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Apollo11MoonLanding
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Apollo11MoonLanding Five days ago, July 20, 2018 was the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing which took place on July 20, 1969. I vividly remember that event like it was yesterday. At that time, I was a skinny, very naïve 9 year old and staying with my family, which were my parents and two brothers in a summer vacation resort called the Willow Bungalows located near the town of Kerhonkson in the Catskill mountain region of southern New York east of the Hudson River. We vacationed there in the summer months of July and August in the years from 1967 to 1971. The building where we watched the moon landing was the largest building in the bungalow complex they called the casino which had a large open assembly area where they usually showed theatrical movies on film projectors on the weekends. Now, that was several decades before home video came out now in the form of modern DVD players. We saw the event on a by now primitive black and white television set receiving broadcast transmissions before cable television. I was lucky enough to present there at around 1:00 pm (Eastern Standard Time) in the afternoon. At that time, about a quarter of a million miles (250,000) away in the immediate vicinity of the moon, the lunar module Eagle had undocked from the command/service module Columbia about 70 miles in attitude above the lunar surface and was descending to attempt a soft landing on the Sea of Tranquility, one of the lava plain Maria visible on the near side of the moon. I remember hearing a lot of the radio chit chat between Mission Control in Houston, TX and the three astronauts in the vicinity of the moon. Now, at the time I was just a naïve small and I couldn't really understand exactly what was going on. But all of a sudden I remember the astronaut Neil Armstrong suddenly stating, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed." and then hearing all the excitement and jubilation taking place over in Mission Control at Houston, TX and I distinctly recall seeing on the small black and white television screen, the look on Walter Cronkite's face, he was the chief CBS television anchor person at the time. Now at the time, I did not really realize the significance of the event and after when I talked with my father about it, he stated that was the first time ever in history that a manned vehicle from Earth had ever made a successful landing on another celestial body other than the Earth. That event took place in the afternoon of 7/20/1969. Then afterward, I had dinner that evening which I always enjoyed as my mother was a great cook. I still miss her cooking. Then in the evening that day I was back again in the casino were there were perhaps a couple of dozen people and we were assembled sitting on chairs. I remember that around 9:30 pm (EST) observing that Neil Armstrong was emerging from the lunar module Eagle and then descended down the ladder and then made the statement, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Now, I actually learned as an adult, several decades later, that he did not quote that statement correctly, he was supposed to state, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Then after that, about half an hour later, Buzz Aldrin joined him on the first moon walk. As it was just a small black and white television set and I was sitting quite a distance from it, I didn't really get a good look at the events of the moon walk which included setting up the American flag on the moon's surface. Now, I was just a little 9 year old and I couldn't stay up until the conclusion of the moon walk which ended several hours later at around 2 am (EST). Later that summer in August 1969, Life magazine published an issue which included all the color film photographs Buzz Aldrin had taken which included a lot of vivid detail much more than what I saw on that small black and white television screen earlier in July 1969. Another publication I remember was a small book which explained most of the technology of the Apollo spacecraft of the Saturn 5 rocket and the three module Apollo spacecraft which I found very interesting. But, in particular what I recall was a couple of pages stating what we know about the other planets of our solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Now, back in 1969, we had only very limited knowledge of the other planets and the book only had very fuzzy pictures of them taken through large telescopes. In the following decades, the interplanetary probes of Mariners, Pioneer, Voyager, Venera, Viking, Magellan, New Horizon's, etc. and we now know what those planets look like in close up detail. In particular, I remember the two Viking probes that landed on Mars in 1976 and the vivid photographs they took of the landscape of the red Martian surface which had hitherto unknown. I remember as a small always reading in astronomy books that Venus was the planet of mystery as its surface is forever shrouded by yellow clouds, ever since Galileo looked at its crescent shape with his primitive 33 power telescope , four centuries ago in 1609. Then in the decades after Apollo 11, the Soviet Venera and American Magellan arrived there and revealed to us that its surface is covered by a very dense carbon dioxide atmosphere with sulfuric acid clouds with a atmospheric pressure of 90 times that of Earth and hotter than an Earth oven with a surface temperature of around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface environment of our other neighboring planet Mars is also extremely hostile to human beings being covered by thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of only 0.6% Earth atmospheric pressure and usually very cold most of the time, being below freezing. As I type this, Mars is in opposition to Earth now being brighter than Jupiter and I saw it the other night. Right now today it is the 46th anniversary of when my family first moved out east on Long Island from where we had previously lived in a six story apartment complex in Rego Park, Queens, NY. I was 12 years old on July 25, 1972 and one thing that year I was looking forward to a big blizzard to arrive that winter which to my great chagrin never came. But, in the years since then, there have been several very snowy winters which have compensated for it. In December 1972, the last Apollo mission to the moon, Apollo 17 which was unusual in having a nighttime liftoff of the Saturn 5 rocket. Now, that's the last time that the human race has left the vicinity of immediate orbit. I have seen the Apollo 18 lunar module on display in the Cradle of Aviation museum in Garden City, NY in the vicinity of my house on Long Island. The lunar module was in fact, the world's first true spacecraft, a manned vehicle designed exclusively to operate only in the vacuum of outer space with no aerodynamic shielding at all as is observed in conventional aircraft. It weighed only 16 tons. As the moon has a mere 1/6 the gravity of the Earth, when the two astronauts in the ascent stage when they blasted off the surface of the moon only had to fire the ascent stage engine to raise it to an attitude of 10 miles high which was high enough to enter lunar orbit. In the lunar orbital rendezvous maneuver, the command/service module actually did most of the maneuvering to achieve it while the lunar module was relatively passive. One thing I am always thinking about was that the computer system of the Apollo spacecraft circa 1970 was very primitive by today's standards. Today anyone can walk into a chain drug store or a Walmart, etc. and buy a graphing calculator for less than $100 that actually possesses much more computing power than the very limited ability of the NASA spacecraft back then. Most<b> teenagers </font></b>in middle and high school use them all the time now. When I attended middle and high school in the 1970s, that was before the advent of electronic calculators. I remember it was a real annoyance to do chemistry problems involving long division when I took high school chemistry in 1976. When I took algebra in middle school in 1974, I had to laboriously plot with pencil and graphing paper the linear algebraic equations. I also had to look up laboriously the trigonometric and logarithmic ratios and values in a table located at the back of a mathematics book. Now anyone can easily punch up those numbers in two seconds with an electronic calculator. When I was a in the 1970s, I used a small 2-inch refractor telescope to look at the moon, the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as well as all the familiar bright stars visible in northern hemisphere skies. I remember being excited to look at the craters and Maria of the moon. Now, in fact, nobody on Earth never knew anything about the surface features of the moon until a mere four centuries ago in 1609 when Galileo first looked at the moon back with a primitive telescope. He also noticed all these hitherto unseen stars in the band of the Milky Way galaxy invisible to naked eye observation. Actually going all the way to the moon wasn't really that big a deal as the moon isn't really that far away at a quarter of a million miles. If the Earth were inserted in the center of the Sun, the moon's orbit would lie entirely inside the confines of the Sun as the Sun's diameter is around 864,000 miles. Now, anyone who takes a casual glance at a clear night sky will usually notice mostly blue/white stars in our part of the Milky Way galaxy and if fact, all of those stars are much brighter than our own feeble sun which has an absolute magnitude of a mere +5. As seen from a distance of ten parsecs or 32.6 light years away, our sun would be very hard to make out, shining with a +5 magnitude and most probably invisible to me where I reside in the very light polluted region on Long Island off the east coast of the United States. Presently, the moon is the only celestial body than mankind has visited. Hopefully in the future, the planet Mars and then the four large Galilean satellites and the other satellites of the four Jovian planets will eventually be visited by manned space vehicles and maybe the nighttime side of the planet Mercury. When I was a in the 1970s, I was hooked on watching reruns of the original Star Trek series made from 1966-69. Now, that space opera is supposed to take place a mere 3 centuries from now in the 23rd century. Now, when I think of that, the whole concept of interstellar travel is by leaps far beyond our present technology. One astronomical unit ( 1 A.U.) or 93 million miles, the distance from the Earth to the Sun on a scale represented by one inch, then the distance from the Sun to Pluto would be 5 feet away and the nearest star to our solar system, Alpha Centauri at 4.3 light years distant would lie a staggering 4 miles away. Also, since Sputnik 1 was launched 61 years ago on October 4, 1957 it is still extremely difficult to launch space vehicles to achieve Earth orbit as it takes a speed of 7 miles/second to achieve escape velocity. Clearly, a much cheaper and efficient technology of space travel must be figured out in the next few centuries.           |
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