Project Apollo, the United States' manned Moon landing programme, culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11. Mission commander Neil Armstrong's famous words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind", spoken as he stepped onto the lunar surface, were heard by an estimated 600 million television viewers.
There were a further five Apollo landings: Apollo 12 and Apollo 14-17. Famously, Apollo 13 ended in near-disaster in 1970 when a oxygen tank explosion forced the mission to be aborted. The programme was cancelled in 1972.
Photo: Alan Bean collecting soil samples (NASA/C. Conrad)
The Apollo 12 astronauts located Surveyor 3, a 1967 unmanned Moon probe, and returned a piece of it to Earth. Scientists wanted to know what effect 33 months on the Moon had had on the probe. Inside the spacecraft's camera they found droplets from a sneeze accidentally sealed into the instrument by one of its builders. The bacteria in the droplets "came back to life" once they were returned to the right conditions. This showed how hardy life can be.
Apollo 8 orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve in 1968 and temporarily lost contact with mission controllers when the spacecraft went behind the Moon. This mission was one of the final test flights before the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Playing devil's advocate, Sir Patrick Moore asks space imaging expert Douglas Arnold about a common claim made by people who say the Moon landings were faked.
In 1972, Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist to walk on the Moon, and his fellow astronaut Eugene Cernan discovered orange volcanic soil. At first, it was thought that this was evidence of recent lunar volcanism.
In 1971 the Apollo 15 astronauts were tasked with finding an original piece of the Moon, not the volcanic basalts previously returned to Earth. They discovered a piece of anorthosite, crystalline rock as old as the Earth. This sample came to be known as the Genesis Rock.
The Apollo program was the spaceflight effort carried out by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), that landed the first humans on Earth's Moon. Conceived during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Apollo began in earnest after President John F. Kennedy proposed the national goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the 1960s in a May 25, 1961 address to Congress.
Kennedy's goal was accomplished with the Apollo 11 mission when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Lunar Module (LM) on the Moon on July 20, 1969 and walked on its surface while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command spacecraft, and all three landed safely on Earth on July 24. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last in December 1972. In these six spaceflights, 12 men walked on the Moon.
Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, following the Mercury and Gemini programs. It used Saturn family rockets as launch vehicles. Apollo / Saturn vehicles were also used for an Apollo Applications program which consisted of three Skylab space station missions in 1973–74, and a joint U.S.–Soviet mission in 1975.
Apollo was successful despite two major setbacks: the 1967 Apollo 1 cabin fire that killed the entire crew during a pre-launch test; and an in-flight failure on the 1970 Apollo 13 flight which disabled the command spacecraft's propulsion and life support, forcing the crew to use the Lunar Module as a "lifeboat" for these functions until they could return to Earth safely.
Apollo set major milestones in human spaceflight. It stands alone in sending manned missions beyond low Earth orbit; Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, while Apollo 17 marked the last moonwalk and the last manned mission beyond low Earth orbit. The program spurred advances in many areas of technology incidental to rocketry and manned spaceflight, including avionics, telecommunications, and computers. Apollo also sparked interest in many fields of engineering and left many physical facilities and machines developed for the program as landmarks. Its command modules and other objects and artifacts are displayed throughout the world, notably in the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museums in Washington, DC, Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, Space Center Houston in Texas, and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. The Apollo 13 Command Module is housed at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas.
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