About this episode

The episode discusses the historic Apollo 11 moon landing and its significance for humanity.

On July twentieth in nineteen sixty nine, humanity did something that had never been done before in the entire history of our species. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided the lunar module Eagle down to the dusty surface of the Moon, touching down in the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins orbited overhead in the command module Columbia, quietly holding down the fort of human civilization all by himself. The landing itself was almost a nail biter. As the Eagle descended, computer alarms started blaring, program alarms with numbers like twelve oh two that nobody in the room had ever seen before during simulations. Armstrong, cool as ever, took semi manual control when he realized the automatic guidance system was steering them toward a boulder strewn crater the size of a football field. With fuel running low, seconds ticking away, and mission control in Houston sweating through their short sleeved shirts, Armstrong found a smoother patch of lunar real estate and settled the spacecraft down with what NASA engineers later calculated was somewhere between twenty and forty seconds of fuel remaining. Talk about cutting it close. Then came those famous words crackling back to…

Topics covered

• Apollo 11
• moon landing
• space exploration
• human achievement
• Cold War
• NASA missions

Keywords

• Apollo 11
• moon landing
• Neil Armstrong
• Buzz Aldrin
• Michael Collins
• NASA
• Sea of Tranquility
• space exploration

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NASA

Places: Moon, Sea of Tranquility, Houston

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