About this episode

The episode discusses the critical moment when Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit, highlighting the engineering challenges and the astronauts' experiences during this historic event.

On July nineteenth in 1969, the crew of Apollo 11 fired the service module engine and slipped into orbit around the Moon, setting the stage for the landing that would happen just one day later. Picture Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins riding in their tiny capsule as it swung behind the far side of the Moon, losing radio contact with Houston for the first time, utterly alone in a way almost no human beings had ever been. When the spacecraft reappeared and Mission Control finally reestablished contact, everyone breathed easier knowing the burn had worked perfectly and Apollo 11 was now a captured satellite of another world. This moment often gets overshadowed by the drama of the landing itself and Armstrong's famous first steps, but slipping into lunar orbit was its own nail biting engineering triumph. The burn had to happen on the far side of the Moon, entirely on its own, guided by calculations worked out years earlier by mathematicians and engineers using computers that were laughably weak by today's standards, computers with less processing power than a modern calculator watch. If the timing or the burn duration had been off by even a little, the spacecraft…

Topics covered

• Apollo 11
• lunar orbit
• space exploration
• engineering triumph
• NASA
• moon landing

Keywords

• Apollo 11
• lunar orbit
• Neil Armstrong
• Buzz Aldrin
• Michael Collins
• spacecraft
• Mission Control
• moon landing
• engineering

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Mission Control

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