n one built ten of them, flew four. None was really successful. But they were very persistent people, and they were very close to actually doing that. They had sent a couple of spacecraft up went around the Moon. One was not successful, one was partially successful, the next one. The two cosmonauts and I know them wanted to go. And then they hesitated back and forth. The hierarchy argued should we had another unmanned or should we not? And when they did that, this side of the Atlantic bold leadership at this time they said, al’s not ready the command service module if it proves out and Apollo 7 will be okay. Huntsville thinks the booster it could be okay, and so they said, let’s send Apollo 8 to the boat. And so that’s how it came to pass.
Steve Kates (17:12):
There was a lot of objections in some of the higher offices of NASA that this might not have been the right thing to do, because we only tested Apollo 7 in Earth orbit, and yet we haven’t sent a Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. Yet so Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders did that most incredible feat.
Lee Habeeb (17:32):
And we’ve been listening to a heck of a story of how America got to the Moon and how we got there before our competitors, our primary competitor being the Soviet Union.
Lee Habeeb (17:43):
When we come back more of this remarkable.
Lee Habeeb (17:45):
Story with Steve Kates’s aka Dr. Sky after these messages, and we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of the Apollo missions in our incredible journey to the Moon with Steve Kates’s. When we last left off, Steve was telling us about the tests that the astronauts selected to be in the Apollo program had to go through, tests that could be deadly like Apollo 1. After the fire and Apollo 1, the Apollo missions could have been canceled, but they weren’t. We pushed forward and after a few successful flights, decided to send a group of astronauts into space around Christmas time. That mission Apollo 8. Here again is Steve Kates.
Steve Kates (18:47):
Apollo 8 nacinated decision that they would send three astronauts on a journey around the Moon for ten lunar orbits in nineteen sixty eight, around Christmas time. There was a lot of objections in some of the higher offices of NASA that this might not have been the right thing to do because we only tested Apollo 7 in Earth orbit, and yet we haven’t sent a Apollo spacecraft to the Moon yet. So Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders did that most incredible feat.
Narrator (19:15):
Here’s Jim Lovell, astronaut on Apollo 8 with more.
Jim Lovell (19:19):
Well, my first sensations, Courus was not too far from the Earth because when we turned around we could actually see the Earth start to shrink. Now, the highest anybody had ever been I think had been either I think it was Apollo or Gemy eleven up about eight hundred miles or something like that, and back down again, and all of a sudden, you know, we’re just just going down. And it was It reminds me of driving a car looking out the back window, going inside a tunnel and seeing the tunnel entrance shrink as it gets as you go farther into the tunnel. It was quite a quite a sensation to think about, you know, and you had to pinch yourself, Hey, we’re really going to the Moon. I mean, you know, this is it. I was a navigator and it turned out that they have a navigation equipment was perfect. I mean, it was just you couldn’t ask for a better piece of navinavigation equipment coming into the Moon itself. The last day, our blunt end was towards the Moon, and we didn’t see it as it got bigger. But the ground called up and the Mission Control said, now it’s such and such a time, and they named it. Right down to the second you lose communication with us because the Moon’s gradual swinging around on the far side. Right to the second, there were static in our earphones, no comm Then, of course we lit the engine to slow down and we got into lunar orbit, and this is where we started to look at the moon, you know, and we all those nice things we said and that Christmas message. When we determined first of all that we would get and burn into the lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, we thought, boy, we something’s got to be appropriate to say. We ought to say something. What can we say? And we couldn’t think of anything. Then there was a fellow that I think Borman knew. His name is Simon Gribbin, Well.
Frank Borman (21:02):
It’s another example of the wonderful country live in we go. Julian Cheer, who was the head of public information for NASA in Washington, call me one day and so you’re going to have the largest audience that’s ever listened to or seen a television picture of a human on Christmas Eve and you’ve got I don’t know, five or six minutes. And I said, well, that’s great, Julian, what do we do? And he said, do whatever is appropriate. That’s the only instructions. Then that’s the exact word. Do whatever is appropriate, whatever you feel is appropriate, and be honest with you. We were so involved in the mission and this was a peripheral one, so I just kind of farmed that out to a friend of mine, Simon Gribbin And from Washington.
Jim Lovell (21:46):
He was with the US Information Agency I think had gone with them some of the astronauts an around their trips. Frank asked him, could he come up with something appropriate? Well, he could, but he knew another person I think those newspaper man, I forget his name that he said, Okay, I’ll think it over. I’ll try to see what I can do. And he was working almost all night trying to think out appropriate words, and his wife came down and said, why don’t you have them read something from the Bible, And they said, well, that’s, you know, the New Testament. Now, she says, the.
Frank Borman (22:17):
Old Testament reading from Genesis.
Jim Lovell (22:20):
Because you know, this would be very appropriate.
Frank Borman (22:22):
And I discussed it with Bill and Gemmen, and we had it typed on the flight plan, and that’s I didn’t give any more thought than that.
Jim Lovell (22:29):
So that’s how it came to pass. They said, the first ten verses of Genesis, which is really the foundation of many of the world’s religions. And that’s how it got started.
Archival Audio (22:39):
Now brooking Lunar for Ryan and for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 haven’t met that we would like to then you. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth without form and Lloyd and darkness was upon the face of the heap, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light, and God saw the light. They went good. And God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And then in the morning. With the first day, God said, let her be a perpot in the midst of the water. Let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the prom and the might of the waters which were under the from the waters which were both the persons. And it was so, and God called the movement heaven.
Archival Audio (23:49):
In the evening.
Archival Audio (23:49):
In the morning the second day, God said, let the waters un going to Heaven be gethered together into one plate, and let the dry land appear.
Archival Audio (24:00):
That would go.
Archival Audio (24:02):
God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering together of the water and calling God thought that it was good.
Archival Audio (24:12):
And from the.
Archival Audio (24:15):
Good night, good luck, and God live all of you, all of you on the good Earth.
Frank Borman (24:25):
Looking back at the Earth on Christmas Eve had a great effect, I think on all three of us. I can only speak for myself, but it had for me because the wonderment of it and the fact that the Earth looks so lonely in the universe. It’s the only thing with color. All of our emotions were focused back there with our families, and so that was the most emotional part of the flight for me.
Jim Lovell (24:50):
We were so curious, so excited about being at the moon that we are like three school kids looking into a candy story window, watching those ancient old created go by from and we’re already sixty miles above the service. We didn’t have any kind of feeling, at least myself, of you know, fear or if you know, are we going to get back or not. It was just just to be there. Was such an exciting moment that you know, would have done it all the time. I felt very, very honored and lucky to be there.
Steve Kates (25:23):
There was a little bit of concern as to how that would be you know, received in the world, but NASA gave them the permission to do that. I mean, it wasn’t something that was really that controversial, but in many circles they thought that, hey, this is inappropriate thing to do as we celebrate the birth of the Christ Child Christmas and read from the Book of Genesis and talk about the creation according to the Bible, of how the universe was formed, and God in his wonderful ways, of how we manifest beauty and love to all the people of the world and probably to all people in the other civilizations outside of this world.
Jim Lovell (25:56):
At the time, we didn’t know what the effect of the flight would be. He didn’t know whether the flight was going to be successful or not, but you know, with riots and assassinations and the war going on, I was part of a thing that Foley gave an uplift to the American people about doing something positive, which was really That’s why I say Apollo 8 was really the high point of my Space career.
Steve Kates (26:18):
Their neutrality in politics was always number one, but reading from the Bible was just in their opinion, and I approve of it. I think it was a beautiful thing because at that time, there’s a way to send a message about peace and love, and why not do that during a time when everybody need up palming. It was probably one of the most watched shows ever in the history of television. And I don’t know the exact number of people that were watching, but it’s in the hundreds of millions. And it was so well done. And I thought that the reading of the Bible and the Book of Genesis was an apropos for the time. Intentions were very high in America.
Lee Habeeb (26:53):
And you’ve been listening to Steve Kates’s aka Dr. Sky, and you’re also listening to Frank Borman and Jim Lovell tell the story of that Christmas Eve reading of Genesis and what it was like to be up there in space sixty miles from the Moon’s surface. The story of how America got to the Moon. First here on our American story, and we’re back with Our American Stories and the final portion of our story on the Apollo missions. When we last left off, Americans had successfully orbited the Moon on Apollo 8 and read from Genesis while doing it with a mission of success. It was time to put a man on the moon. That mission it would be Apollo 11. The year was nineteen sixty nine. Here again is Steve Kates but first audio from Neil Armstrong at the post landing press conference. You’ll also hear from Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in this segment. Let’s return to the story.
Archival Audio (28:17):
Was our pleasure to have participated in one great adventure. It’s an adventure that took place not just in the month of July, but rather one that took place in the last decade. We all here and the people listening in today had the opportunity to share that adventure that was certainly the highlight for the three of us of that decade. We’re going to divert a little bit from the format of past press conferences and talk about the things that entered It interested us most, in particular the the things that occurred on and about the Moon.
Steve Kates (29:07):
The road to the stars has always been difficult.
Archival Audio (29:10):
There’s so many things that can go wrong on a trip to the Moon and back. It’s sort of a long and fragile daisy chain of events. And I can remember being in the little house trailer aboard the aircraft carrier after we landed in the Pacific and thinking, sane, none of them did, None of those little links broke, And to me that was the amazing part that everything worked in some as well.
Steve Kates (29:32):
As it did. You have to be able to live in this environment, and you have to obviously have a steady flow of oxygen to continue the obvious understatement of the entire program to survive in space. You have to make sure that your landing craft, the lunar module, was going to work perfectly. You have to have a flight path to the surface of the Moon that works very simply by a small computer that if many people go out and go to one of their dollar stores right now, little handheld calculator that costs less than maybe a couple of dollars, had more so called processing power than the entire lunar module itself.
Archival Audio (30:09):
Well, every launch day is a time of excitement, enthusiasm, and apprehension, but I think in most circumstances you always feel that the chances have actually lift an offer are fairly distant or remote.
Archival Audio (30:23):
I think the momentous, most memorable thing that I can recall about that particular day was the opportunity, while my two friends here were being put into the spacecraft, to stand alone by myself out there and look at the rocket and the quietness and see the sun come up and the waves rolling in, and the evidence of the millions of people watching, but nothing specific, and just so quiet, And to realize that indeed it was such a contrast was going to take place all a frantic activity preparing the rocket, but it was so quiet up there for me personally ended in a very few moments. So we’re going to be departing in it in a great roar and offer of momentous signed in pea length five.
Archival Audio (31:09):
In book five four three two.
Archival Audio (31:14):
One zero all engine running looked off. We have a looked off thirty two minutes five three hour looked up in Apollo 11.
Archival Audio (31:27):
Well, I think the impressions of the Moon started thousands of miles.
Archival Audio (31:31):
As we get closer and closer, we could see more and more.
Archival Audio (31:34):
There are many different moons to remember, the one that we see from the earth, the one that’s in root. You look down on it and it’s a rather rough, lonesome, foreboding location.
Steve Kates (31:44):
And then this object is hurtling around the Moon and you have to have a series of burns in which you’re firing the descent motives. They don’t have unlimited fuel, so as they get into a certain angle of attack, as they call it. Remember, the little lunar module is like a little spider with the or legs. You’re going around the Moon in a horizontal position, and then you slowly have to fire these little tiny If anybody’s seen the lunar module, you notice that it has these little bell shaped areas around it which are actually a little rocket motors, and they’re steerable. And that descent has to be done in an orchestrated way, because not only are you looking to go to the surface, you’re actually looking to go to a location on the Moon. So as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are going down, they’re getting a series of these alarms master alarms on the computer with the buzzing sounds meaning an override. The computer was overridden. And this little computer, think about it. It was this big box, big beautiful polish, metallic box. And that’s fascinating that in those days they even had something I think it was like seventy three K and the description was that most emails take up more space than the Apollo computer had. On the descent, came close to having to abort. They overrode all this, and I’m keeping it very simple. It’s a long process. Then they have to drop down. It didn’t drop down very hard, but he didn’t. Just perfectly soft land as if you never felt it. And then those famous words and they appear the.
Archival Audio (33:09):
Ankle landed, rocket crank quality.
Archival Audio (33:12):
We got be on the ground. We got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thank a lot.
Steve Kates (33:18):
The most amazing story.
Archival Audio (33:21):
I’d like to ask Neil Armstrong and a Buzz Aldrin and I’m not quite sure i’d ask this question, but when you first stepped down the moon, did it strike you as you were stepping that you were stepping on a piece of the earth or a sort of what your inner feelings were, whether you felt you were standing in a desert or this was really another world, or how you felt at that point, Well, there was no question.
Archival Audio (33:45):
In our minds where we were.
Archival Audio (33:47):
We’ve been orbiting around the Moon.
Steve Kates (33:51):
And now comes the most amazing part of the story is the actual egress from the lunar module, and stories have it that Buzz Aldrin wanted to be the first man onto the surface of the Moon, but NASA looked too Neil Armstrong because of his ability to handle problems if something were to happen. They wanted him to be able to handle any situation, and boy did he handle one when he was in the Gemini program, him and Dave Scott orbiting the Earth in one of the Gemini capsules, and somehow, I don’t know the answer. I don’t think they did either. The spacecraft started to roll as if you held a pen in your hand and just start turning it horizontally, and it got faster and faster and faster, and that may have caused that whole mission for Gemini, to those astronauts to perish. But Neil actually handled the problem cool, calm and collected. Neil Armstrong exits the lunar module comes down the ladder, and here’s a story that most people do not know. Inside his space suit he had a small little bag, a collection bag for lunar material. And as we heard on the Earth.
Archival Audio (34:58):
Perm in the part ty A, the.
Steve Kates (35:03):
Truth story is this true wording should be and was that’s one small step for a man. We had garbled when we heard the communications, and it sounded like that’s one small step for man, not to go on technicalities. But the first thing he did when he got onto the surface was to bend over and gather a sample of lunar material. Why because if anything were to have gone wrong with the lunar module at that time and they had to go away and blast off from the Moon, they at least had the money spent of the Apollo program to bring back a sample of lunar material. We also noticed that there’s not as many pictures of Armstrong on the surface of the Moon. As Buzz Aldrin comes out and describes his words, where magnificent desolation. He and Neil are so busy trying to do everything they had to do, set up science experiments, check and see that the camera worked. And yes, those camera images were by today’s stay or it’s rather poor. If you were rating them on a grading scale, you’d probably give them a D. But that was the best technology we had at the time to even show The flag, of course, was placed onto the surface of the moon.
Archival Audio (36:12):
To me, it was one of the prouder moments of my life to be able to stand there and quickly salute the flag. So many people have done so much to give us this opportunity to place this American flag on the surface.
Steve Kates (36:26):
They did their EVAs, they collected lunar samples. They had to tuck all those samples back in and now it’s time to go home. And here comes a very interesting story. What happened is is the time was to go. Apparently, Buzz says that he turns around and somehow, whether it’s because of his suit or some other object, the ascent button or switch that you’ve hit to get yourself to blast off the moon actually broke. And it’s described by Aldrin that he what he used, even before we called him sharpies. He actually used his little felt tip pen and stuck it into the hole where the switch or the relay had been broken. And thank goodness that lunar module ascent stage took off. Many people don’t know that the ascent from the Moon was an interesting thing and pretty harrowing because President Nixon actually had a second speech that he was prepared to deliver if indeed the two astronauts were stranded on the Moon because of the inability of their ascent motor on the lunar module to fire. But luckily that speech never had to be given. Collectively. It said this that if we put our minds to a problem and try to solve it, we can do it. And it came with great expense, It came at the loss of human life. But the simple legacy is American exceptionalism. Proud to say this did something that was really incredible.
Archival Audio (37:49):
It was a stranger to me before the mission, but I now look back at it as somewhat of a friend, a place that I Visitedrrific.
Lee Habeeb (38:00):
Job on the production and storytelling by Monte Montgomery and especial thanks to Steve Kates’s aka Dr. Sky The
Lee Habeeb (38:09):
Ultimate Adventures story here on Our American Stories
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