Living 21 July
Ashim Kumar Paul
‘That’s one small step for man; one
giant leap for mankind’ is the famous quote that Neil Armstrong uttered when he, as the first man who
stepped off the Lunar Excursion Module on to the surface of The Moon on 21st
July, 1969. Through the very words, he meant that it was just a small step down
to the surface for him, but a giant leap because he was the first human to set
foot on another celestial body. Nevertheless, it is often argued that Neil
Armstrong's first words from the moon were heard all over Earth, but the
astronaut himself claimed his famous words were misquoted. But Armstrong
clarified, immediately after the 1969 landing, that he had actually said,
“That's one small step for ‘a’ man.” It's just that people didn't hear it. The
astronaut acknowledged during a 30th anniversary gathering in 1999 that he
didn't hear himself say it either when he listened to the transmission.
It’s really noteworthy that landing on the moon was
the materialisation of a dream which our ancient ancestors treasured as they
first gazed at the lights in the heavens and wondered what they were. The moon,
so large and bright in the night sky, dazzled our ancestors. The moon’s regular
phases marked the months and suggested to the Greek thinkers that it might not
be some celestial goddess but another world. That understanding was confirmed
in 1609 when Galileo pointed a telescope at the moon and saw mountains, craters
and what looked like seas. From then on men mused about what was considered
forever unattainable, a journey to the moon.
But in the 20th century, human beings exhibited their knack by making that dream a reality. Aristotle did rightly say, “All men by nature desire to know.” The moon landing was driven by man’s such avid enthusiasm, his impulse to know the world around him. However, the Soviet Union performed the first hard (unpowered) Moon landing in 1959 with the Luna 2 spacecraft, a feat the U.S. duplicated in 1962 with Ranger 4. Since then, twelve Soviet and U.S. spacecraft have used braking rockets to make soft landings and perform scientific operations on the lunar surface. The Soviet Union achieved the first unmanned lunar soil sample return with the Luna 16 probe on September 24, 1970. This was followed by Luna 20 and Luna 24 in 1972 and 1976. The Luna 17 and Luna 21 were successful unmanned rover missions. But the greatest success came with the Manned landings.
A total of twelve men have landed on the Moon. This was accomplished with two US pilot-astronauts flying a Lunar Module on each of six NASA missions across a 41-month time span starting on 20 July 1969 UTC, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11, and ending on 14 December 1972 UTC with Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt on Apollo 17. Cernan was the last to step off the lunar surface. All Apollo lunar missions had a third crew member who remained on board the Command Module. The last three missions had a rover for increased mobility.
However, in the
44th anniversary of lunar landing, some ten
little-known Apollo 11 facts have been unearthed by a recent research.
·
The
Apollo’s Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound
shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn’t rule out the possibility that they
might explode on takeoff. NASA seated its VIP spectators three and a half miles
from the launch pad.
·
The Apollo computers had less processing power
than a cell phone!
·
Drinking water was a fuel-cell by-product, but
Apollo 11’s hydrogen-gas filters didn’t work, making every drink bubbly.
Urinating and defecating in zero gravity, meanwhile, had not been figured out;
the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire
mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it.
·
When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle,
separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in
a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s
landing four miles off-target.
·
Pilot Neil Armstrong nearly ran out of fuel
landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash. Apollo
engineer Milton Silveira, however, was relieved: His tests had shown that there
was a small chance the exhaust could shoot back into the rocket as it landed
and ignited the remaining propellant.
·
The "one small step for man" wasn’t
actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock
absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to
the surface.
·
When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the
surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no
outer handle.
·
The toughest moonwalk task? Planting the flag.
NASA’s studies suggested that the lunar soil was soft, but Armstrong and Aldrin
found the surface to be a thin wisp of dust over hard rock. They managed to
drive the flagpole a few inches into the ground and film it for broadcast, and
then took care not to accidentally knock it over.
·
The flag was made by Sears, but NASA refused to
acknowledge this because they didn’t want "another Tag."
