00:00Welcome to Turning Points, World History. I am Hugo.
00:04And I am Clara. Tonight we go to the summer of 1969, to a journey of eight days, a quarter
00:10of
00:11a million miles, and a landing watched by more people than had ever watched anything before.
00:16The mission was Apollo 11. The goal, set eight years earlier by President John F. Kennedy,
00:22was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the decade was out.
00:27On the 16th of July 1969, three astronauts left Florida to try. Four days later, two of them stood
00:36on the moon. The crew was Neil Armstrong, the commander, a quiet test pilot from Ohio, Edwin
00:43Aldrin, known to everyone as Buzz, the lunar module pilot, a brilliant engineer with a doctorate in
00:49orbital mechanics, and Michael Collins, the command module pilot, who would fly alone around the moon
00:56while his crewmates walked on it. Collins later called himself the loneliest man in history,
01:02and he meant it as a joke, and also not quite as a joke.
01:06The spacecraft had two parts. The command module, Columbia, was the cone-shaped capsule that would
01:12carry the crew home. The lunar module, Eagle, was a spidery, ungainly craft with thin walls and windows
01:19like a helicopter's, built to fly only in the vacuum of space. It had never landed on the moon
01:25before. Nobody had. The launch, at 9.32 in the morning, Eastern time, on the 16th of July, was
01:32watched by about a million people who had gathered along the Florida coast and by millions more on
01:37television. The Saturn V rocket, taller than a 36-story building, rose slowly at first and then
01:44faster and faster until it was a point of light in the sky. Three days of coasting followed,
01:50a quarter of a million miles through darkness, toward a gray, cratered world that had haunted
01:56human dreams since the beginning of history. On the 20th of July, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed
02:02into Eagle, sealed the hatch, and separated from Columbia. Collins, alone in Columbia, watched Eagle
02:10pirouette in front of him, checking it for damage, and then he watched it fall away toward the moon.
02:16He would not see his crewmates again for nearly a day. If Eagle failed to lift off from the moon,
02:22Collins would have to fly home alone. He knew it. They all knew it.
02:27The powered descent began, and almost immediately, things started going wrong in small, alarming ways.
02:33The landing site was coming up too fast. The computer, an extraordinary machine for its time,
02:38but with less memory than a modern greeting card, began flashing program alarms. 12.02, then 12.01.
02:46In the control room in Houston, a 26-year-old engineer named Jack Garman, who had memorized what
02:53every alarm meant, recognized them at once. The computer was overloaded, being asked to do too
02:59many things at once, and it was shedding low-priority jobs to protect the landing itself.
03:04The flight controller responsible for the computer, Steve Bales, made the call. Go on the alarm. Keep
03:11descending. It was one of the great judgment calls in the history of exploration, because if Bales had
03:17been wrong, Eagle would have crashed. But the alarms, it turned out, were not a failure. They were the
03:23computer doing exactly what its designers at MIT, led by Margaret Hamilton, had built it to do.
03:30Prioritize and keep flying. Then Armstrong looked out the window and saw a problem no computer could
03:35solve. The automatic landing system was taking Eagle toward a field of boulders, near a crater later
03:41named for him, a place where landing could tip the craft over or smash it. With less than two minutes
03:47of fuel left in the descent stage, Armstrong took manual control and flew Eagle sideways, skimming over
03:53the boulders, looking for a flat spot, while Aldrin called out altitude and speed, and Houston watched
03:59in silence. At 4.17 in the afternoon, eastern time, Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility,
04:06a flat plain of ancient lava. Armstrong's first words from the surface were,
04:11Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. In mission control, the room erupted. The flight
04:19director, Gene Kranz, and his team had been holding their breath for twelve minutes of descent.
04:24They could breathe again. The plan had been for the astronauts to rest for several hours before
04:29stepping outside. Instead, Armstrong and Aldrin asked to skip the rest. They were too excited to sleep,
04:36and Houston agreed. More than six hours after landing, at 10.56 at night, eastern time, on the 20th of
04:44July,
04:44Armstrong climbed down the ladder and stepped onto the lunar surface, the first human being ever to
04:50stand on another world. His words were heard by an estimated 600 million people, about a fifth of
04:57all humanity at the time. That is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. He later said
05:04he
05:04had thought about the words beforehand, but in the moment, they came out as history remembers them,
05:10slightly garbled and entirely perfect. Aldrin followed about 20 minutes later, and together
05:16they spent about two and a half hours outside, collecting about 47 pounds of moon rock and soil,
05:22setting up a seismometer to measure moonquakes, and a reflector that scientists still use. Today,
05:29bouncing lasers off the moon to measure its distance from Earth to within centimeters.
05:33They left a plaque that reads,
05:35Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace
05:43for all
05:43mankind.
05:44They also left a patch honoring the crew of Apollo 1, who had died in a fire on the launch
05:50pad in 1967,
05:51and medals honoring two Soviet cosmonauts who had died in the race to space. The moon landing was an
05:58American triumph, but Armstrong and Aldrin made sure the plaque, and the memorials, said it belonged to
06:04everyone. Above them, Collins circled the moon alone in Columbia, and he later wrote that he did not feel
06:11lonely at all. He felt aware and alert, and part of something larger than himself. When Eagle lifted
06:18off the moon, after about 21 hours on the surface, Collins was waiting, and the two spacecraft docked,
06:24and the three astronauts began the journey home. They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on the 24th of
06:31July, eight days after they had left, and were picked up by an aircraft carrier.
06:35Why does Apollo 11 matter so much? It matters because it was, in a sense, the largest cooperative
06:43effort in human history up to that point. About 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program,
06:51from the engineers who wove the computer's memory by hand, wire through magnetic core, to the seamstresses
06:58who sewed the spacesuits, layer by layer, to the recovery divers who waited in the Pacific. It was a
07:05government program, yes, and a Cold War competition, yes, but it was also proof that human beings,
07:12organized around a clear goal, could do something that had been impossible for all of history before.
07:19It also matters because of what it did to how we see ourselves. The most famous photograph of the
07:24mission is not of the moon, it is of the earth, rising over the lunar horizon, a blue and white
07:30marble and black space, fragile and alone. People who saw that image, and the image of two men standing
07:38in gray dust under a black sky, began to think of earth itself differently, as one place, shared by
07:44everyone. The environmental movement, and the idea of the planet as a single home, owe a great deal to
07:51those photographs. And there is a final, quieter lesson. Apollo 11 nearly failed, several times,
07:59in those last twelve minutes. The overloaded computer, the boulder field, the fuel running low.
08:07It succeeded not because everything worked perfectly, but because the people involved had
08:12prepared for things to go wrong, and had practiced making decisions under pressure. Margaret Hamilton's
08:19software was designed to fail gracefully. Jack Garman had memorized the alarms. Steve Bales trusted his
08:26team's work. Armstrong knew how to fly. Preparation, not luck, is what saved the landing.
08:34No one has walked on the moon since 1972, when Apollo 17 left. The footprints Armstrong and Aldrin left in
08:42the lunar dust are still there, because there is no wind or rain on the moon to erase them. They
08:48will be
08:48there for millions of years, unless someone goes back and walks beside them. One small step, one giant
08:55leap, and a world that has never been quite the same since. That is the Apollo 11 landing. Join us
09:02next time
09:03on turning points, when a single moment changes everything.
