The Day the Eagle Landed...

The Apollo 11 Astronauts -- Neal Armstrong, Michael Collons, and Buzz Aldrin

There aren't too many days on which I can tell you precisely what I was doing 50 years ago.  Today, on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing of the Apollo program, I can.

In 1969, I was living with Forrest Frueh and Jim Mouser at 1212 Woodland Drive in Norman, Oklahoma.  I had returned to school to earn an engineering degree and was beginning my senior year.  Forrest and Jim constituted the entire department of business law in the College of Business at the University of Oklahoma.  We had been living under the same roof for a couple of years.

The latest in technology!

The moon landing began to unfold on a Saturday.  The mission had launched a few days earlier on July 16, 1969.  We had watched the launch on a brand new 21" (!) RCA color television that Forrest had purchased for this very special occasion.  We had a TV room with plenty of comfortable seating in what had originally been the master bedroom in the house.

As I recall, we started watching the landing coverage with Walter Cronkite on CBS at around noon on Saturday.  To fully comprehend how slowly things would unfold, you have to recall the complexity of the mission, its equipment, and its procedures.  There was a three-stage Saturn V rocket that launched the whole operation.  Only the third stage made the trip to the moon.  Upon this stage were mounted a command module (CM) with a cabin for the three astronauts, and the only part that returned to Earth; a service module (SM), which supported the command module with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen, and water; and a lunar module (LM) that had two stages – a descent stage for landing on the Moon, and an ascent stage to place the astronauts back into lunar orbit.

The procedure that the astronauts followed on that day is well described on the Space.com Website (I've corrected all times to Central Daylight Time): "Lunar landing operations for the Apollo 11 crew officially began around 8:27 a.m. July 20, when lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin crawled through a tunnel separating the command module Columbia from the lunar module, Eagle, to power on the lander.  Four hours later, Buzz Aldrin and his commander, Neil Armstrong, stood in Eagle while it separated from Columbia. At the controls of Columbia, command module pilot Michael Collins turned on the ship's engines and moved it away. He watched as Armstrong and Aldrin fired Eagle's engines for the lunar descent. "Everything's going just swimmingly. Beautiful!" Collins said over radio to Mission Control.

But not everything went to plan after that. Eagle's computer experienced several task overloads that tripped program alarms in the spacecraft. Just after 3 p.m., Armstrong looked outside the window and saw the automatic landing system was taking Eagle to a rocky field. He took control of the spacecraft, steering it down to the surface with just seconds of fuel to spare. Apollo 11 was on the moon.

"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed," he radioed Mission Control at 3:18 p.m.

The main event, the moonwalk, began at 9:39 p.m. when Armstrong opened the hatch of Eagle and backed outside, watched by Aldrin. He carefully moved down the ladder, turning on the TV camera on the way. His first step took place at 9:56 p.m. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," he radioed Earth.

Armstrong quickly moved to take samples from nearby Eagle, and Aldrin followed him on to the surface. The moonwalk lasted 2.5 hours, in which time the men picked up several rock samples, deployed science experiments, erected a flag and took a phone call from U.S. President Richard Nixon. Eagle's hatch was closed, astronauts inside, at 12:11 a.m. the next morning."

Buzz Aldrin with U.S. Flag on Moon

The astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin actually slept for several hours after the lunar walk and before the lift off of the ascent module.  I recall that it was some time around noon on Sunday before they left the moon's surface. And all this time, the newscasters had to find subjects to fill their coverage programs.  There were interviews and discussions of the hardware, reviews of the history of the space program -- unending diversions to fill the time until the module would ascend to rejoin Michael Collins in the Command Module for the return to earth.

The astronauts used Eagle's ascent stage to lift off from the lunar surface and rejoin Collins in the command module. There was some concern that the ascent engine might not ignite correctly because Aldrin had bumped a circuit breaker and damaged it earlier, but the ascent engine started as planned.  They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that propelled the ship out of the last of its 30 lunar orbits on a trajectory back to Earth.

The whole world breathed a sigh of relief that they were on their way back home.

It was a unique moment in which the entire nation was united in an immense sense of pride and accomplishment.  A visionary president had laid down a challenge ten years before and we as a nation had accepted and run with it.  There aren't a lot of times in U.S. history that are as unifying.  And this one unified us in a joyous way rather than a shared tragedy.  It was as if every American had a kid on the winning team in a national championship.  What a very special moment it was.