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The voyage of Apollo 11 on the Moon took place as planned (Image de representation)
The first four days of the Apollo 11 Moon voyage went as planned, but only twenty minutes before landing, the atmosphere became tense when the crew faced a series of problems.
It was July 20, 1969 and, as the world watched the progress of the spacecraft, it briefly lost radio contact with the control of the mission in Houston.
Then, as the Lunar Module Eagle was in the middle of its descent, piloted by Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, an alarm tone began to sound.
Eagle had been detached two hours earlier from the main part of the ship, the control module, Columbia, where the third crew member, Michael Collins, had remained in orbit.
It was a distressing moment for Armstrong, a brilliant test pilot and aeronautical engineer, but with a little known voice.
"Give us a reading of the 1202 alarm program," he says to the control of the mission. They are told to continue. Houston realizes that the onboard computer is experiencing an overflow, but all systems are functional.
Below them, the craters of the Moon are spinning fast. Too fast, Armstrong realizes: at this rate, they will overtake the landing site by several kilometers.
He switches to manual control and starts looking for a new landing site from his porthole. But it is difficult to find the ideal place, and it will be tight.
"Rocky area," he told Aldrin.
Aldrin continues to tell him the speed and altitude readings of the computer. "Get down nicely," he says.
"I'll be right over this crater," Armstrong responds.
Meanwhile, the fuel runs out quickly.
Houston continues to announce the remaining number of seconds at "Bingo Fuel Call" – the point at which Eagle will remain 20 seconds to land or cancel the mission.
There are now 30 seconds left at the bingo.
Armstrong, gathering all his experience, remains silent while he concentrates.
The module is immobilized on the ground. "Contact light," says Aldrin, which means that one of the foot sensors of the leg is seated. The engines are off.
"Houston, base of tranquility here, Eagle has landed," Armstrong said.
"We are copying you to the floor, you have a group of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thank you very much," says Charlie Duke, CapCom or the capsule communicator on the ground.
Nazi rocket
History indicates that the number of people participating in the Apollo program is 400,000. But two figures dominate the others for their contributions.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy called his Vice President Lyndon Johnson to beat the Soviets in space.
"We are in a strategic space race with the Russians and we are losing," Kennedy wrote in a magazine the year before. "If a man turns around the Earth this year, his name will be Ivan."
Johnson turns to NASA's space program sponsor Wernher von Braun.
The former Nazi card-holder was the inventor of the V-2 rockets that destroyed London during World War II.
Towards the end of the war, he surrendered to the Americans, who brought him with a hundred of his best engineers to Alabama, as part of the secret operation "Paperclip".
Von Braun told Johnson that even though the United States was well behind, they could possibly beat the Russians when it would be a matter of placing men on the moon, if they immediately started working on a giant booster rocket.
Kennedy would speak in Congress later that year, pledging to "put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to Earth" by the end of the decade.
Eight years later, Richard Nixon was president when the goal was reached.
In case of tragedy, he had prepared the following remarks: "Fate has ordered that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace stay on the moon to rest in peace."
But extraordinary national efforts have borne fruit.
Everything happened quickly, thanks to a blank check for the mission of the Congress. Between October 1968 and May 1969, four Apollo preparatory missions were launched. Armstrong was chosen in December 1968 to command the eleventh.
A few months after the launch, Armstrong told Aldrin that he was on the line and that he would be the first to set foot on the lunar surface.
"I kept my silence for many more days, while trying not to get mad at Neil," Aldrin later recalled in his memoir.
"After all, he was the commander and, as such, the boss."
The giant leap
When the monstrous rocket designed by von Braun launched the Apollo 11 capsule at its summit on Wednesday, July 16, 1969, a million people gathered on the beach in front of Cape Canaveral to watch.
But many doubted that they had managed to land on the moon the first time. Armstrong confided in 1999: "My instinct was that we had a 90% chance – or better – to come back safely, and a 50% chance of landing successfully."
For those in America, the final descent would be on Sunday night.
In Europe, it was already dark, but everyone was glued to their television, although they could only hear radio communication crackles until Armstrong set up his black and white camera before his first step.
His grandmother had advised him not to do it when he felt the danger; he had accepted, according to Craig Nelson's book "Rocket Men".
As he descended to the foot of the ladder, he noticed that the Eagle's foot wedges were sunk into the ground only an inch or so and that the surface looked very fine. "It's almost like a powder," he recalls.
Then, on the radio: "Okay, I'll leave the LM now." A pause, then the immortal words: "It's a small step for man, a big step for humanity."
According to Armstrong, the line has not been scripted. "I thought about it after landing," he said in an oral history recorded by NASA in 2001.
One problem: without the indefinite article ("a man"), it was not grammatically correct. Armstrong said that he wanted to say it, but agreed that it was inaudible.
What does the moon look like?
Its color varies with the angle of the sun: from brown to gray to black like coal. And you have to get used to the lowest level of gravity.
"I started jogging a bit, and I had the impression of moving slowly in slow motion, often with both feet floating in the air," Aldrin wrote in a book in 2009.
For two and a half hours, Armstrong picks up piles and piles of rocks from the moon and takes photographs. Aldrin installs a seismometer and two other scientific instruments.
They plant the American flag and leave behind a host of items, including a medal in honor of the first man in space, the Russian Yuri Gagarin.
Of the 857 black and white and 550 color photos, only four show Armstrong. The majority are from Aldrin. "He's a lot more photogenic than me," he joked in 2001.
Come back to the country
By the time they had to leave, the astronauts were covered with dust. In the cockpit, "It smelled like wet ash in a chimney," said Armstrong.
Collins had been waiting for 22 hours in orbit.
"My secret terror for six months left them on the moon and returned to Earth alone," he wrote later.
"If they can not come up from the surface or crash, I'm not going to commit suicide, I'm going home immediately, but I'll be a man who's been branded for life and I know that."
Fortunately, the engine of the lunar module worked, he found Columbia and the trio started the long journey back.
In the end, with its extra modules and fuel removed, the capsule weighs only 12,250 pounds, or 0.2% of the launch weight of the fully loaded Saturn V rocket.
On July 24, he enters the atmosphere and becomes for a moment a ball of fire in the sky before deploying three parachutes and to disappear safely in the Pacific.
The United States had dispatched an aircraft carrier to retrieve them. Nixon was on board.
The elite divers pull out the unhurt but smelly men after their trip to transfer them by helicopter on the ship.
There, they are quarantined for fear of contamination by extraterrestrial microorganisms.
At their first press conference, three weeks later, reporters asked the three men, now world heroes, they would consider returning to the moon.
"In the lunar reception lab, we had very little time for meditation," said Armstrong, always in the foreground.
None of them would ever return to space again.
After six other missions, the Apollo program ended in 1972.
It was only when Donald Trump came to power that the United States decided to return to the moon, as part of the Artemis program, from the twin sister name of Apollo.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not changed by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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