Apollo Eleven: One Giant Leap, Frozen in Time
About this episode
The episode discusses the historic Apollo 11 moon landing and its significance in human history.
July twentieth stretches into the twenty first depending on your time zone, and that little quirk of clocks and calendars is fitting, because on July twentieth 1969, humanity did something that forever changed our relationship with time and space. Apollo eleven's lunar module, piloted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, touched down on the Sea of Tranquility, and a few hours later Armstrong climbed down the ladder and spoke his now immortal line about one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. Since you gave me July twenty first, let me carry that story forward just a touch, because the twenty first is when the truly wild extravehicular part happened for those watching in many time zones outside the Americas, and it's when Armstrong and Aldrin actually walked, hopped, and bounded across the dusty gray landscape while Michael Collins orbited alone above them in the command module Columbia, quietly becoming, for a while, the most isolated human being in history. Picture the scene. The lunar module Eagle had landed with barely thirty seconds of fuel to spare, Armstrong having taken manual control to steer past a boulder field that could have tipped the whole mission into…
Topics covered
- Apollo 11
- moon landing
- space exploration
- historical events
- human achievement
Keywords
- Apollo 11
- Neil Armstrong
- Buzz Aldrin
- moon landing
- space travel
- July 20 1969
- Sea of Tranquility
- Michael Collins
- Mission control
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Mission control
Places: Sea of Tranquility, Houston, Eagle, Columbia
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