Why apollo 11 was important

Together, these revelations have sparked interest in using the moon as a base where spacecraft can refuel en route to more distant places in space. While the moon has yielded invaluable scientific secrets, it has also provided some colorful vignettes from the people who have walked on its surface.

One of them is Mr. Duke, the ground communicator with Apollo After years of dreaming, years of training, and many tense hours talking Mr. Aldrin through that inaugural landing, the first thing Mr.

Duke did when he got to the moon himself was It was April 20, The lunar module Orion had just settled on the dusty surface. Apollo 16 mission commander John Young and Mr. Duke, the lunar module pilot, would soon descend the wobbly ladder to become the ninth and 10th humans to walk on the moon.

But first, they removed their spacesuits, ate supper, and clambered into their sleeping hammocks. Young dozed off immediately. Duke found it difficult to quiet his mind.

Hours earlier, while the crew waited in lunar orbit, Mission Control had deliberated whether to even attempt the landing. There was a technical problem that Houston thought might jeopardize the ability of the crew to return to Earth.

Duke says. And they were about to tell us to come home. Fortunately, six hours later, Mission Control figured out a solution and gave Apollo 16 a go for the fifth landing on the moon. Houston told them they needed to sleep. Schmitt says. Time on the moon is precious — and losing any could prove fatal.

Buffer time was included in case something went wrong. Schmitt and mission commander Eugene Cernan had numerous samples to collect and untouched lunar terrain to explore. They had some 22 hours over three moonwalks to do it.

Other Apollo missions had even less time. He vividly recalls the details of the Apollo 17 landing site. Temperatures on the moon can range from degrees Fahrenheit to degrees. Apollo astronauts also constantly spoke to each other and checked in with Mission Control over the radio. Bounding around in cumbersome spacesuits and the unfamiliar low gravity of the moon is tricky. Apollo astronauts took a lot of tumbles. Schmitt says, holding his hand two feet above the floor. Despite being in a place so inhospitable to humans, Dr.

Schmitt says he was relaxed. He could often, in fact, be heard singing throughout his mission. At one point, Dr. Cernan joined in. The duo bounced along the moon, singing as they went about their work. Three more Apollo missions were originally planned, but the program ended with No.

Humans have not gone back to the moon — or even left Earth orbit — since. Space agencies and private companies have outlined several grandiose proposals over the past several decades to return to the moon or even go to Mars.

None has taken off so far. Announced earlier this year, it envisions landing humans on the moon by , with the ultimate goal of establishing a base to test space technologies and act as a way station to Mars. Funding remains a formidable obstacle. The Apollo program represented a singular moment, Mr. Launius says. Still, the Apollo moon missions and the hype surrounding the space race helped spawn a generation of dreamers who want to make deep space travel a reality — with or without government help.

Bezos was 5 years old when Mr. Private aerospace companies such as Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Boeing are vying to build the next generation of rockets and spacecrafts. Boeing and SpaceX are running final tests on systems that could send Americans to the International Space Station by the end of this year. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in that his country will begin manned missions to the moon and Mars in upcoming years.

China is also establishing a human presence in space. The quest to some day walk on another planetary body is understandable to those who have already done it. Schmitt still remembers his last stroll on the lunar surface. As a true geologist, he was picking up rocks one final time. He took a look around the valley, letting his eyes linger on the horizon to commit the alien scene to memory.

What sticks in his mind still today is the stark contrast between the barren lunar landscape under a pitch-black sky and the colorful little module the astronauts had called home for three days. He said, "Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed. Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Today marks a rare exception. Fifty years ago today, humans walked on another planetary body for the first time in history. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon, the entire world was watching, every person captivated and inspired — regardless of nationality, ethnicity, income or gender.

It appeared that human civilization had truly entered a new and exciting phase. Those who were alive at the time to experience this event can most likely, even 50 years later, tell you exactly where they were at the time. Many will tell you that they were sitting in their living room or den, watching on a black and white Zenith console TV, listening intently to the reporting of Walter Cronkite. We are correct to celebrate this remarkable achievement, but this 50th anniversary also reminds us what could, and many of us feel should, have been.

After beating the Soviet Union to the moon, the United States lost its motivation to continue sending astronauts to the moon — the last mission ascending from the lunar surface in December Since then, there have been calls by several presidents to return to the moon and send humans to Mars, but these aspirations to return humans to deep space have not in all those intervening years, so to speak, gotten off the ground.

The times, however, they may be changing. I was glued to the television set watching the landing and the Moon walks like everybody else. It was a singular event in history for humans to walk on another planetary body. It captivated everyone. In terms of my own work, the mission led to an explosion of new data about the Moon. I included lunar work in my research agenda for a number of years thereafter, using data from all of the Apollo missions, from the findings of sample analyses to the observations from the orbital and surface experiments that Apollo carried.

July 20th marks 50 years since the Apollo 11 moon landing. Photo: NASA. There was really no field of planetary science in , just a handful of people who called themselves planetary astronomers and studied other worlds through telescopes or with theoretical work.

NASA had sent spacecraft to Venus and Mars by the time of Apollo 11, so there were a few people who were working on planetary data, but the space age was less than 12 years old at the time of the first Moon landing. Almost everybody who worked on the scientific return from the Apollo program came from other fields — earth science, chemistry, or physics — and they became lunar scientists. It was an enormous expansion of our presence in space that was enabled by a healthy NASA built up to conduct the Apollo missions but an agency that also had the budget and the engineering expertise to figure out how to explore the rest of the solar system by spacecraft.

The field of planetary science came into its own in those few years after Apollo. Lamont was very heavily involved in the Apollo program and was much more active in planetary research than it is now. There were Lamont scientists who were in line to receive some of the first samples brought back from the Moon.

At least equally importantly, Lamont was a leader in the geophysical exploration of the Moon. Over the course of the Apollo missions there were several geophysical experiments, but the one that spanned nearly all of the missions was the passive seismic experiment. And several early Lamont seismologists had teamed together to put that experiment on Apollo, including Maurice Ewing, Frank Press, Gary Latham — the principal investigator — and other team members from Lamont as well.

In later Apollo missions, astronauts measured the heat flowing out from the lunar interior. That experiment was led by Manik Talwani, who by then was the Lamont director. Ewing was studying seismology in the ocean basins before he was contacted by NASA.

How does that relate to studying seismology on the Moon? Ewing pioneered the use of seismology to study the crust beneath the oceans. He took seismic experiments to a venue where there had never been such experiments before. And with them he showed that oceanic crust is different from continental crust.