Moon Landing that almost never happened. In 1969 Apollo 11 had a disaster no one knows about A thousand years from now, when historians look back on the history of mankind, Neil Armstrong’s name will likely still be remembered. The moon landing is perhaps man’s greatest technological accomplishment ever in the history of human civilization. The 50 year anniversary of this event is in 2019.
The odds for success were very low. Even Neil Armstrong only gave it a 50% chance. Computer technology was measured in Kilobytes and megahertz at the time, not terabytes and gigahertz of today – a million times less powerful. The astronauts had to be shielded from deadly cosmic rays. The number of stages involved in rocket launch to earth orbit, to lunar orbit, to descent on the moon, to ascent, to landing back on earth all had to happen with no room for error.
Is it any wonder that millions of people believe that we never landed there? Yet, it happened – not just once, but six times over 3 and ½ years between 1969 and 1972. But the very first mission had two life threatening events that could have easily ended in disaster. The incredible moon landing and take-off disasters averted by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong is shown here.
They were in the Eagle lunar module on their final descent. They were falling rapidly towards the surface of the moon at 20 feet per second. But when they looked out the window, they did not recognize anything they saw. They had not seen this terrain in any of their Apollo simulations. A navigational error and faster than anticipated speed caused them to overshoot the planned landing zone by four miles. So now the terrain was not smooth. Instead, there was a huge crater field, and car sized boulders – dangerous areas to land. But they had to land, and land soon, because they were running low on fuel. Armstrong decided to level the craft and cruise horizontally until he could find a smoother surface to land on.
If they did not land, they would drop to the ground like a rock and damage the craft beyond repair, or they would have to abort the mission, which was equally risky. They were flying to save their lives. There was 60 seconds of fuel left. In normal simulations, the craft was expected to land with 2 minutes of fuel left. But at the 60 second mark they were still 100 feet or 10 stories above the moon’s surface.
The CONTACT light finally came on, and they were on the surface. Only about 20 seconds of fuel was left. Armstrong radioed: “Houston, Tranquilly Base here…the Eagle has landed.” And disaster had been averted.
After exploring the surface of the moon for about 2 and ½ hours, when they came back into the module, as they took their backpacks off, one of the backpacks had snapped off something on the control panel. Aldrin noticed a small black object lying on the floor, and realized it was a circuit breaker switch. Scanning the control panel, he noticed that the switch was missing from a one that was labelled “Engine arm”. This circuit breaker switch happens to be required in order to ignite the engine.
If the engine did not ignite, they could not return home. And there would be no rescue mission. So this tiny black switch could potentially determine whether they lived or died. He told Houston, and they didn’t immediately know what to do. They said, “we’ll work this out down here, so you guys go ahead and go to sleep.” – Of course these guys could not sleep with this looming catastrophe hanging over their heads.
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Contrary to the popular narrative, it was not a metal ball point space pen that Aldrin inserted into the circuit, but a spare felt tip pen that he had brought with him on his spacesuit that saved the day. The Apollo 11 mission ended with a splash down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24 near Wake Island.
There are millions of people in the world who don’t believe that man has ever walked on the moon. I don’t have much to say about this other than give you some surprising stats. In 1960, less than 5% of people doubted the authenticity of the video images they were seeing on their TV screens. But today a full 6% of Americans doubt the moon landing. And over 50% of Russians refuse to believe that Americans set foot there. This may not be all that surprising given widespread government control of media and propaganda dissemination by the Russian regime. But the most surprising stat is that 25% of British people and 9% of French, our allies, do not believe we landed on the moon. What would be the irrefutable proof that could convince people that we did land there? How about photos of the surface of the moon that shows the moon rover tracks, or photos of the abandoned lunar modules from the Apollo, 11, 14, 15, and 16 missions on the surface of the moon. That’s exactly what we have from the 2009 lunar orbiter mission.
