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

“Dear Mr. Taxman: I’m sorry I missed the deadline. I was, uh, hmm, in a spaceship flying to the moon?”

On the evening of April 15, 2010, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s John H. Glenn lecture series honored four legendary men of Apollo 13 on the 40th anniversary of their hair-raising flight: commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise, originally-assigned command module pilot Tom Mattingly, and flight director Gene Kranz.

From left: Fred Haise, Jim Lovell, Tom Mattingly, and Gene Kranz at the National Air and Space Museum, April 15, 2010. Photo: Mark Avino

Kranz and his Mission Control team brought the crew safely home against tall odds after an oxygen tank on the outside of the spacecraft exploded and turned the mission into the worst inflight crisis of the lunar program. Despite the aborted moon landing, Apollo 13 ranks with Apollo 11 and Apollo 8 as one of NASA’s finest hours, often called “The Successful Failure.”

The mission seemed hexed from the start. Just days before launch, the crew was exposed to the German measles. Mattingly, who carried no antibodies against the infection, was bumped on the possibility that he might develop measles during the flight. He was replaced by backup command module pilot Jack Swigert. Mattingly would fly to the moon on Apollo 16, and later commanded two space shuttle flights.

Jack Swigert helps jury-rig the "mailbox," the lithium-hydroxide cannister contraption needed to purge carbon dioxide from the air inside the lunar module, which was used as a lifeboat to get home. Photo: NASA

Swigert, who died of cancer in 1982, had 72 hours to get his head around the fact that he had just gone from an observer to a prime crew member, about to take his first rocket flight, and orbit the moon 240,000 miles away. A bachelor, he was on his own for any last-minute, to-do items at home. He launched with Lovell and Haise on April 11, 1970.

The first two days unfolded smoothly. “Let me mention something that happened just before the explosion,” said Lovell at the Museum event, suppressing a grin. “And it concerns Jack Swigert. Things were working pretty nicely. The spacecraft was working perfectly. My two rookies were really doing a great job. And suddenly Jack looked  at me and his face was white. And he said, ‘Uh, when are we getting back to land, back on the Earth?’ I said, ‘Well, we’re scheduled to land on the 21st.’ ‘When do we have to pay our taxes?’ I said, ‘Tax day is the 15th.’ He said, ‘I got on board this thing—I forgot to mail my taxes in!’ We all had a big laugh, of course. And he says, ‘I’m serious, they could put me in jail!’ And the word got down to the control center, and everybody was laughing themselves silly, until finally someone called up and said, ‘Listen, I think the president gave you a little relief because you’re out of the country.’ ”

"It says, 'Subtract the amount on line 39, Form 1040, from...' " (L-R) Lovell, Swigert, Haise review data on the first day of their post-flight debriefing at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, April 20, 1970. Photo: NASA

Apollo 13 Lunar Module contingency checklist. Courtesy of Bonhams New York.

“Well I can’t say that this thing hasn’t been filled with excitement,” said astronaut Jim Lovell as Apollo 13′s crew crowded into the Command Module Odyssey—following the explosion of an onboard tank in the Service Module—and headed back to Earth. CapCom immediately joked, “Well, James, if you can’t take any better care of a spacecraft than that, then we might not give you another one.”

Exactly 40 years after the events of Apollo 13, Bonhams held its annual space history auction. Included in the 290 items auctioned were the flight notes of Jim Lovell and Fred Haise (left), used during their nerve-wracking return to Earth. The notes, which sold for $45,750, include such reminders as “Turn LM up link squelch off” (written in red ink by Lovell), and comments about various circuit breakers (written in black ink by Haise).

Apollo 11 flight plan. Courtesy of Bonhams New York.

The auction also included memorabilia from Apollo 11, such as this flight plan (right), which was signed by Neil Armstrong on August 9, 1969, while the crew was in quarantine after splashdown. The sheet, which sold for $152,000, includes Armstrong’s famous quote: “One small step for a man—one giant leap for mankind.”

When Bob Hope took Neil Armstrong to Southeast Asia with the USO Tour a few months after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the troops at each show gave the astronaut and former Navy fighter pilot standing ovations whenever he walked on stage.

Armstrong will travel abroad again to bolster troop moral, this time with Armed Forces Entertainment, in association with Morale Entertainment, for the Legends of Aerospace Tour, March 3 to 13, 2010. The first man on the moon will be joined by the last man there, Gene Cernan, who orbited the moon on Apollo 10 and commanded the Apollo 17 landing; and Jim Lovell, who journeyed to the moon on the first orbital mission, Apollo 8, and commanded the Apollo 13 mission that was forced to abort a landing.

This will mark the first time the three astronauts will have traveled together on a goodwill tour, though Armstrong and Cernan have been friends since attending Purdue University together in the early 1950s. They’ll be joined by two more flying legends, test pilot Bob Gilliland, the first man to fly the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, and Vietnam veteran Steve Ritchie, the last U.S. Air Force Pilot Ace.

Media personality David Hartman, the first host of “Good Morning America,” will moderate panel discussions with the pilots and astronauts at some stops, along with author Jeffrey Kluger, senior writer for Time Magazine and co-author with Lovell on the book Lost Moon, on which director Ron Howard based the film Apollo 13.

The tour will log more than 15,000 flight miles to bring the men in contact with more than 10,000 troops. American Airlines will provide the round-trip, trans-Atlantic transportation. The show will make stops in Southwest Asia (specifics aren’t being released for security reasons), and visit wounded troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany on the way back, before returning to a welcome home event in New York at The Intrepid Air & Space Museum on Saturday the 13th.

“I have been waiting my whole life for this opportunity to meet with our service men and women on the front lines,” said Jim Lovell. “They are the real heroes. I’m truly looking forward to thanking them for their service in person and sharing some of my experiences with adversity during Apollo 13. I’m sure it’s going to be an extraordinary experience.”

NASA is honoring former astronaut Fred Haise on December 2 with their Ambassadors of Exploration Award, given out every few months in recent years to the first generation of explorers who made the moon landings happen.

Haise is usually remembered as one of the three astronauts, along with Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert, who barely got home in the Apollo 13 scare. That was his only flight into space.

What many people don’t realize is what a golden boy he was in the Apollo program: He would  have walked on the moon with Lovell; was backup lunar module pilot for Apollos 8 and 11 and was inside the Apollo 11 command module early on the morning of the launch configuring the control panel for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, as well as the last person to see them before pulling his head out and closing the hatch; was backup commander for Apollo 16; commander of the canceled Apollo 19; and commander of five drop tests of the space shuttle Enterprise in 1977. Check out this video of the first landing of a space shuttle, with Haise at the controls. Stick with it past the 3:30 mark for some very groovy 1977 color from an audience that watched in a TV studio.

Haise was also scheduled to command the second orbital flight of the space shuttle, which would rescue the Skylab space station and bring it home. Delays in the shuttle program made this impossible. The station entered Earth’s atmosphere in 1979 and was destroyed. Haise retired from NASA in June 1979.

Here’s a video of Haise talking about his work on the Apollo lunar lander (look on the right side of the page for the video “A Very Unusual Machine.“)

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who later flew the space shuttle in orbit four times, twice as commander, will present Haise with the award at Gorenflo Elementary School, which Haise attended, in his hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. The award consists of a chip of moon rock encased in Lucite for display. Haise will then present the award to Paul Tisdale, superintendent of the Biloxi Public School System, and Tina Thompson, the school’s principal, where it will go on permanent display.

Having settled into a new, lower orbit just 31 miles above the lunar surface, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently passed over the Apollo 17 site.

Harrison "Jack" Schmitt on the moon, December 1972, with Earth in the background.

We emailed moonwalker Harrison Schmitt, the Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and the only geologist—the only scientist—to have walked on the moon, and asked him if he’d seen the new photos of his old stomping grounds. He had. Anything strike him as different from the way it looked in December 1972?

“The most surprising geological aspect of the image is the very dark area that begins about 100 meters north of the SEP [the Surface Electrical Properties transmitter] site,” he replied. “This is probably a concentration of black pyroclastic beads (also seen at Shorty Crater) in the regolith. If we had been able to see it before the Apollo 17 mission, we probably would have picked a station there for a stop on the way to Station 6 (the large boulder site at the base of the North Massif).”

When asked if there’s anything he’d like to see in more detail on future LRO passes, Schmitt had a ready answer. “I suspect that they plan eventually to image the entire area; but a comparable image of Shorty Crater where we found the orange pyroclasitc glass [here's a description of the site and here's a lab photo of the glass beads and an accompanying description] and of the boulder tracks on the walls of the valley would be of great interest. This resolution and sun angle may make it possible to map the distribution of pyroclastic glass throughout the area and region.”

What else did he think was noteworthy? “The very dark rectangle a the LRV [Lunar Roving Vehicle] final parking spot is puzzling,” he said. “Something drastically changed the albedo of the upper surface of the LRV, probably the result of changes to the materials of the seats or because of deposits from broken silver-zinc batteries. Similary, the area immediately arouund the Challenger descent  stage appears darkened, also probably because of contamination from the materials or fluids in the stage.

“Our EVA 1-3 LRV tracks away from the landing area are not obvious,” he continued, “but I suspect other versions of the image will show them. That will be more difficult because the landing area had been lightened by the winnowing of fine material from the top of the regolith giving a very thin albedo enhancement. Tracks in this area look dark because of stirring up the normal dark regolith from below this enhancement.

“Just seeing this overhead, high sun angle detail of the Apollo 17 landing site in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow strikes my interest!” Schmitt wrote. “The pre-Apollo 17 photography we had for planning was at lower sun angles and at least ten times lower resolution. Having a record of our activities in the vicinity of the Challenger [lunar module] stirs great memories. My appreciation and awe goes to Mark Robinson and his LRO team.”

Over the next year or so, NASA’s  LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) will be systematically photographing  the Apollo landing sites from orbit. Here’s the most recent view, showing the Apollo 12 landing site where Pete Conrad and Alan Bean came down in Nobember 1969, near the same spot where the Surveyor 3 spacecraft had landed two years earlier (click on the photo to see it larger).

Visible in the LRO scene are the descent stage, or bottom half, of the Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid, and the smaller Surveyor spacecraft. (The photo at right shows how the area looked to Conrad and Bean.) In the new orbital photo you can see the dark tracks made by the astronauts as they roamed the area, and the ALSEP experiment package they left behind.

Rather, the end of it. The crew of Apollo 11 didn’t realize how magnificent it was until they were thrust into a frenzied world after 19 days of quiet quarantine. From the moment they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, they’d been penned up like three men in an episode of The Twilight Zone, having returned to their own people to find themselves captive curiosities, like fish in an aquarium or animals in a zoo.

The Apollo 11 crewmembers are greeted by their wives as they arrive in Houston.

Following a flight from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to Houston, their trailer was hooked up to Building 37 at the Manned Spacecraft Center (today the Johnson Space Center), where their quarantine continued in more spacious digs. The building housed the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, which included an apartment complex with private rooms for each man, common rooms, workrooms, a kitchen and dining room, and labs for studying the lunar material they’d brought back.

That post-flight period, during which NASA had the opportunity to fully debrief the crew (through panes of glass), was the last bit of peace and quiet the astronauts would enjoy for a very long time. Armstrong celebrated his 39th birthday during the quarantine, and was pleasantly surprised with a cake from the in-house chef, who shared their quarters along with another chef, a couple of doctors, a janitor, a journalist, and a NASA public relations official. Potential contamination with an adjacent lab where the study of moon rocks was in progress pulled six more people into the quarantine.

Then, on August 10, 1969, at about 9:00 on a Sunday evening, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins became free men, deemed at long last not to be health risks to planet Earth due to some unknown lunar germ they possibly had picked up on the moon. They were free to go home. Including their eight-day, 500,000-mile roundtrip flight, and their medical quarantine prior to that, they had been in seclusion for over a month.

Armstrong celebrates his 39th birthday with a surprise cake during the quarantine, August 5, 1969.

Their freedom would be short-lived, with Monday their only day off at home. Tuesday saw a major press conference at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, and Wednesday morning at 5:00 a.m. the beginning of a one-day, cross-country megatour for which Richard Nixon loaned them his presidential jet. Tickertape parades greeted them in New York and Chicago, and the day climaxed with a huge banquet at Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Hotel, attended by 1,440 guests including 50 astronauts, all of NASA’s top brass, 44 state governors, representatives of 92 foreign countries, entertainment industry heavies, Supreme Court justices, and the president and vice president and their families. The $43,000 gala’s menu included garden peas shelled by hand to prevent bruising, and a Claire de Lune ice cream dessert, each staked with an American flag.

Armstrong comes out of quarantine on August 10. Chief astronaut Deke Slayton is seen at left.

Not to be excluded, Houston threw its big bash for the crew three days later, attended by 250,000. September 6 brought individual parades for each crewmember in his own hometown. September 9, they were brought to Washington for NASA’s Apollo 11 “Splashdown Party” at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, and an unveiling of the commemorative moon landing stamp at the U.S. Post Office. A week later the crew was summoned back to Washington to be honored at a joint session of Congress.

On September 29, the round-the-world “Giant Step” goodwill tour began, in which about 100 million people in 24 countries on six continents saw the astronauts, and an estimated 25,000 people shook their hands. The trip, again on the presidential jet, finished on November 5 with an overnight for the crew and their wives at the White House, complete with a private dinner with the president.

Aldrin fingers a shotgun—not the one Soviet cosmonauts would give to Armstrong—in Norway.

The whirlwind didn’t end there. Armstrong was off to Vietnam for Christmas with Bob Hope’s USO tour, as the requests for appearances and speaking engagements began to pour in.

But a trip he made the following May was perhaps the most intriguing: An invite to the Soviet Union, in which Armstrong—the second NASA astronaut to visit after Frank Borman—was received quietly in St. Petersburg. His visit had not been announced. He made a presentation to the International Committee on Space Research, and some days later visited Moscow and Star City. He met personally with Premier Alexei Kosygin. His personal hosts were cosmonauts Georgy Beregovoy and Konstantin Feoktistov, of Soyuz III and Voskhod I, respectively. After meeting the widows of Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov, and being led around Star City by Valentina Tereshkova, Armstrong was feted at a dinner attended only by the male cosmonauts, in which they presented him with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun, his name engraved on the stock.

Apollo 11’s PR race seemed to have no finish line. But the other race was over, and the Soviets, good sports in the end, had done their part to recognize the triumph of Apollo 11. Although Armstrong had to turn over most of the official gifts he received to the U.S. government, he was allowed to keep the shotgun.

In an essay published recently in the New York Times, novelist Thomas Mallon made a provocative comment: “If any real scandal attaches to Project Apollo, it’s the extent to which hard science was allowed to dominate the astronauts’ hours on the moon. With less geology and more ontology, they might have kept the public fired up for further space exploration.”

It sounds harsh, even anti-science (heresy!), but I understand what Mallon means. Most of the men who went to the moon now say they regret not having had more time to savor the experience. They rushed around like rock-collecting robots, ever mindful of the checklist and the voice of Mission Control, and had to steal whatever time they could to pause, look around, and react like human beings to the alien world on which they’d landed. What a shame, for them and for us.

Journalist-turned-filmmaker Al Reinert must have felt the same regret when he set out to make his Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary For All Mankind—which still stands as the best film ever done on Apollo. Reinert almost singlehandedly changed the tone of Apollo reminiscences from grand-scale techno-worship to a focus on the individuals who journeyed to the moon. Instead of learning how many pounds of rocks he collected, we hear Charlie Duke recount a weird and vivid dream about finding his own body and that of fellow Apollo 16 astronaut John Young on the moon. Instead of triumphal music, we get Brian Eno’s eerie, ambient soundtrack. It’s Apollo as a personal story, scaled down but every bit as powerful as the bombastic narratives about national glory and heroism we’d been served before Reinert came along.

For All Mankind was re-released this summer on DVD and Blu-ray, with extras including An Accidental Gift, a mini-feature on the making of the film, in which Reinert claims that the film shot by the Apollo astronauts—not the geological samples—was the real treasure returned from the moon. Here’s a clip:

NASA is once again thinking of sending people to the moon, “this time to stay,” as the rallying cry goes. And once again, scientists are planning a busy schedule of fieldwork. Which is fine. For all the talk of expanding human civilization to the moon and Mars, nobody suggests what individual people might do there, other than tending science experiments or some grim corporate mining operation. But if we do return, this time could we please give the astronauts an occasional break to think/ write / sing / play/ take pictures/ meditate or do whatever else it is that human beings like to do, left to their own devices?

All over: A dusty Gene Cernan inside the lunar module Challenger after his third Apollo 17 moonwalk—one of the last photos taken on the moon.

Space historian Matthew Hersch writes:

This year marks the 40th anniversary not only of Apollo 11’s historic moon landing, but of the vigorous public debate that accompanied it—debate that, decades later, shows no signs of weakening. Human spaceflight has always been controversial, and condemnation of Project Apollo began almost immediately following President Kennedy’s announcement of the moon goal in 1961. Scientists and lay persons alike wondered whether the returns on the endeavor might ever equal its costs, or if it would, instead, be (in the words of one critic) “the most expensive funeral man has ever had.”

Of all the criticisms, only the technical ones seemed to diminish over time. In the fall of 1968, American journalists still weren’t sure if the United States could make it to the moon before the Soviets did. But within months, NASA proved that its astronauts could achieve lunar orbit (Apollo 8), dock with and pilot a lunar lander (Apollo 9) and take the lander to within 50,000 feet of the moon’s surface (Apollo 10). Whether America should go to the moon was another matter, and the diverse objections commentators raised have kept social critics and comedians busy ever since.

By 1969, NASA’s funding had already begun to decline; distress over the expenditure of resources was the most common complaint about Apollo from the Left and the Right: the program soaked up funds that many thought could be better spent on social welfare, defense, or nothing at all. Other criticisms were ideological: some felt that Apollo represented the worst of American culture instead of the best—a government project in the land of free enterprise; an example of American hubris, militarism, racism, and gender inequality; a garish form of public theater. Even the Soviet Union (itself the sponsor of a vigorous moon program) criticized Apollo, describing it as a grotesque farce the decadent West had orchestrated to lull its citizens into a false state of satisfaction—mindless capitalist “entertainment,” according to the government-controlled Soviet press. Other critics noted the uncertain pedigree of some of the foreign-born NASA engineers (Tom Lehrer’s “Wernher von Braun”), or condemned the loss of life in the January 1967 Apollo 1 accident.

The Apollo 11 landing tempered the objections, but only for a while. Ten days after the newspapers reported the triumph, moon news had been driven from the front page in favor of the usual topics of interest: Nixon, Vietnam, the Middle East. Landing on the moon hadn’t changed the world, at least not in a way that anyone would notice; the lunar surface had become just one more place—like the South Pole—that a few talented people might visit from time to time. The only thing likely to have preserved Apollo 11’s triumph from the critics (short of finding large lunar gold deposits) was continued interplanetary exploration; without it, Apollo became part of the past instead of the future.

With each successive anniversary of Apollo 11, pride mixed with ever greater quantities of nostalgia, fueled by scholarship casting new light on the moon decision. For each work of solid scholarship (like Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age) there were hundreds of editorials, opinion articles, and funny but flippant riffs on a national preoccupation that seemed very serious at the time, but increasingly strikes modern audiences as absurd (Gerard DeGroot’s Dark Side of the Moon; Jon Stewart on The Daily Show). The arguments, like Apollo itself, are frozen time: that establishing NASA was a mistake; that NASA should have gone to the moon in partnership with the Soviets or not at all; that it should have stopped at the first landing, or flown people better able to interpret or take advantage of the trip (scientists, philosophers, artists). Other critics have balked at America’s loss of nerve, wondering why it failed to capitalize on its moon success with further explorations of the solar system. Conjuring the unsavory image of Holocaust deniers, some would even rob Apollo of its history, insisting that the landings were faked on a soundstage. Efforts to debunk the debunkers have spawned a sub-literature (Moon Base Clavius) that is in equal measures fascinating and sad.

Long after Apollo’s technical achievements are dwarfed by other adventures, its greatest legacy may be the volume of comment it generated. As a free society, the United States tolerated public criticism of the space program in a way other nations would never have allowed. The criticism almost certainly made Apollo a better program: stronger, more focused, and imbued with urgency. Were they to visit our world in a time machine, the emperors of ancient civilizations would easily understand why America went to the moon in 1969. What might make them wonder is why the nation tolerated such criticism, or how it could pull off the landings in spite of it.

Hersch, an HSS/NASA Fellow in the History of Space Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is writing a labor history of American astronauts.

Dr. Bill Carpentier, in orange, follows the astronauts into their quarantine trailer on the deck of the U.S.S. Hornet.

Riding in a helicopter with the Apollo 11 astronauts following their Pacific Ocean splashdown on July 24, 1969, Bill Carpentier might have had a thousand questions for the first men to return from the moon. But there would have been no point in asking. Even if Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins hadn’t been wearing bulky masks, the helicopter noise would have drowned out their answers. So there was no conversation at all between the astronauts and their NASA doctor on the short flight to the waiting aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet, where they entered a mobile trailer to begin two and a half weeks of quarantine.

The isolation was a precaution against some exotic moon-bug contaminating the Earth, which even the doctors considered far-fetched. Still, recalls Carpentier, now 73, “nobody thought the probability was zero.”  So they did “whatever it took” to follow protocol to the letter.

Once inside the trailer, the astronauts took off their isolation garments, and Carpentier immediately collected swab samples to send off to the lab. Then the three lunar explorers headed one-by-one to the shower before meeting (through thick glass) with President Richard Nixon, who was waiting on the carrier.

Carpentier remembers the day as businesslike. “There wasn’t a lot of time to talk or reflect,” he says. Later, after the ceremonies were over, they relaxed over drinks (Carpentier was the bartender). But soon it was back to work. The astronauts had reports to write and a spacecraft to unpack. The doctor kept to his medical tests and sample collection, all in the name of research. “I felt very strongly that we owed it to the program, that we needed to learn as much as we could, as carefully as we could, for the future.”

After the quarantine ended in Houston on August 10, Carpentier joined the astronauts on their round-the-world goodwill tour, which he remembers as “an incredible journey” and “very heady stuff” for a young doctor from a small town in Canada.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1979, Carpentier, who had left NASA by then, helped commission an oratorio composed by Richard Willis, Composer-in-Residence at Baylor University, based on poetry by Cynthia Linzy. The piece, which the doctor describes as “an outstanding example of 20th century atonal choral music,” was performed by the Temple (Texas) Civic Chorus, where Carpentier sang. Called “For All Mankind,” the music “comes to an end but does not resolve,” he says. Just like Apollo.