Recollections of NASA’s Apollo 11 Mission

Like a lot of kids who grew up during the ‘60s and ‘70s, I had a fascination with spaceflight. This interest started honestly enough back around 1966 when I was about four years old after my mother sat me down in front of our small black and white television set one morning to watch the launch of a Gemini mission. At the time, I had no clue about the Space Race with the Soviet Union or the sequence of crewed and automated missions then taking place to land Americans on the Moon. All I knew at the time was that “some spacemen were going into space on a rocket”. And through an innocent misunderstanding of what my father did for a living, I mistakenly believed for a time that my father was a “spaceman” (see “When I Thought My Dad Was an Astronaut”). Combined with a steady diet of children’s television science fiction shows like Lost in Space, The Thunderbirds, Space Angels, as well as a lot of sci-fi B-movies that inundated the airwaves during that time, I was hooked on space – an interest that continues to this day after almost six decades.

The Build Up to the Apollo 11 Mission

The cover of the June 6, 1969 issue of Life featuring photographs of the Apollo 10 mission.

Being just in second grade at the time, I was completely unaware of the buildup to the first Apollo Moon landing from October 1968 to May 1969 as a fast paced series of manned missions from Apollo 7 to 10 systematically tested all the elements of the Apollo spacecraft. It was only well after the fact that I became aware of these missions as a result of publications we received. Notable among these were the beautifully illustrated article on the Apollo 8 mission to lunar orbit (see “Apollo 8: Where No One Has Gone Before”) published in the May 1969 issue of National Geographic, to which the family subscribed, and the June 6, 1969 issue of Life my father bought at a newsstand that had an excellent pictorial about the Apollo 10 mission to test the Lunar Module in lunar orbit (see “Apollo 10: The Adventure of Charlie Brown & Snoopy”).

While I was unaware of these Apollo missions until after the fact, the same was not true of Apollo 11. The historic nature of this mission was well known to my parents and the other adults in my life and subsequently all of my young friends were getting hyped up about the impending mission as the summer of 1969 started. My parents would let me know when TV coverage of various parts of the Apollo 11 mission would be on the air allowing me to catch these historic events frequently while watching with them. Armed with a map of the Moon that came with the February 1969 issue of National Geographic and a colorful wall poster my parents got for me detailing all of the steps in the mission to the Moon, I was as well prepared as any seven year old could be to keep track of this first of its kind manned spaceflight.

Portrait of the Apollo 11 crew: (l to r) Neil Armstrong (Commander), Mike Collins (CMP) and Buzz Aldrin (LMP). (NASA)

The Apollo 11 Mission

The first event I watched on TV was the launch of Apollo 11 on Wednesday morning, July 16, 1969. As with all of the early Apollo missions, I watched the coverage from our local CBS network affiliate hosted by the well-respected newscaster, Walter Cronkite. While most of the technical discussions during what seemed like a very long countdown went largely over my head, I experienced a genuine thrill to see the mighty Saturn V Moon rocket lift off from Launch Complex 39 on what was then known as Cape Kennedy at 9:32 AM EDT. Although the rocket quickly moved out of the view, animations were subsequently used to illustrate what was happening far above the Earth as Apollo 11 accelerated towards its Earth parking orbit achieved almost 12 minutes after launch.

After the excitement of the launch, I was off to play outside with my siblings and neighborhood friends as most kids did during summer school vacations at the time. Later that day, I would learn from the local newspaper and a segment I watched with my dad on the CBS evening news that Apollo 11 and its crew were safely on their way to the Moon. These same sources would keep me and the rest of the world updated on the progress of the Apollo 11 mission with highlights of scheduled TV transmissions from the spacecraft shared each evening. After Apollo 11 slipped into lunar orbit on the afternoon of Saturday, July 19, the public’s interest (as well as my own) picked up once again as preparations for the actual Moon landing started.

Once again, I was glued to the TV set watching CBS coverage of the Moon landing. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had separated the LM Eagle from the CSM Columbia with Mike Collins still aboard at 1:44 PM EDT on Sunday, July 20 to begin the series of burns to reach the lunar surface. I watched the coverage trying to match up the dialog between ground control and the crew with the animation CBS was using since there was no live TV feed from inside the LM at this time. The historic lunar landing took place at 4:17:39 PM EDT followed by the announcement from Armstrong, “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed”.

According to the original mission plan, Armstrong and Aldrin would take a meal break and get four hours of rest following post touchdown checkouts of the LM (see “Apollo 11: Preparing to Win the Moon Race”). Under the original timeline, the beginning of the planned 2-hour, 40-minute surface EVA was scheduled to start at about 2:00 AM EDT in the wee hours of Monday morning. As it turned out, a couple of hours after landing the crew and mission controllers opted to postpone the first four-hour rest break and instead proceed directly to EVA preparations allowing American viewers to watch the historic event on Sunday evening instead. Luckily for me, my parents let me stay up long past my usual 8 PM bedtime to watch this first moonwalk.

Later that evening, hours after my younger siblings had gone to bed, my parents and I watched the live TV coverage as the first moonwalk was about to begin. With the deployment of the Modular Equipment Storage Assembly (MESA) on the right side of the LM descent stage exterior, the slow scan TV camera on board the spacecraft was switched on. For a few moments, I was trying to figure out what I was seeing in the high contrast black and white image until I realized it was upside down. Once ground controllers inverted the image, I could clearly make out the figure of Neil Armstrong cautiously making his way down the ladder on the front LM landing gear. At 10:56:15 PM EDT, Armstrong step off the LM footpad and said his now famous words, “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”.

After Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar surface, performed some simple mobility assessments, and secured a contingency sample of lunar soil, Buzz Aldrin joined him on the surface about 19 minutes later. As the pair of astronauts performed their tightly scheduled series of tasks on the lunar surface in view of the television camera, I fell asleep long before the 2½ hour surface EVA was completed.

On Monday afternoon, July 21 at 1:54 PM EDT, The Eagle successfully lifted off from the lunar surface. Unlike the later Apollo J-series missions where the color TV camera on the lunar roving vehicle transmitted live images of the lunar lift off, there was only an audio feed for this important event. Some 3 hour and 41 minutes later, Eagle had docked with Columbia which had been waiting in orbit for the last day. After the LM ascent stage was jettisoned, the Apollo 11 crew started their trip home in the early morning hours of Tuesday, July 22.

Once again, I was transfixed by the TV set as I watched CBS coverage of the Apollo 11 splashdown early Thursday afternoon on July 24. As we watched the Apollo 11 CM slowly descend on its trio of parachutes, the spacecraft splashed down at 12:50 PM EDT. The crew was subsequently recovered wearing special isolation suits to minimize the risk of any lunar contamination being released. They were flown to the recovery ship where they disembarked the helicopter and entered the mobile quarantine facility on board. So ended the first historic spaceflight I had followed from beginning to end. Because of the timing of subsequent Apollo missions, it would not be until the Apollo 15 mission during my summer school vacation two years later before I could watch the full coverage of a lunar landing mission again (see “NASA’s Apollo 15 Mission: A Kid’s View from 1971”).

Related Video

Here is a NASA produced documentary about the Apollo 11 mission:

Related Reading

“When I Thought My Dad Was an Astronaut”, Drew Ex Machina, July 1, 2014 [Post]

“Apollo 11: Preparing to Win the Moon Race”, Drew Ex Machina, August 12, 2019 [Post]

“NASA’s Apollo 15 Mission: A Kid’s View from 1971”, Drew Ex Machina, July 29, 2021 [Post]