For All Mankind

Fifty years ago, July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

In 1957, America was flat-footed by the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1. The creation of NASA, Project Mercury and then Project Gemini followed in short order. Then came Apollo, conceived in 1960 under the Eisenhower Administration. On May 21, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stated the goal of landing a man on the moon and bringing him home again by the end of the decade.

The rest is history.

It was an American project, designed and built in America (with a significant assist from German scientists brought over as part of Operation Paperclip), but as the plaque left behind stated, it was undertaken for all mankind.

America was the most technologically advanced nation in the world in 1969, but it’s hard for most people to imagine how primitive the technology of the time was compared to what we have now. Most people still had black and white televisions, the networks not having changed over to full color until 1966. Most people still used rotary phones. The first message to be transmitted by ARPANET, the embryonic beginning of the Internet, would not be transmitted for several months. The Intel 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor, wouldn’t be available for for almost two years.

Against that background, landing a man on the moon was a herculean task. “At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 Americans and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.” It took 350 people just to write the software to run the guidance computer, and it was entered on punchcards.

My friend Al Jackson helped design and run the lunar module simulator I mentioned last week, and he was kind enough to send me a scan of this signed photo of the Apollo 11 astronauts (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins).

Speaking of Collins:

More tweets:

From lift-off to splashdown was 197 hours:

There’s a documentary, For All Mankind that’s well worth watching. The soundtrack consists solely of mission noises, the voices of the astronauts themselves, and music by Brian Eno, which was featured on his album Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks, which includes probably his best piece, “An Ending (Ascent)”:

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