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Apollo 11

Where were you on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon? What were you doing on October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik? Do you remember April 12, 1981, when the space shuttle Columbia made its first flight?

In 2008, the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival included the program “NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond,” and as part of that program, visitors were encouraged to document (written on note cards and recorded on tape) their memories of America’s space program.  A few of the festival-goer’s memories appear below.

As the 50^th anniversary year of human spaceflight draws to a close, we ask you to remember your own space milestones. After you read the remembrances here, leave a comment to tell us where you were, what you saw, and how you felt.

I had just learned to drive my husband’s stick shift car. He worked in the simulation lab with astronauts. I was stopped in front of their building to pick up my husband. As he got into the car, he said, “There’s Neil.” I said, “Neil who?” He said, “Armstrong! Who else?” At that point I went limp, the clutch jumped, the car lurched forward, and Neil just missed being hit.

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. I remember Werner von Braun was our most famous citizen. Huntsville was very sleepy until Sputnik was launched. All of a sudden, Huntsville became a hotbed of activity, all centered on the space program. Within three years, the U.S. had an active space program. Many of the engines for spacecraft were built in Huntsville. Huntsville calls itself “The Space Capital of the Universe” now. In 1950, it was known as “the Watercress Capital of the U.S.” Things change!

In 1957 Sputnik went up and the talk was that U.S. students had to catch up academically. I was 10 years old—the next day was the first time we ever had homework in school.

I was in second grade when the entire student body of Norfeld Elementary reported to the auditorium to watch a not-very-big portable black-and-white TV for a Mercury capsule splashdown in the Atlantic. We were all worried that it could miss and veer back into space forever. (It went OK.)

When I was in elementary school, a man came to the school and sang songs about Black Holes. Needless to say, I was terrified.

I’ve been fascinated by space exploration for my entire life. My family tells me that my first word was “moon.” Now I work as a NASA contractor, on a mission to the Moon (LRO). I’m grateful to be standing on the shoulders of giants, the men and women before and beside me that helped NASA and all space agencies achieve what they have. And we’re only at the beginning of the adventure.

Moon hoax believers contend that NASA’s Apollo lunar landings were elaborately orchestrated lies, and that men never walked on the moon. Apollo 18, a film that opened this month, proposes the opposite: that NASA launched a manned lunar mission the public has no knowledge of—until now.

The Apollo program was canceled in 1970, and the last mission of the series, Apollo 17, launched on December 7, 1972. Apollo 18 sells itself as a documentary drawn from real footage shot during a secret—and final—manned moon mission. But the illusion is ruined by the credits that roll at the end of the film, as well as a statement that all characters are fictional.

Taken as a work of pseudo-history, Apollo 18 gets many things right. Good special effects simulate the grainy black-and-white footage from real Apollo missions. And the film is nicely cast, with Lloyd Owen as mission commander Nate Walker and Warren Christie as lunar module pilot Ben Anderson. Both men capture the swagger and unflappability of military aviators turned astronauts (their characters are U.S. Navy pilots).

The weakness of Apollo 18 is its lack of originality. The moon’s real secret, as it turns out, (plot spoiler ahead) is that the rocks themselves are extraterrestrial life forms, who like to invade human hosts. Unfortunately, we’ve seen scarier parasitic aliens before, most notably in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien.

The Apollo 11 crew in quarantine, after their return from the moon in 1969.

Before Apollo 11 (the first manned moon landing) in July 1969, there were a lot of Earthly concerns about the planet being contaminated by a lunar pathogen picked up by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In a book just published by NASA, When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA’s Planetary Protection Programs, author Michael Meltzer devotes a chapter to examining the years of committee meetings and painstaking plans on how to prevent “back contamination.” Items that had come into contact with the  Apollo 11 crew—clothing, film canisters, even the command module—had to be sanitized. Lunar samples were quarantined until it was determined they did not pose any risk of contamination. The astronauts themselves had to chill for a few weeks in the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a customized trailer now on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia.

In a scene that seems almost comical today, Meltzer details the care taken to protect Richard M. Nixon when he visited the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, where the Apollo 11 crew was taken after their command module landed in the Pacific: “Only after the astronauts were safely sealed in the airtight Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) and the Hornet’s deck disinfected did NASA allow President Richard Nixon…to approach the large window at the rear of the MQF to give his congratulations. During the transfer of astronauts, President Nixon had been kept far away, a helicopter waiting to fly [him] off the ship should any leaks be detected in the MQF.”

Scientists now know that the surface of the moon is too sterile to support life, but NASA had to play it safe. After Apollo 14, however, the sanitizing and quarantining protocols were suspended.

At the end of Apollo 18, the filmmakers note that more than 840 pounds of lunar samples were returned to Earth, some of which were given to foreign dignitaries as gifts and were stolen and now unaccounted for. Implying what, exactly? That there’s still a threat of moon rocks going alien on us? Don’t tell that to the hundreds of people who daily touch a moon rock on display at the National Air and Space Museum.

Three legendary astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Gene Cernan—were in Kabul, Afghanistan, yesterday, meeting with American service men and women as well as young Afghan Air Force trainees.

From the NATO press release:

“This is the best day of my life!” said Lt. Fatama Abteen, one of a small handful of female Afghan Air Force trainees.  “I’m overwhelmed and extremely excited.  It’s hard to communicate how much this means to me.”

Spacesuit worn by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, commander of the Soyuz 19 spacecraft, during the Apollo-Soyuz test project on July 15-19, 1975. Courtesy Bonhams.

On May 5, 2011,  Bonhams auction house will hold its annual space history sale. (The date commemorates the 50th anniversary of Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in Freedom 7.) Some 250 items are up for grabs, a few coming from the Forbes Collection, others from the personal collections of various astronauts, and some from the estate of NASA administrator James E. Webb. Here are six of our favorites from the list:

Left is one of Alexei Leonov’s spacesuits, this one from the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz test project. In March 1965, cosmonaut Leonov made the first spacewalk in history, beating American Ed White by almost three months. Floating outside his capsule for 10 minutes, Leonov felt, he writes, “like a seagull with its wings outstretched, soaring high above the Earth.”

On July 17, 1975, the final Apollo spacecraft docked with its Soyuz counterpart, and the two commanders, Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov, shook hands through the open hatch of the Soyuz, symbolically ending the space race. Bonhams’ catalog notes that “Leonov wore this space suit during the docking operations, and during launch and re-entry. The Sokol-K suit was categorized as a ‘rescue suit’ since it was not suitable for EVA use, but was designed to protect the wearer in the event of spacecraft depressurization…. The Sokol-K was first used on the Soyuz 12 mission in 1973 in response to the loss of the Soyuz 11 crew whose spacecraft depressurized during re-entry.” The suit comes from the Forbes Collection, and is estimated to fetch a whopping $100,000 to $150,000.

National Aeronautic Association (U.S. representative of the FAI) document confirming the first manned space flight. Courtesy Bonhams.

Lot 34, right, is none other than the certificate from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale confirming astronaut Alan Shepard’s May 5, 1961 flight.

In order to qualify for the record of manned spaceflight, the FAI (the governing organization for aeronautical world records) decided that the pilot had to take off and land in the same vehicle. When Yuri Gagarin re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on April 12, 1961, he ejected from his spacecraft, as planned, and landed separately by parachute. Gagarin’s ejection was covered up by Soviet authorities, however, and the truth wasn’t discovered until 1971, by which time the FAI had certified Vostok 1 as the first successful manned spaceflight.

The document at right confirms records set by Shepard in the “non-air breathing manned rocket” category: (a) altitude without Earth orbit, and (b) greatest mass lifted without Earth orbit. The document is estimated between $8,000 and $12,000.

HAM the chimp's flown neck tag. Courtesy Bonhams.

Who could forget the story of Number 65, also known as HAM the chimp? HAM (his name was an acronym derived from Holloman AeroMedical Research Laboratories, where he was sent for training) was one of six chimpanzees-in-training. On January 31, 1961, the little guy flew 157 miles into space, and reached a maximum velocity on his suborbital flight of 5,857 miles per hour. This brass disc, lot 18, is expected to bring between $2,000 and $4,000.

Get your hands on one of the largest model airplanes in the world. The 102-foot-long Concorde, perched atop its former home in New York City's Times Square. Courtesy Brian Abbott.

Below is what may be the largest model airplane in the world, a model of the Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde. That’s right, it’s 50 percent scale, approximately 102 feet long, with a 42-foot wing span, and is estimated to weigh 24,000 pounds.

Bonhams’ catalog notes that in 1996, British Airways commissioned the Texas firm L&L Tooling to build this model. “The cost of the model is believed to [have] been $980,000. It was transported to New York City on five trailers, and assembled in situ by a local sign company, four stories up atop the Times Square Brewery on 42nd Street…. At night it was lit from inside…. The model was taken down in 2001, when the Brewery building made way for a tower block. Initially BA planned to reuse the Concorde model in a different site, but it ended up being transferred to the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island, where it has remained, largely undisturbed, for the last decade.” If you’d like your own Concorde, be prepared to shell out $100,000 to $150,000.

Full-scale Saturn V F-1 engine model. Courtesy Bonhams.

Maybe you’d like to have both air and space represented in your yard. Why not add this full-scale Saturn V F-1 engine model, left, to your landscape? This 19-foot-tall model was built for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, held in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Bonhams’ catalog notes that “At the fair was a Space Park which featured scale models of Gemini-Titan and Mercury-Atlas rockets, the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7, an Apollo CSM and LM, and the SI-C first stage of the Saturn V, complete with its five F-1 engines. In the decades following the Fair, most of the models remained in place. In the early 2000s, the New York Hall of Science expanded into the Park, tidying up, and restoring the models. The Saturn V first stage was dismantled, and its model F-1 engines were distributed between several museums.”

Interested buyers beware: the model is being sold in situ, and is currently located in Garden City, New York. The winning bidder will have to remove the model from its current location no later than July 5. The estimate is $15,000 to $25,000, plus the cost of removal and shipping.

Early rocketry manuscript by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Courtesy Bonhams.

Looking for something more historic? How about a early rocketry manuscript by none other than Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the man who invented space travel?

This eight-page manuscript, dated 1912, is titled “Latest thoughts regarding construction of jet devices, in the work The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices.” Tsiolkovsky is considered, along with Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard, to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and spaceflight, and is said to have inspired both Wernher von Braun and Sergey Korolyov.

Beneath the rocket sketch Tsiolkovsky has written, “Certainly many are frightened by this progressive idea [rocket flight], but life itself will make mankind do everything possible to solve this problem. The conquering of solar space is a necessity dictated by the experience of all history of mankind.”

The manuscript comes with an authenticating letter from the director of the Tsiolkovsky Museum in Kaluga, Russia, and is expected to bring $12,000 to $18,000.

Still picking yourself up off the floor after reading our recent post about the $152,000 that was paid at auction for Neil Armstrong’s autograph, along with his famous “one small step” quote, written on a sheet of the Apollo 11 flight plan?

Here’s what Armstrong had to say in his 2005 biography by James Hansen about rumors of such a memento:

“The ultimate Armstrong memento, [collector Robert] Pearlman relates, would be a signed picture or letter that includes Neil’s famous quote ‘one small step.’ For years it was believed that no authentic examples of such an item existed. Recently, ‘an authentic example,’ signed while Neil was still in quarantine, surfaced, and though it never sold, many thought it could easily reach $25,000, if not higher. Armstrong categorically denounces any such item as a fake. ‘I know that to be false, because I have never, ever quoted myself. From day one, I never did that. So it doesn’t exist anywhere. Not for my mom, not for the Smithsonian, not for anybody—there is not one anywhere. Not in quarantine or any other time. I never did one.’ “

Armstrong hasn’t given an autograph in years. According to his biography, he signed anything he was asked to for the first fifteen or so years after the moon landing. Then, dealers of collectibles began misrepresenting themselves as school teachers or children, asking for signed photos by mail. By 1993, Armstrong saw that forgeries of his signature were being sold on the Internet, and stopped giving his autograph, advice that Charles Lindbergh had given him in September 1969 at a banquet of  the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

Nonetheless, Armstrong’s autograph, according to Paul Fraser Collectibles of the United Kingdom, is the most valuable in the world, and fetches more than $7,500 these days. Here’s Fraser’s top ten list:

10. Mick Jagger

9. Pele

8. Madonna

7. Bob Dylan

6. Muhammad Ali

5. J.K. Rowling

4. Queen Elizabeth II

3. Paul McCartney

2. Tiger Woods

1. Neil Armstrong

"Where do I sign? Not." The Apollo 11 crew arrives at the White House at the conclusion of their 45-day Giant Step Presidential Goodwill Tour, November 1969. Photo: NASA