SCIENCE TODAY:PRESIDENT JOHN F Kennedy was just five months in office when he pledged the United States to the extraordinary goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out, writes RONAN McGREEVY
The year was 1961 and, with the benefit of hindsight, it would appear to be an extraordinary, prescient statement from a dynamic young president who died so tragically.
In reality, the speech was motivated by America's shame and embarrassment at the Soviet's Union's success in sending the first satellite into space, Sputnik, and then the first man, Yuri Gagarin.
Kennedy acknowledged as much in his address to Congress, telling those who would eventually write the $25 billion cheque ($150 billion in today's money or €115 billion) for the Apollomissions, that he could not guarantee the US would finish first, but doing nothing would ensure it finished second.
Forty years on, the moon landings remain the US’s finest technological achievement. It may even be mankind’s finest technological achievement. Only a country with its wealth, native optimism and intellectual resources could have done it. Only the Cold War could have provided the impetus that would make it politically acceptable to spend 4 per cent of its annual federal budget on a figurative and literal shot in the dark.
After a notable series of firsts, the Soviets gave up, lacking the engineering capability in rocket science to attempt a moon landing. The US had a secret weapon, the brilliant rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who once built the V2 rocket for the Nazis, but also the man who helped deliver the iconic Saturn V rocket of Apollofame.
In 1967, Apollo1 ended in tragedy when three astronauts were burnt to death on the launch pad. Such an incident today would have halted the programme for years, but there was a deadline to meet and a much more philosophical acceptance of risk.
On Christmas 1968, Apollo8 became the first mission in which human beings left Earth orbit, Apollo9 tested every aspect of the command and lunar module and Apollo10 came within 15km of the moon's surface.
By July 1969 the vast Apolloenterprise was ready. Apollo11 would be the one to make history, but it was a close-run thing.
Apollo11 left Cape Canaveral on July 16th. The three-day journey to lunar orbit was uneventful, as was the separation of the command module and the lunar module that would take astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin to the surface of the moon.
Back in the command module, the pilot Michael “Mike” Collins became the loneliest man in history. When he was orbiting on the far side of the moon, he was out of contact with every other human being. “If a count were taken, the score would be three-billion-plus-two over on the other side of the moon, and one-plus-God-only-knows-what on this side,” he would later recall.
Trouble started as Armstrong and Aldrin made their descent to the lunar surface. Aldrin noticed that they were travelling 30km/h too fast and would miss their landing zone by several kilometres. Potentially, they could have ended up in a boulder field, which might have destroyed the lunar module.
As tension rose at mission control in Houston, Texas, the tiny LM onboard computer, which had the computing power of a modern mobile phone, overloaded. Mission controller Gene Kranz agonised over an abort, but a 24-year-old backroom computer programmer, Jack Garman, understood how to put it right.
The mission continued. As they drew nearer to the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong took manual control of the Eagle. Fuel supplies dwindled rapidly as he searched for a place to land. Mission Control gave him 60 seconds and he made it with 11 just seconds to spare.
"Tranquillity Base here. The Eaglehas landed," Armstrong said in a monotone voice that belied the historic nature of what had been achieved.
Back in mission control the sense of relief was overwhelming. “There’s a bunch of guys about to turn blue. Were breathing again,” said Charlie Duke, the voice of Houston.
By the time Armstrong took his first step on to the surface six hours later, the whole world was watching. He stepped off the ladder and offered possibly the most famous soundbite in history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong was no orator before or since, but he managed in a brilliant, pithy sentence to describe the immensity of what had been achieved.
There would be five further moon landings, the last in 1972. All would seem commonplace by comparison to the first one. Von Braun described July 20th, 1969 as the greatest day “since man crawled out of the slime”.
As the years have passed the achievement has, if anything, been enhanced, given that nothing has surpassed it, not even with all our technological advances.
The moon landings were a 20th-century achievement, but so far ahead of their time they properly belong in the current century. Nothing in our century to date has matched it, or even come close.