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.

Twenty years ago, performer/director Andrew Dawson, who calls his type of art “physical theater,” accepted a challenge. Could he create a one-man show using only a table as a stage? With such a small set, he realized he’d need a big subject. “And I couldn’t think of anything bigger than going to the moon,” he says.

The result was “Space Panorama,” his one-man, 30-minute recreation of the Apollo program, which he staged for the first time at a festival in northern England in 1989. Since then he has performed it around the world, including, most recently, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to mark the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Apollo 16 astronaut John Young saw the show in London, and was so tickled that he invited Dawson to perform it at an astronaut reunion in Houston in 2001—”the most nervous I’ve ever been,” he says. Over the years he has varied the tone. The show started out serious and reverent, became more humorous, and now has settled somewhere in between. But always, Dawson delights his audience by telling a big story using only his hands, whether to represent the frenzy of a rocket liftoff or the moon hanging in the sky overhead.

Here’s an excerpt from “Space Panorama,” courtesy of the artist. The music is from Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony:

The Soviets called it the N1, and kept it secret, of course. What a hard secret that must have been to keep, considering just how awesome this rocket was. A tall, ultra-steep cone, it was a bit more 19th century in appearance, more science fictiony-looking, than the square shouldered and cylindrical Saturn V. The N1 was so much more…Soviet looking. It might have been an element of a nuclear power plant, or a tower rising up in the middle of any Eastern-bloc industrial city.

The business end of the N1.

At 345 feet tall, the N1 was only slightly shorter than the Saturn V’s 363 feet, and was built for the same purpose—to send people to the moon. The Soviets hadn’t mastered large, first-stage rocket engines, so the N1 had 24 rockets arranged in an outer ring at the base of its first stage, and six more in an inner ring, with a total thrust at liftoff of 9.666 million pounds, three million more than that of the strongest Saturn V. The Soviets had not mastered the combustion of liquid hydrogen either, so the vehicle burned only kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The N1’s four unmanned launches, between February 1969 and November 1972, all ended in firey failures. The second of these, on July 4, 1969, in the hours after midnight local time at the Baykonur Cosmodrome (still July 3 in Moscow), produced a spectacular detonation as the rocket rose briefly to about 600 feet and collapsed onto the launch pad. The event unleashed an estimated force of 250 tons of TNT, destroyed the launch pad and the surrounding infrastructure, and set the program back two years.

Remarkably no one was killed, as all observers were kept at a safe distance. But Valeriy Menshikov, a young lieutenant in the Strategic Missile Forces who worked as a duty officer that night, later wrote [as quoted in Asif Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974]:

Only in the trench did I understand the sense of the expression “your heart in your mouth.” Something quite improbable was being created all around—the steppe was trembling like a vibration test jig, thundering, rumbling, whistling, gnashing—all mixed together in some terrible, seemingly unending cacaphony. The trench proved to be so shallow and unreliable that one wanted to burrow into the sand so as not to hear this nightmare…the thick wave from the explosion passed over us, sweeping away and leveling everything. Behind it came hot metal raining down from above. Pieces of the rocket were thrown ten kilometers away, and large windows were shattered in structures 40 kilometers away. A 400 kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the installation and testing wing, seven kilometers from the launch pad.

It’s diamond shaped. And it’s the crown jewel of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, displayed on the first floor in the Milestones of Flight Gallery. It’s the Apollo 11 command module, the heat shield charred from entering Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 35.

Last Sunday, July 19, as the Apollo 11 crew made their way from a sequestered place in the upper floors of the museum down an escalator to the IMAX theater for the 40th anniversary John Glenn Lecture, they paused to say a few words to an overflow crowd in the Gallery. Armstrong, in one of his rare moments of sarcasm spiced with bravado, stepped up to the microphone, looked up at the X-15 rocket plane hanging overhead, and said, “Flew that one.” Then he looked down at the command module: “Flew that one.” The crowd cooed with delight.

Is it a crime, then, that the command module, like so many objects on public display, is a victim of graffiti? The culprit: Mike Collins, who just before being transported from Pearl Harbor to Houston in the summer of 1969, still in the quarantine trailer with his crewmates, made his way one last time through the tube connecting the CM to their trailer, and penned a few words on an inside panel, just above the sextant port:

A sentimental thought from the guy who flew her. (Click photo to enlarge)

“Spacecraft 107 – alias Apollo 11
alias “Columbia”
The Best Ship to Come Down the Line
God Bless Her
Michael Collins
CMP”

The astronauts of the 1960s were mostly a crewcut bunch, but by 1969 fashions were changing, and Apollo crews returning to Earth had to make a decision: Should I shave off my moon beard? Most did, but a few experimented with new looks when they got back. Mike Collins of Apollo 11 (right), kept his mustache while in quarantine, but it was gone by the time he addressed Congress in mid-September. Apollo 14’s Ed Mitchell (below) sported a beard even after returning home.

The Apollo 16 crew of Duke, Young and Mattingly (below, left to right, in the raft following their splashdown), had quit shaving in space, but went back to a clean look before they left the aircraft carrier. And judging from a sequence of photographs taken by his Apollo 17 crewmates, Jack Schmitt flirted with the idea of keeping a mustache on the way back from the moon, but must have decided against it.

The first two expeditions to the moon, in December 1968 and May 1969, sent back conflicting reports on its color when viewed up close. The Apollo 8 astronauts described the surface as whitish gray, like “dirty beach sand,” in the words of Bill Anders. Tom Stafford’s Apollo 10 crew saw tans and browns, with the Sea of Tranquillity being “chocolate brown.”

Who was right? Turns out they both were. The moon appeared different at different times, mostly depending on the sun angle. When the sun was high, the surface tended to look brown. At low sun angles, it appeared more gray.

Mike Collins of Apollo 11 later recalled “a cheery rose color” near noon. Jim Irwin of Apollo 15 wrote (in his 1973 book To Rule the Night) that the moon was “all ochers, tans, golds, whites, grays, browns—no greens, no blues.”

The moon in Earthshine, Apollo 17.

Well, not so fast. When orbiting over the night side of the moon in Earthshine (the equivalent of moonlight, but brighter), the surface looked “pale blue,” according to Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke. Collins also described a “bluish glow,” which his crewmate Neil Armstrong thought beautiful. “It’s a view worth the price of the trip,” he radioed to Mission Control during one nightside orbit.

Even walking on the surface, the astronauts saw a surprising amount of color change. In their postflight science report for Apollo 12, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean commented:

The first day, everything appeared to be dull gray. If we looked very closely, of course, now and then it was possible to observe a white rock or, in an area where we had disturbed the soil, perhaps a slightly different shade of gray. Between the first and second days, definite color change accompanied the Sun-angle change. On the second day, everything that had appeared to be gray on the first day started looking either a dark or a tannish brown.

Earth, not surprisingly, presented a more varied pallette when viewed from the moon. “The red Earth colors were easy to distinguish, but the greens and grays were difficult to distinguish from the blues,” reported the Apollo 12 astronauts after their return.

Solar eclipse by the Earth, Apollo 12.

That crew also was treated to the stunning sight of a total eclipse of the sun by the Earth, just a few hours before their splashdown in the Pacific. The planet itself was pitch black. “All you can see is this sort of purple-blue, orange, some shades of violet, completely around the Earth,” Bean radioed to the ground. While the planet was in darkness, the crew saw lightning flashes in the atmosphere, the lights of cities, and the bright light of Venus, just off the Earth’s limb. Bean, who’d just returned from walking on the moon, said, “This has got to be the most spectacular sight of the whole flight.”

Dispense with the nostalgia already. Let’s argue about the future.

Forty years after the first moon landing, with most of the Apollo astronauts pushing 80 and older, it’s a major news event when seven of them, including four moonwalkers, assemble under one roof. This time they passed on an umpteenth telling of what it was like in favor of grappling with International Space Station, Moon, and Mars issues for today’s NASA. The overriding sentiment among the aging space travelers was dismay that we haven’t been to Mars, and pessimism that we’ll get there soon.

Apollo astronauts at NASA Headquarters on July 20. From left: Walter Cunningham, Jim Lovell, Dave Scott, Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Duke, Tom Stafford, and Gene Cernan. (Photo: Caroline Sheen)

Buzz Aldrin occupied the seat at the center of the dais, chief-justice-like. Whether intentional or by chance, his placement implied that Aldrin occupies a prime perch wherever astronauts are gathered—when Neil Armstrong isn’t present—despite the capricious ways in which Apollo crews were assigned to missions, which rendered some spacemen famous and others almost anonymous. Aldrin noted that 66 years had passed from the Wright brothers’ first flight to his moon landing, and said he thought we would have astronauts on Mars by now. “Where we are today is quite a bit different,” he lamented, referring to the shuttle and International Space Station, both stuck in low-Earth orbit. “We need to get back to exploration. Curiosity is the essence of human existence.” His challenge to NASA: Put astronauts on Mars before the next 66 years are up, a deadline of 2035.

Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7’s lunar module pilot, agreed. “I don’t think there was a soul in the Astronaut Office back then that wouldn’t have thought we’d be on the moon by 2000.” The group mumbled corrections at him. “Uh, Mars,” he said.

“Charlie and I were there for three days,” said Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, of his moon visit, nodding his head toward Charlie Duke, lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. Their missions were the longest trips to the lunar surface. “We would’ve wanted to be there for three weeks. I really believed we’d be back on the moon by the end of the decade and at Mars by 2000.”

If Aldrin held court, Jim Lovell was the elder statesman. Command module pilot of Apollo 8 and commander of Apollo 13, the down-to-Earth Lovell gave the opening remarks with an air of class and temperance. He orbited  the moon before anyone on the dais. He commanded the only life-and-death abort of an Apollo mission, which robbed him of his chance to walk on the moon. He had more time in space than any astronaut until Skylab, including two Gemini flights, the second of them as Aldrin’s commander. He noted that we should look at July 20th as a national celebration of the whole Apollo program, and called it a “bold move, well conceived.”

Lovell suggested that today’s NASA isn’t sure of its goals. “We have to look at, what do we want to do with our space activities? What do we want to accomplish? What are our priorities?” His most abrasive opinion, one widely shared, was calling the ISS “almost a white elephant. As of now, the people on the ISS are simply maintaining it. As a scientific tool I think the station has a ways to go.” Sending people to Mars, he said, is a project that would include the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians, and bring the people of the world together in the spirit of exploration.

Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott made a rare appearance. “We made it look easy, but it was difficult. Going to Mars will be about ten times as difficult.” He got a good laugh by reporting with a straight face that it would cost around “two jillion dollars.” And he warned that there has to be a good reason to go to Mars in order to keep the flow of money coming.

To which Aldrin took umbrage, claiming that we need to send humans to Mars and leave them there, just as the Europeans who came to North America stayed. And the moon, thinks Aldrin, is in the way. He insists that the technologies needed, such as an exploration module, could be tested on the ISS. “Why go to the moon?” he asked. Soon, Cernan was disagreeing with Aldrin over the level of emotion present during a moon landing. At one point, Cunningham looked at the audience and stated  the obvious, that a consensus is rarely available among the group.

A reporter tried to bring the discussion back to the awe of the first moon landing with a query about President Nixon’s controversial remark four decades ago that the week of Apollo 11’s flight was the greatest week since the creation of the world. For once, Aldrin appeared at a loss for words. “Well, it was eight days,” he said. “It was certainly a great eight days, but we didn’t start with, Let there be light.”

In 2000, “The Dish” (watch the trailer) was the most popular movie in Australia. Half fact, half poetic-license, it highlights the role that Australia’s Parkes Observatory played in televising the first steps made on the moon. One reviewer wrote “…a real sense of the importance of it to the community and the individuals therein is present throughout. An American film may have made this subservient to the moon landings; here, the two are intertwined on equal footing, and you care equally about each.”

The Parkes Observatory Web site presents the facts:

It was one giant leap for mankind, and it was taken at 12.56 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on Monday 21 July 1969.

Six hundred million people watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. Three tracking stations were receiving the signals simultaneously. They were the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s Parkes Radio Telescope, the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station outside Canberra, and NASA’s Goldstone station in California.

The signals were relayed to Mission Control at Houston. During the first few minutes of the broadcast, NASA alternated between the signals from its two stations at Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, searching for the best quality images. When they switched to the Parkes pictures, they were of such superior quality that NASA remained with the Parkes TV pictures for the remainder of the 21/2-hour telecast.

It almost didn’t happen.

In late 1968 NASA had asked for Parkes to be used in the Apollo 11 mission. The giant telescope would be the prime receiving station for the reception of telemetry and TV from the surface of the Moon. Using it also provided extra gain in signal strength from the Moon. This meant that during the tightly scheduled first moonwalk the astronauts would not have to spend time setting up a large antenna to get the necessary signal strength.

At 6:17 a.m. (AEST) on 21 July, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin landed their LM,Eagle, on the Sea of Tranquillity. It was still some seven hours before the Moon would have risen high enough to be seen from Parkes.

The schedule required the astronauts to rest before attempting the moonwalk, by which time the Moon would have been high overhead at Parkes. However, Armstrong opted for an immediate moonwalk instead. To the astronomers at Parkes, it looked as though the moonwalk would be all over before the Moon even rose over Parkes. However, it took the astronauts such a long time to don their spacesuits and depressurise the LM cabin that as they left the module the Moon was just rising over Parkes. It seemed as though they would get the signals after all.

But suddenly troubled loomed. While fully tipped over waiting for the Moon to rise, the telescope was struck by a series of severe, 110 km per hour gusts of wind, which made the control room shudder. The telescope was slammed back against its zenith axis gears. This was a dangerous situation, threatening the integrity of the telescope structure. Fortunately, cool heads prevailed, and as the winds abated, Buzz Aldrin activated the TV camera just as the Moon rose into the telescope’s field of view, and tracking began.

Using a less sensitive ‘off-axis’ detector, Parkes was able to receive the TV pictures just as the LM TV camera was switched on. Less than nine minutes later the Moon had risen into the field of view of the Parkes telescope’s main detector. Because Parkes was a larger telescope, it captured more signal and so produced better pictures. Houston switched to Parkes and remained with those pictures for the rest of the 2-1/2-hour broadcast.

Parkes staffer Neil ‘Fox’ Mason, who was seated at the control desk, drove the telescope without being allowed to once turn around and see the incoming pictures on the TV monitor. It was essential for him to monitor the tracking of the telescope, in case the winds picked up again, threatening the signal reception. The weather remained bad at Parkes, with the telescope operating well outside safety limits for the entire duration of the moonwalk.

Australia Telescope Outreach and Education sums it all up in “The Dish: Facts versus Fiction.”

Like many people over the age of 45, Barack Obama reminisced yesterday about the Apollo 11 moon landing and what he was doing at the time. The President recalled sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders in Hawaii, waving to the Apollo astronauts as they returned on recovery ships.

Unlike most people, though, Obama got to share his memories directly with the Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins. See the video here:

Apollo historian Matthew Hersch writes:

Thanks to the radio telemetry streaming from Apollo 11’s Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, the engineers at Mission Control could tell, second by second, just how bad the astronauts’ predicament was getting as they prepared to make the first landing on the moon. Or could they?  Three thousand feet over the lunar surface, the onboard computer guiding the landing appeared to be failing, but the cryptic alarms that flashed on the monitors in Houston—1202, 1201—were understood by only a few of the ground controllers. If NASA could not resolve the problems, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might have to abort their landing. The LM’s gauge showed that it had barely enough fuel to land, and no margin for lengthy debate.

Neil Armstrong in a lunar landing simulation.

The alarms signaled an overload of Eagle’s main computer, an all-purpose machine that was running the LM’s navigation system and controlling its descent to the lunar surface.  Contrary to popular belief, the LM couldn’t be landed “manually”—the finesse required to control Eagle’s thrusters without computer assistance was beyond the capability of any astronaut who had tried it in the simulator. Rather, as David Mindell writes in Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight, the astronauts were supposed to work with the LM’s Apollo Guidance Computer, using their control sticks to nudge the computer’s calculations.

But on Apollo 11, something went wrong. The guidance computer wasn’t completely user-friendly: It reported system conditions using codes the astronauts couldn’t readily decipher. Overwhelmed by radar data, the computer started dropping unnecessary programs, launching its own version of the Microsoft Windows Task Manager. Neither the astronauts nor the computer ever lost their cool, though, and thanks to NASA guidance officer Steve Bales, and Jack Garman, a young computer specialist with an alarm code crib sheet, NASA didn’t abort the landing.  (Garman later received an award for his quick response.)

So what happened? Crossed wires. During the design of the guidance computer at MIT’s Instrumentation laboratory, Buzz Aldrin wanted the computer to be able to simultaneously handle radar data from the lunar surface and the Apollo Command and Service Modules in lunar orbit, just in case Apollo 11 needed to abort the landing and rendezvous with the CSM.  Despite discussions, the added capability was never built into the system, to Aldrin’s surprise on July 20th. (Simulations had never fully tested the feature and failed to reveal its absence.)

In all other respects, though, the system worked fine. Later accounts described an overloaded computer and Armstrong landing the craft by hand. In fact, though, the guidance computer had performed as it was supposed to perform. As the craft approached the lunar surface, Armstrong used his controller to instruct the computer to change the landing site to a smoother section of terrain, and the guidance computer kept humming right along until the contact light went on.

An unsung hero of the decision not to abort the landing is Richard Koos, a NASA simulation supervisor who, on the afternoon of July 5, 11 days before the launch of Apollo 11, put the team of controllers including Bales, Garman, and capcom astronaut Charlie Duke, through a simulation that intentionally triggered a 1201 alarm. The astronauts involved in the simulation were Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, the backup crew for Apollo 12 and the prime crew for Apollo 15. Unable to figure out what the 1201 was, Bales aborted that simulated landing. He and Flight Director Gene Kranz were dressed down for it by Koos, who put the team through four more hours of training the next day specifically on program alarms. When the 1202 and 1201 alarms occurred during the actual landing, Garman, Bales, and even Duke recognized them immediately.

The efforts of astronauts and engineers on the ground had made the landing a success.  There would be other scares during the Apollo landings, but none so harrowing: in spaceflight, a computer “crash” had taken on a whole new meaning.

Hersch, an HSS/NASA Fellow in the History of Space Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is writing a labor history of American astronauts. He’ll be blogging regularly about the Apollo anniversary during the month of July.