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In this book you’re going to read eight different stories about the Apollo 11 mission. These stories were told to us by people from all around the world, who experienced Apollo 11 in very different ways. But before going back in time and across five different continents, we thought it would be helpful to provide some information about NASA’s Moon landing program, Apollo.

The “Space Race”

Humanity’s course toward the Moon started in October 1957 when Russian scientists launched a rocket into space carrying a small metal sphere about the size of a beach ball. This rocket was traveling fast enough that when the metal ball was released from the nose cone, it went into orbit around the Earth. This metal ball was called Sputnik—humanity’s first artificial satellite. By most accounts, Sputnik officially kicked off the “Space Race.”

The term “Space Race” is used to describe a sort of technology Olympics between two countries: The United States of America and Russia—more often referred to at the time as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or the Soviet Union for short. If we’re keeping score then, it was the Russians who were leading the medal rankings in the early days of the “Space Race”.

On April 12, 1961, the Russians scored their second big win. A young man named Yuri Gagarin sat cramped in a tiny cockpit atop a Russian Vostok rocket. Gagarin was a military pilot, but his job that day was to be a passenger. The rocket on which he sat was significantly bigger than the one used to launch Sputnik four years earlier and didn’t include any manual controls for Yuri to pilot the craft himself. After launching from Baikonur (in what is now Kazakhstan), Gagarin’s rocket pierced through the atmosphere and entered space. Like Sputnik, the speed of the rocket propelled Yuri’s cramped capsule into Earth’s orbit—where no human had ventured before.

After just over an hour circling the Earth, Gagarin’s Vostok capsule re-entered the atmosphere, deployed its parachute, and successfully touched down. His mission was a success, making him the world’s first cosmonaut, the Russian word for astronaut (both “cosmonaut” and “astronaut” come from the Latin words for “star sailor”).

Seemingly losing the “Space Race” at that point—or at least convincing themselves it was a race and that they were losing—American politicians and scientists set out to do something big. In May of 1961, President John F. Kennedy told the world that America was planning to put humans on the Moon. This was, to say the least, a bit of a shocker. The President was announcing this Moon plan mere weeks after the first human had even ventured into space. Few people before this had really taken a human Moon landing seriously. It seemed to many an impossible task. But Kennedy was confident—so much so that he gave America a deadline, saying, “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.”

Spurred on by the success of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, and against a looming deadline, engineers and scientists from around the world were brought to work at NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Far from the shining symbol of excellence it is viewed as today, NASA was barely a toddler when Kennedy made his announcement. It had only been created three years earlier.

NASA’s attempt to put humans on the Moon would be called Project Apollo, and it had about nine years to meet the President’s deadline. This gave those scientists and engineers less than a decade to do something people had barely started thinking about from a technical perspective. The clock was ticking.

So, You Want to Land on the Moon?

If you want to land on the Moon—and come back to Earth—you’re going to need at least two things: a gigantic rocket, and a spacecraft able to land and come back.

At this point it’s important to note that spaceships in sci-fi movies are very different from spacecraft that were built in the 1960s, or even those built today. In movies, spaceships are usually an all-in-one vehicle, like the Millennium Falcon or the starship Enterprise. Fictional ships like this take off from planets, fly around in space, and land all on their own, all in one piece. In real life, we aren’t quite there yet.

It’s incredibly hard to get off of Earth. Our planet has a lot of gravity that tries to pull you right back down. Long story short, you need a very powerful rocket to leave the Earth’s gravity. But once you’re in space, the rocket has done its job and there’s no further need to lug it around with you. We don’t need the rocket to get back down to Earth either. That’s where gravity is our friend. We can just fall back to Earth, albeit in a controlled manner so as not to burn up in the atmosphere.

So, what we usually do is build small spacecraft called capsules, and put them on top of a powerful rocket. The rocket lifts the capsule into space, where it then separates and goes wherever it needs to. The rocket, meanwhile, falls back down to Earth.

For the Apollo program, NASA put three astronauts in a capsule, put the capsule on top of a rocket, and launched them toward the Moon. This sounds simple enough, but there was one minor detail to attend to: No one had ever built a rocket that was able to do this. No one had ever built a rocket that could lift a spaceship and three people at a fast enough speed that they could escape the gravity of Earth and get to the Moon.

To add to NASA’s problems, no one had ever designed a spacecraft able to land on another world and take off again. Both NASA and Russia had sent robotic missions that landed on the Moon in the late 1960s, but none of these were designed to return to Earth or carry humans.

After exploring all the options for getting to the Moon, landing, and getting home, NASA came to a conclusion: they needed one very big rocket and two different spacecraft.

The plan went like this: The massive rocket would have the two spacecraft placed on top of it. There would be three astronauts onboard, right at the top. The giant rocket would push both spacecraft into space. Once in space, while still near the Earth, the two craft would connect and start flying towards the Moon. The rocket would then fall back down to Earth having completed its job.

Once the two spacecraft got to the Moon a few days later, they would detach from each other. One would remain flying above the Moon (staying in orbit) with one astronaut onboard. The other craft, carrying two astronauts, would land on the Moon’s surface.

The astronauts that made the journey down to the lunar surface would walk around for a bit, collect some rocks, then launch off the Moon back up to the other spacecraft that had remained in orbit. Thankfully, it’s much easier to launch off the Moon than the Earth because there is no atmosphere, as well as much less gravity holding you down. Getting off the Moon only requires a small booster.

After getting off the Moon and reaching the other craft, the two would reconnect and the Moonwalking astronauts would rejoin the third that had stayed in orbit above them. Reunited in the same spacecraft, the three astronauts would make their way back home to Earth. Since they didn’t need two spacecraft to go back home, they would leave one to fall back down to the Moon just before they left.

As our three astronauts returned to Earth, the Command Module would fly through the atmosphere and deploy multiple huge parachutes—each one nearly half the size of an Olympic swimming pool—and land softly on the ocean. They would float there until being picked up by a naval carrier and brought back to shore.

No one said going to the Moon would be easy.

That Big Rocket:

The Saturn V

Next time you’re in a city, find a building that’s about thirty stories high. That’s the height of the rocket built by NASA to send humans to the Moon. The rocket was called the Saturn Five. The “five” is always written in Roman numerals, so it’s written out as “Saturn V.” To this day, over fifty years later, the Saturn V is still the most powerful vehicle ever built by humans.

Like a lot of rockets, the Saturn V was what’s called a multistage rocket. These rockets shed weight as they fly. This is good as lighter things can fly faster and will have an easier time escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity. Multistage rockets are built in sections (“stages”) and burn fuel from the bottom up. When the fuel from one section is used up, that section breaks off and the rocket becomes lighter.

Spacecraft 1: The Command/Service Module

The Command/Service Module was a three-seater capsule that sat right at the top of the Saturn V. When the Saturn V was on the launch pad, the astronauts would be sitting with their backs to the ground looking straight up at the sky. The only thing on top of this craft was a small escape rocket for emergencies. This escape rocket was like an ejection seat for all three astronauts, but it was only needed in case of an accident on the launch pad; it would be discarded right after takeoff if unused and wouldn’t go into space.

The Command/Service Module had two parts: the Command Module and the Service Module, hence the name “Command/Service Module.” The Command Module was a triangular capsule at the front where the astronauts sat and controlled everything. The Service Module was the cargo part of the spacecraft behind them. NASA figured it would take the astronauts about three days to get to the moon. This meant they would need about seven days worth of food, power, and oxygen to cover the day at the moon and the return trip. Essentially, the Service Module was the supply closet for the mission. To simplify things, from here on out, we’ll just call this whole craft the “Command Module.”

NASA also attached a very small rocket engine to the back of the Command Module so that the astronauts could make maneuvers on their way to the Moon. This was critical for entering the Moon’s orbit, which required precise flying to account for the Moon’s own, albeit weaker, gravitational pull. When an Apollo mission was over, the Command Module would return to Earth’s orbit from the Moon and split in two. Only the triangular “command” part with the three astronauts onboard would return safely to Earth’s surface. The supply closet that was the Service Module was left to orbit the Earth and eventually crash into the ocean.

Spacecraft 2: The Lunar Module

At this point we’ve got a big rocket, a place to sit and control the spacecraft, and a place to keep all the important things like food and oxygen. So, what else do we need? Well, a huge part of going to the Moon was flying down to the lunar surface, landing, and being able to come back.

For this part, NASA had some decisions to make. They realized that the Command Module couldn’t perform the actual moon landing once it got there. Instead, the solution was to build an entirely separate spacecraft that came along for the ride and would only be used for going up and down to the lunar surface. This craft would attach to the front of the Command Module for the trip to the Moon, kind of like driving to a lake with a canoe on the roof of your car. The second spacecraft was designed specifically to land on the moon, and was called the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM for short (pronounced like the beginning of “lemon”).

The LEM looked a bit like a robotic spider. It was designed only for landing on the Moon and getting back off again. After landing, the LEM would be the astronauts’ home base—their tent in the woods, so to speak. When they had their spacesuits on and were ready, the astronauts would go outside and explore the lunar surface. In the case of Apollo 11, the two astronauts explored for about three hours before getting back in, taking a nap, and flying back up to their astronaut colleague in orbit. In order to do this, the LEM would actually split in half, leaving its legs on the Moon’s surface. The top half, lifted by a small booster engine, would then rendezvous with the Command Module orbiting in wait above them.

Once reconnected to the Command Module, the astronauts would unload the Moon rocks they collected and jump back in the Command Module. Just before heading back to Earth, they would detach what was left of the LEM and let it crash into the Moon, like leaving your canoe to drift on the lake if you don’t want to bring it all the way back with you. (Please don’t actually do that with your canoe though. Littering isn’t cool.)

The Astronauts

Who would NASA need to take on this mission? They decided that each Apollo mission would need three astronauts: one person to fly the Command Module, one person to fly the LEM, and an overall mission commander. The Command Module pilot would be the “unlucky” one who didn’t get to go down to the Moon. Instead, they would stay in orbit flying above the Moon while the other two went down in the LEM. The first Moon landing was accomplished by three astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. You’ll hear a bit more about them throughout the rest of the book.

Practicing for the Moon

The success of Apollo 11 didn’t come out of nowhere. Just like learning to do anything difficult, NASA took incremental steps in achieving the Moon landing. This involved a series of missions, each testing out the equipment, preparing the astronauts, and making sure they were ready for everything and anything that might come their way.

Sadly, during this testing there were casualties. Apollo 1 was meant to be a test of the Command Service Module in low Earth orbit. It had a crew of three astronauts: Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Tragically, a fire in the module during launch rehearsals on the ground resulted in the deaths of all three astronauts. This mission had originally been designated AS-204, but the widows of the three astronauts asked that the mission be called Apollo 1 in their honor.

Two launch tests of the Command Module had taken place without a crew aboard previously, so the naming scheme for the next mission jumped to Apollo 4; there was never technically an Apollo 2 or Apollo 3 mission. Apollo 4 and 6 marked the first and second flights, respectively, of the mighty Saturn V rocket, still with no one onboard. Apollo 5 was the first uncrewed test flight of the LEM using the Saturn V’s little sibling, the Saturn IB. All of these tests were to make sure the equipment would be safe for humans before taking the risk of actually putting astronauts into the mix.

The first Apollo astronauts to fly were the Apollo 7 crew; Walter Cunningham, Walter Schirra, and Donn Eisele. Apollo 7’s goal was to test out the Command Module. They did this by flying it around the Earth a few times and making sure everything worked. The astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission had the same goal of testing the Command Module, but they were lucky enough to be asked to test it by flying around the Moon. On this mission, Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and Jim Lovell became the first humans to truly leave Earth and its orbit. Apollo 9, with James McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart, followed by staying back in Earth’s orbit and testing both the LEM and Command Module together. This was important to make sure the two spaceships could be connected and disconnected when needed.

Apollo 10 combined everything that had happened so far, flying both the Command Module and LEM to orbit around the Moon. Astronauts Gene Cernan, Tom Stafford, and John Young even detached the LEM from the Command Module and flew it within fifteen kilometers of the lunar surface—practicing almost everything needed to land on the Moon except actually landing. Because of this, Apollo 10 is often referred to as the dress rehearsal. In fact, NASA didn’t even include enough fuel for the mission to be able to land and take off again as it wasn’t intended to be done on this mission. Apollo 10 astronaut Eugene Cernan later joked that NASA might have done this intentionally so that he and Stafford couldn’t take it upon themselves to just go ahead and land on the Moon.

By 1969, NASA had gone step by step and were ready to attempt a lunar landing. They had tested the Command Module above Earth (Apollo 7) then above the Moon (Apollo 8). They had tested the Command Module and LEM together above the Earth (Apollo 9) and then, again, above the Moon (Apollo 10). Everything had been done at least once…except the actual landing. That would be left for Apollo 11 to try for the first time. You’ll read all about Apollo 11 in the rest of this book, so we won’t talk about it here.

Six more Apollo missions flew after Apollo 11. Five of these were successful in landing on the Moon: Apollo 12, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and the finale, Apollo 17. One other mission launched, but the astronauts had to fly around the moon without landing because of a malfunction in the Service Module. This was the famous Apollo 13 mission.

What all these missions had in common was the goal of landing on the Moon and, most importantly, getting back home safely again. Amazingly, each Apollo mission that launched accomplished the goal of getting the astronauts home safely.

A Truly Global Mission

To this day, the Saturn V remains one of the most complex machines humans have ever built. When it first launched from Cape Kennedy in 1967, now known as Cape Canaveral, NASA’s Moon rocket was the culmination of centuries of human ingenuity. The first rockets were invented in China and India almost one thousand years earlier. The mathematical formulas necessary to calculate the rocket’s flight and that of the Apollo 11 spacecraft used algebra developed by ancient Babylonians and perfected by Persian scholars in the ninth century. Work by seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and British physicist Sir Isaac Newton provided many of the basic equations for the orbital mechanics needed to get Apollo 11 on and off the Moon. And in the decades leading up to Sputnik, engineers from around the world studied the work of pioneering Russian rocket scientists such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who developed the crucial equations necessary for rockets to reach outer space.

In short, it took all of humanity’s ingenuity to launch the Saturn V.

And it wasn’t just the science and technology of past generations taking part. Along the way, people from around the world were with Apollo 11, even inside their spacecraft. Among the personal items Armstrong and Aldrin brought with them to the Moon was a cassette of Antonin Dvořák’s 9th Symphony. This nineteenth-century masterpiece of classical music, written by the Czech composer while he lived in the United States, was inspired by African American folk music. Dvorak wanted a symphony that expressed the musical potential of Indigenous American and African American cultures, which for too long had been ignored by other composers. The result: a blend of African American folk melodies and Slavic compositional traditions wrapped into a single musical masterpiece—a masterpiece that found its way to the Moon in July 1969.

What you will see in the pages to follow is that the Apollo missions were some of the most incredible adventures humanity has ever witnessed, and just as the world inspired Apollo, the mission, through its accomplishments, returned the favor. Throughout the 1960s, people from all around the globe watched these missions as they happened live, gripped with excitement and wonder.

Apollo didn’t happen in a vacuum (pardon the pun). It was intertwined with millions of people’s lives, as participants or observers. In this book, we want you to feel what it was like to be on Earth when humans first touched another world. We also want you to get a sense of what life was like in this different time, five decades ago. From India to Canada, Sudan to Iran, we want to take you around the world and back in time.

We hope you enjoy this sort of global folk history of Apollo that we’ve had the pleasure of hearing and assembling. We are honored to share these stories with the world and, most of all, want to thank those who shared their precious time and memories with us. They have provided us all with a gift, to have the opportunity to relive this unique time in human history.