Volume 6: “The Eagle has landed”
Apollo 11 lands on the Moon 1969
After two more Apollo missions in the first half of 1969 – one to test the just-completed Lunar Module, the other to send it hovering within an agonising 50 miles of the lunar surface,
NASA chiefs gave the ‘go’ for a lunar landing. On July 16, with the eyes of the world focused on Cape Canaveral, only the fifth Saturn V ever to be launched blasted the crew of Apollo 11 towards the Moon. President Kennedy’s deadline was about to be met with just five months to spare.
In the meantime, as their N-1 Moon rocket suffered its second successive launch failure, Soviet space engineers could only watch helplessly as their own dreams of a manned lunar landing went up in smoke. The Soviet Union made one final attempt to steal NASA’s’ thunder by launching an unmanned lunar lander to beat Apollo 11 to the surface. But in the the end, nothing could detract from Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic ‘giant leap for mankind’ on July 21 – watched, it is said, by one seventh of the world’s population. The race to the Moon was finally over.
PLUS audio/video in the digital edition:
NASA chiefs gave the ‘go’ for a lunar landing. On July 16, with the eyes of the world focused on Cape Canaveral, only the fifth Saturn V ever to be launched blasted the crew of Apollo 11 towards the Moon. President Kennedy’s deadline was about to be met with just five months to spare.
In the meantime, as their N-1 Moon rocket suffered its second successive launch failure, Soviet space engineers could only watch helplessly as their own dreams of a manned lunar landing went up in smoke. The Soviet Union made one final attempt to steal NASA’s’ thunder by launching an unmanned lunar lander to beat Apollo 11 to the surface. But in the the end, nothing could detract from Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic ‘giant leap for mankind’ on July 21 – watched, it is said, by one seventh of the world’s population. The race to the Moon was finally over.
PLUS audio/video in the digital edition:
