Original subtitles

(tense music)

The most important thing NASA ever did

in terms of its Human Space Flight Program

is to land an astronaut on the moon,

so that would make it sort of a golden age,

and when we all look back on this, probably 100,

200 years from now, they're gonna remember the 20th

century for only a few things, but one of them

is gonna be the moon landing.

It's gonna be something that children study

centuries into the future.

(rousing orchestral music)

20 seconds and counting.

We are still go on Apollo 11 at this time.

T minus 25 seconds.

On a beautiful Friday morning,

the world holds its breath as three men,

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Buzz Aldrin,

sit atop a 363 foot Saturn V rocket,

destined to become the first humans to land on the moon.

Four, three, two, zero.

All engines running.

Liftoff, we have a liftoff, 32 minutes past the hour.

Liftoff on Apollo 11.

(rumbling)

Pushing past earth's gravitational force,

the crew of Apollo 11 travels four days

to reach the Sea of Tranquility and alter the course

of human history.

Contact flight?

Okay, engines stop.

Tranquility base here.

The Eagle has landed.

Roger, Tranquility.

We copy on the ground.

Armstrong is on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

There was no question in Neil's mind

that he was the first person to walk on the moon,

and that was certainly the intention of NASA.

While they were in the lunar module on the surface

of the moon, and at that point that they're

opening the door, Buzz suggests, well,

it's easier for me to get out first,

so why don't I do that?

And Neil says no, no, you're not doing that.

So they have to do a little sidestep

and Neil gets off first.

On this July 20th, 1969--

It's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

Well.

(laughter)

Well, obviously, the famous words.

They're very appropriate, and not all of the statements

of the astronauts when the reach the surface

of the moon are quite so memorable.

That one clearly is.

It's also one that's gonna be quoted

in the history books to eternity.

People literally around the globe sorta paused

for a moment, paid attention, were interested

in what was taking place, were less concerned about

maybe their day-to-day activities than they were

about this kinda larger thing that they're living through,

this historic moment, and there's all these

fascinating recollections of people, where they were,

what they were doing, when they saw the moon landing.

There's no question that that moon landing was the point

at which everything that NASA does will be measured by.

The United States successfully accomplished

its mission of bing the first nation

to plant its flag on the moon,

(tense music)

but during the early years of space exploration,

it was far from certain that Americans

would be the ones to take that first small step

onto lunar soil.

In NASA's conception in 1958, the objective was

to beat the Russians at whatever the Russians

were going to do.

This was a Cold War era.

NASA was fundamentally a Cold War agency,

created to demonstrate to the world that the United States

was second to none when it came to science and technology,

and this was really important, because in the world's

stage, the Soviet Union outwardly looked successful

in high-technology activities.

Rocketry was one of those means in which

they demonstrated their prowess very early on.

By October 1957, the first artificial

Earth satellite was pronounced ready.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik October the 4th, 1957,

and the United States sort of responded to this

as oh my goodness, how can they do this and we didn't?

A man-made celestial body,

for the first time in history, flew into space.

Sputnik 1 had been a little ball

about the size of a beach ball, and weighed 184 pounds.

It wasn't terribly big.

It didn't do very much.

It was just first, but the next month,

they launched Sputnik 2, which was about the size

of a Volkswagen, and had a dog aboard, Laika.

Laika had been groomed for the flight.

It had been trained to live in a special container.

The apparatus weighed half a ton.

Laika would become the first animal

to orbit Earth, but sadly would not return home,

with her life ending a few hours into the journey.

On national television, everybody saw it,

and it looked like not only could the Soviets

do this stuff very, very well.

The Americans couldn't do it at all.

The space team at Cape Kennedy

runs into trouble, and at the center,

a rocket fails just two seconds after blastoff.

Now, at Cape Canaveral,

the first transition from missile to

advanced space technology.

The Soviets continued to lead for a number of years.

They were the first to send a satellite to the moon.

They were the first to go to the backside of the moon

and photograph it and send those images back.

They were the first to engage in all kinds of activities

with robotic space probes in that period between

1958 and 1961, but then, in 1961, they launched

Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut, into Earth orbit.

The first strides into the unknown

are about to be made.

(rumbling)

In some respects, nothing did more to spur

NASA's efforts and spur the funding for NASA

than that one act on the part of the Soviets.

They had put a human in Earth orbit.

They had demonstrated that it could be done.

Then man would conquer solar space

and acquire might and boundless power over nature.

It was a bad experience early on.

All of that is what sparked the necessity

on the part of Congress to pass legislation

to create NASA.

I therefore ask the Congress--

President Kennedy, in 1961, decided that we were

seriously going to try to beat the Russians,

and on the 25th of May, you know, less than six weeks

after Gagarin's flight, he announces we're gonna

go to the moon.

I believe that this nation should commit itself

to achieving the goal before this decade is out

of landing a man on the moon and returning him

safely to the earth.

And that's when he set the challenge.

We're gonna land a man on the moon by the end

of the decade, and he was intent that the Americans

lead the way.

It was a really difficult task to kind of catch up.

(tense music)

Going to the moon is hard to do, and the demonstration

of that is the fact that nobody's been there since, really.

You know, there's a few robots who've landed,

but that's the extent of it.

There's a lot of technology that has to be mastered.

You have to build a really big rocket

to be able to get there.

You have to create the life science capabilities

to keep an astronaut alive for the period of time

necessary to get there and back.

You have to build other types of technologies,

especially things like a lunar lander

built for flying in a weightless environment,

in an airless environment, and in an environment

that only have 1/6th gravity.

(upbeat music)

The proposed technique for simulating

the lunar gravity can install a jet engine

underneath or within the machine on gimbals,

so the thrust was always vertically upward.

I was most fortunate to be involved throughout

the entire lunar flying development.

I had the pleasure of flying every one of the machines.

NASA management was forever worried about the reliability

and safety of these machines, and continually wanted

to shut them down, but the pilots insisted they were

vital to lunar landing preparation.

But those technical challenges were maybe even

less significant than the managerial ones.

How do you organize hundreds of thousands of people,

billions of dollars of activity, all carried out

all over the United States, and be able to bring

all of the results of that together at one location,

put it together, and then fly it to the moon successfully,

and not do it just once.

Do it multiples of times, which NASA did.

While many on Earth hope to travel

to a new world, NASA had a particular sort of candidate

in mind for its Apollo program.

Candidates had to be men between the ages

of 25 and 35 years old.

They had to be in excellent physical condition,

and could be no taller than six feet.

The astronaut must learn

to tolerate the heating he encounters during his fall

back into the atmosphere.

These quartz tube lamps produce great heat.

They must also have obtained

a university degree in physical science or engineering

and have logged, at a minimum, 1,500 hours of flight time.

Psychologically, they would need to be emotionally stable,

highly motivated, and not to mention, brave.

Astronauts are fascinating characters.

There's a variety of personalities, but one of the things

about them is that they're all military officers

of one type or another, which means they have lived

their adult lives in a very large bureaucracy

that values order, and discipline, and obedience.

The astronauts consider this experience

as probably the most important phase of their

space flight environmental training.

We tend to have this perception that comes

from Tom Wofle's book, the Right Stuff,

that these are kind of cowboys and they do whatever

they want, so on and so forth.

None of that is true.

They might occasionally go off and do something

that is a little bit out of the ordinary,

but mostly, they knew how to operate in a big bureaucracy

and were very successful at it, or they wouldn't have been

picked as astronauts.

The other thing about them is that they are all

sort of white, middle-class males,

many of them from the Midwest.

I don't think there's any accident that that's the case.

Most of them went to school on the G.I. Bill.

Many of them were the first children in their families

to go to college.

So at some level, they're sort of the all-American boys.

Bottom line is astronauts wanna fly.

That's why they're there, and that's what they train

to do, and that's in their DNA, so to speak.

Apollo 1 was intended to be a test mission,

flying in to low Earth orbit.

The three men selected for this heroic operation

were command pilot Grissom, senior pilot Ed White,

and pilot Roger Chaffee.

They would be the first men to embark on NASA's

ambitious plan to reach the moon.

Little did anyone know the tragedy that awaited them.

They weren't on a mission, they weren't flying.

They were doing ground tests at the Kennedy Space Center,

trying to work on the first flight

of the Apollo Spacecraft with a crew aboard,

and flash fire breaks out, and those men die

in a matter of seconds.

All three were victims of the sift inferno,

which left the capsule a blackened shell.

Investigators theorize that perhaps a short circuit

or electrical overload may have sparked the blaze.

27 would-be rescuers were all overcome by smoke and heat.

Entering Arlington National Cemetery,

a horse-drawn caisson bears the body

of Lieutenant Virgil Gus Grissom, one of three

Apollo astronauts killed in a tragic flash fire

at Cape Kennedy.

NASA had a reputation up through 1966 that it had this

organizational structure that could solve any problem,

and so it was the perfect system, and then suddenly,

in January, 1967, they lose a crew

in the most horrible of ways.

At that point, public scrutiny starts to look at this

in ways it had not previously.

People were asking the question, well,

we knew it was expensive.

We didn't realize how dangerous it was

until you ended up with three astronauts dead,

and maybe we should pull the plug on this thing,

and there were members of Congress who were

actively seeking that particular resolution.

NASA handled that reasonably well.

They did a fairly honest review of what was taking place

and how it had taken place.

Now, from that point on, we've had

many different tests performed on flammability materials.

We've discovered that many of the materials

must be changed.

And it was gut-wrenching, it's a death in the family.

(tense music)

Apollo astronauts Chaffee, White,

Grissom, martyred heroes, who gave their lives

in total dedication to duty.

Their memory will forever be honored.

The tragedy would have a profound effect

on the course of space exploration history.

Plans for a manned Apollo 2 and 3 missions were scrapped

in favor of less risky, unmanned missions.

It seemed that mankind would have to wait

to step foot on our moon.

While scientists develop a fireproof fabric

for Apollo spacesuits and a new hatch

that will open in three seconds, America's man on the moon

timetable still aims for a landing by 1970.

They fixed the technical problems.

They tried to restore confidence, both in their activities,

as well as the larger technical system.

The next launch, seven months after the fire,

would be named Apollo 4.

Apollo 4 and the subsequent missions leading up

to Apollo 7 would al test different technological aspects

necessary to safely send humans into space.

It wasn't until October 11th, 1968, that the Apollo Program

would deliver its first human crew into space

for an 11 day test flight in low Earth orbit.

But down on Earth, there was little time to celebrate.

1968 was a horrible time in the United States.

It began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

It went through the assassination of Martin Luther King

and riots that followed.

Every city blew up at some point during that

particular year.

There were moments when there was fear

for the safety of the Kennedy part.

The assassination of Robert Kennedy,

the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention,

and on, and on, and on.

After all of this strife, on December 21st,

1968, NASA launches Apollo 8, which became the first

manned mission to orbit the moon before returning

safely back to Earth.

Everybody sort of focuses for about a week

on this mission in which these three astronauts

circle the moon, take pictures of the Earth,

and do broadcasts from lunar orbit over

the Christmas holidays.

And the spirit of God

moved upon the face of the waters, and God said,

let there be light, and there was light.

Literally, they read from the first verses of the Bible

and wished happy holidays, merry Christmas,

to all of the people on, as they said, the good Earth.

There are only about half a dozen pictures from Apollo

that anybody remembers, and one of them

is the so called Earthrise picture,

which was taken by that crew in 1968.

And you see, in the foreground of this,

the moon, gray, lifeless.

And off in the distance, you see a crescent Earth,

blue, white, handing in the blackness of space,

and it signals to you the realization that,

quite frankly, we, ourselves, are living on

a little spaceship, and it's pretty little

in the overall scheme of things, and there aren't

any lifeboats, and maybe we better start

to take care of it a little bit.

That particular moment suggest that with all the strife,

all the contention, you can pause and think that, you know,

there's more that brings us together

than that keeps us apart.

For a few moments, we all saw ourselves,

not just as a member of some particular nationality

or a representative from some particular race,

or ethnic group, or whatever it happened to be,

but as a human being.

We were all doing this one thing together.

We pause with goodnight, good luck,

a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you,

all of you on the good Earth.

(slow music)

With the success of the Apollo 9 and 10

missions, for those on the good Earth,

the dream of landing on the moon became all the more real.

The crew of Apollo 9 spent 10 days in low Earth orbit

testing gear, including docking and redocking

the lunar module.

They were even able to perform two separate space walks.

Apollo 10 became the second mission to orbit the moon,

and was the dress rehearsal for the eventual moon landing.

Descending to an altitude of 8.4 miles

above the lunar surface, the crew tested the capabilities

of the lunar module's assent engine and condition.

Armed with the skills and knowledge amassed

during these two successful missions, the final stage

was set for Apollo 11.

This was the big show.

This was the one that was going to do it.

It's pretty remarkable, that particular crew

and how they went about their work.

Neil Armstrong was just about as no-nonsense

as any one person can be.

Very good pilot, very strong willed,

and was able to keep in check other personalities

around him, and Buzz Aldrin was sort of a guy

who tended to get excited and run off in one direction

and then get excited and run off in another direction.

You had to keep him vectored.

But Buzz was a fellow who did as much as anybody

to help us get to the moon.

He had a PhD in astrophysics.

He had studied at MIT and he was a key person

in developing rendezvous and docking techniques

in the 1960s, which you have to do

if you're gonna go to the moon.

He was the key person, the key of all the astronauts,

in terms of working on the EVA, or extravehicular activity.

You know, putting on a spacesuit, going outside

the spacecraft, doing something.

It was Buzz who went into a swimming pool

and said, we can sort of replicate a weightless environment

in this swimming pool, and he figured out

the procedures, and he worked on the tools

that were necessary to do certain kinds of things

and made it possible to do this EVA.

Fancy way of saying walking in space.

Buzz and Neil would spend the next

22 hours and 26 minutes on the moon,

but only two and a half of those hours

were walking on the surface.

The science wasn't too complicated,

and consisted mostly of taking lunar samples,

as well as observing and inspecting this uncharted

alien environment.

Radios aren't clear, how's it going?

Roger, the EVA is progressing beautifully.

I believe it is setting up the flag now.

Because nobody knew how the spacesuits

would hold up, neither man would venture farther

than 90 yards from the lunar module.

Okay, that's great.

Is the lighting halfway decent?

Yes indeed.

They've got the flag up now and you can see

the stars and stripes.

Beautiful, just beautiful.

I'm sure most of them were confident

in the technology, but you've always gotta have

in the back of your mind that this is a test run,

that's it's experimental, and that something could happen

that is unexpected, and they were prepared for that.

Houston, guidance recommendation

is pinged and your cleared for takeoff.

The folks at NASA maybe had less confidence

in the technology and there were some

who were concerned.

You know, what if we can't light that stage

to send the assent part of the lunar module

back up into orbit?

We got two astronauts on the moon who are gonna die

a slow death when their oxygen runs out.

This is Apollo control--

And nobody liked that idea, obviously,

and you're gonna do everything you can

to guard against it.

(rousing music)

The world waited.

Never before had so many people be attuned to one event.

Apollo 11, Apollo 11,

this is Hornet, Hornet, over.

In spite of all the successes NASA's had since then,

we've had many, this is the one that's gonna stand out.

This is the one that everybody remembers

and talks about.

So many people have done so much to give us

this opportunity to place this American flag

on the surface.

To me, it was one of the prouder moments of my life.

We give ourselves a hometown party.

History will always remember these

three valiant men who became the first

to leave their footprints on a celestial body

beyond our home planet, but they would not be the last.

The crew of Apollo 12,

astronauts Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon.

Two, one, zero.

Over the next three years,

the Apollo Program launched six subsequent missions

to land on the moon.

Five of them were a success.

Pete Conrad reports that your program is in.

Apollo 15 and 16 would bring a companion

that captivated children and adults worldwide

who wished that they too could drive through

lunar dust and craters.

And suddenly, the flames shot up

until finally, Apollo 17 was just a bright star

in the sky.

Apollo 17, the final mission of the program,

marked the last time that any human would visit the moon

in the 20th century.

I was strolling on the moon one day in the

very merry month-- In the very merry month--

--of December. No, May.

Do-do-do-do-do.

It was also the first time

that geologists would have the chance

to investigate our neighbor firsthand.

You get the tongs, Jack?

Yep. I'll carry the rake.

Look at the size of that rock!

Every rock that we examined had something new

that I didn't expect, and surprises is what geologists like.

That's why you're exploring, is to see the things

that nobody's ever seen before.

The quality and diversity of the Apollo sample collection,

independent of Apollo 17, where had an experienced

geologist, is just remarkable.

We hope that this will be a symbol

of what our feelings are, what the feelings

of the Apollo Program are, and a symbol of mankind,

if we can live in decent harmony in the future.

No matter how much preparation you have

for experiences like stepping on the moon,

it's going to be more than you ever anticipated.

(bright music)

The first time that somebody climbs a hill

outside their town and looks down on their town,

they have a different and changed perspective on it.

When you see the Earth from space,

you do have a different perspective,

and all the astronauts talk about this.

You don't see any borders between nations.

You know, all you see is these geographical features,

and sometimes you can see some human-made objects,

and certainly at night you can see lights of cities,

but that changes you, when you see this in a new way.

Some of them reflected on this in a variety of ways

and some of them in a very religious manner.

Obviously, you know, I'm a part of this grander scheme

that was been created for us in this universe.

Others have had strikingly different perspectives.

Russell Schweickart came back as an avowed environmentalist.

That's the most important thing you can do,

he announced when he returned, because there's

nothing more fragile than the Earth.

All of them came back with a slightly altered perspective.

Even for those who may never gaze down

on our home planet from such great heights,

these 12 individuals, and thousands of other men and women

involved in the Apollo Program, forever changed

humanity's view of our tiny blue dot.

(calm music)

For the first time in history, humans on Earth,

looking towards the sky, could imagine setting foot

on worlds beyond our own and know that it

was more than a dream.

(chill music)