More space for the day

Michael Peckerar has a RantPlaces article about the first landing on the Moon:

Forty-five years ago, man walked on the Moon for the first time. People nowadays take it for granted that people landed on the Moon, but, in reality, it was the greatest scientific achievement of all time, and arguably remains so.
There's still a lot of things people don't know this amazing achievement. Whether you never heard them or are one of those idiots who think it was faked, these are twenty things you did not know about the Moon landing:

20. That's not Neil Armstrong

In fact, none of the photos from Apollo 11 you know well are of Neil.

Through some odd quirk of scheduling, Neil was in none of the photos. They're all of Buzz Aldrin, the other guy who was on the Moon with him. There's one possible photo of Neil, but nobody is positive. The reflection in Buzz' visor is the only still photo where we can be positive Neil is on the Moon.

19. NASA lost the videotapes

The actual master tapes of Neil coming down the ladder were accidentally lost in the commotion of the week. The images NASA has right now are a video of a monitor that was showing the landing. They've since been remastered and restored to how they would have appeared that day.

18. Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the Moon

Right after the landing, Buzz surprised everyone by pulling out a tiny communion set. Right there on the surface of the Moon, he took the Catholic rite of communion, while Neil presumably kicked himself for not thinking of that first. It's honestly kind of odd that this wasn't made a bigger deal than it has, since it's a pretty cool move on Buzz' part.

17. The astronauts refused nap time

Right after that whole The Eagle has landed thing, the mission plan said that Neil and Buzz were required to get a little sleep. It stands to reason, since they did kind of have an exciting afternoon. After a quiet moment, they asked Mission Control if they could just go ahead and start the two-hour process to get out on the surface. Mission Control graciously postponed their nap, on the condition they go straight to bed when they get back.

16. The mission was literally saved by a pen

As the guys were getting ready to lift off the Moon to go back home, Buzz noticed something important was amiss. A switch from an important circuit breaker had fallen out, the breaker that allowed the LEM to take off from the Moon. In a moment that would make MacGyver jealous, Buzz found the hole where the breaker used to be and jammed a pen in there to complete the circuit. It obviously worked.

15. There was a third guy up there

Michael Collins had one of the crummiest jobs ever. He got to ride all the way to the Moon, then drop off Neil and Buzz like they were teenagers at the mall. While those lucky guys made history, Mike sat up in the Command Module and presumably goofed off for a day, waiting for the guys to come back with "you had to be there" stories about the Moon. It was probably a long trip back to Earth for Collins.

14. Nixon had a speech ready if things went wrong

Going to the Moon and coming back again is really, really, really difficult, and the odds of these three astronauts not making it were pretty good.

President Nixon had his speechwriters draft a speech to be delivered in the event they got stuck on the Moon and weren't going to make it. When they did get back, Neil, Buzz, and Mike presumably lined their birdcages with the speech:

 

13. They didn't bring back that many rocks

Since nobody had ever been to the Moon before, there was no real plan for rock collecting. Neil and Buzz just sort of grabbed rocks that looked neat. In the end they only carried fifty pounds of rock and soil samples back. Only on later missions did the astronauts do some serious rock hunting.

12. Neil Armstrong had a history of seriously clutch performances

As if 78 combat missions in Korea weren't enough, Neil landed an X-15 rocket plane that was tumbling out of control at Mach 3 without a scratch. On Gemini 8, the capsule was put into a spin and he told the computer to shut up and regained control. When the Apollo 11 landing training vehicle broke, Neil ejected with less than a second to spare. 

When the landing computer on Apollo 11 broke, nobody was surprised when he stuck the landing.

11. NASA will let any teacher in America borrow Moon rocks for free

A teacher simply has to ask nicely, and NASA will let them borrow actual samples of rocks and soil from the Moon. All they have to do is attend a brief certification training, follow certain security procedures, and pay for return postage, and they can have actual samples of lunar rocks in their classroom. It is entirely free to get certified and the school only pays to mail the samples back.

10. The astronauts spent twenty-one days in quarantine

One would think, after getting back from the Moon, these guys were ready to collect their free drinks in every bar in America. They had to wait twenty-one days, while they sat in a converted Airstream trailer to make sure they didn't bring back any contagions or diseases from the Moon, because what the heck did we know? Neil and Mike reportedly played the most epic marathon of gin rummy in the history of cards.

9. They left a mirror on the Moon

One of the experiments on Apollo 11 was this neat little trick scientists came up with called the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment. Neil and Buzz staked a laser reflector onto the Moon's surface. To this day, scientists can shoot a laser at the Moon and have it bounce back at them. The time it takes the laser to come back lets us know just how far away the Moon is at all times. It also shuts up the people who think the landing was faked.

8. Buzz Aldrin is pretty sure the flag fell over

When the LEM took off for Mike to come pick the guys up and give them a ride home, Buzz looked out the window and saw the exhaust from the engine knocking stuff around. He's not completely sure, but he reported to NASA that he saw the flag fall down. Future missions planted the flag a hundred feet away from the LEM.

7. A piece of the Wright Flyer made the trip

A chunk of the Wright Brothers' Flyer was brought along by Neil, an Ohio native like the Wright Brothers. It was brought back and is on display at the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

In a weird coincidence, North Carolina native Michael Smith took another chunk of the Wright Flyer on the Challenger space shuttle mission that ended in disaster. The artifact was recovered from the wreckage and is displayed at the North Carolina Museum Of History.

6. The Saturn V rocket was insane

To this day, the Saturn V remains the largest and most powerful vehicle ever created by the human race to fly successfully. It also still holds the record for the heaviest payload(s) ever put into orbit. The F-1 rocket engine put out a million and a half thrust-pounds of force and the first stage had five of those suckers.  In thirteen launches, it never lost a single payload or crew member.

5. The weirdest things caused drama

NASA insisted they clean up the eagle claws on the patch for "looking war-like". The guys wanted to name the Command Module as Snowcone and the LEM as Haystack, and were asked to maybe take this a little more seriously. Neil and Buzz had a long back-and-forth with planners about who would get out of the LEM first (with Buzz bordering on a tantrum).

4. One switch almost ruined everything

Because someone wrote the checklist wrong, a radar system had the switch in the wrong position. As Neil and Buzz descended to the surface, the computer promptly freaked directly out and started sending a 1202 Alarm that literally nobody had heard of. Turns out that one switch was overloading the computer and that was its way of saying "hang on a sec". Neil switched it off and landed it by hand.

3. The Eagle landed with under thirty seconds of fuel

Because of the computer freakout, the LEM was coming down about a mile off course and into a boulder field. When Neil and his balls of steel took over, he was using the descent engine to prevent the LEM from crashing and making Nixon use that speech.

At the moment the Eagle landed, there were twenty-three seconds of fuel remaining.

2. The New York Times said it couldn't be done

In 1920, Dr. Robert H Goddard published a paper that said a liquid-fueled rocket could take someone to the Moon. Solid-fuel rockets needed air to work, which space has none of. Goddard said his new engine would do it.

In an editorial, The New York Times said Goddard was full of it, rockets can't work in a vacuum and that Goddard "seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools".

1. The New York Times had to take it back

Oops. When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, it was pretty much a slam dunk on The New York Times being wrong. In a completely stand-up move, the Times ate some humble pie and ran this apology, noting that they "regret the error." Dr. Goddard had passed away, or else they'd have run a photo of him flipping the bird next to the correction.

Rico says that he doubts that Dr. Goddard knew what 'flipping the bird' meant...