They put a man on the moon
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses for a photography beside the US flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Photo: Neil Armstrong/The Associated Press
Recollection of event still strong for observers
By Rashah McChesney – Daily Staff Writer
Forty years ago, Americans watched as the first manned mission to the moon landed, then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface and came back to Earth, lauded as heroes.
Elizabeth Orcutt-Kroeger, administrative assistant at Parks Library, said she remembers the iconic walk very clearly.
“The thing about it was that everybody had their TV on, and your whole day was planned around when they were going to be in contact, and Walter Cronkite was telling us all about it,” she said.
The landing, which was part of NASA’s Apollo program, used technology that had less computing power than a modern calculator. Yet, this is now beyond the grasp of NASA’s current capability, said Stephanie Schierholz, a spokesperson for NASA.
Schierholz, whose parents both graduated from Iowa State, said there were a number of reasons for this lapse in technological capability.
“We don’t have a rocket that can send us there, and we don’t have the technology anymore,” she said. “The Saturn V rockets were ended under the Nixon administration. So that was a decision made by the government, so then we moved to the space shuttle program.”
Schierholz said the Saturn V rocket was used to launch both the moon lander and a capsule that orbited around the moon, waiting for the lander to return.
There were three people aboard the capsule, but only two — Armstrong and Aldrin — landed while Michael Collins stayed in orbit during the moon walk. Thomas Rudolphi, professor of aerospace engineering, said despite the abandonment of the technology, he didn’t think it would be difficult to get it back.
“I think we left the goal of our particular rocket capability that put us there. We didn’t have any use for it so it’s sort of gone, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t get it back fairly quickly,” Rudolphi said. “It would certainly be more expensive.”
Rudolphi said he worked for Rockwell International at the time of the lunar landing.
“I was straight out of school at that point, I had taken my first job in the Los Angeles area,” he said. “They helped make a lot of the equipment that was used to get to the moon, the rocket boosters and things like that. So I was kind of in the middle of that, I worked for a division of the company that wasn’t intimately involved, but it was very much of interest.”
As an engineer, Rudolphi said, the technological advancements involved in the whole process were something he “kept an eye” on, but that the moon walk was not something that happened suddenly and surprised people.
“This all followed through a period of 10 years of developments that led up to this. So the landing was kind of at the end of a 10 to 12 year period of the old Sputnik-era culmination of this country’s effort to get us ahead of the Russians,” Rudolphi said. NASA’s current Constellation program, which started in 2004 during the Bush administration, announced a goal of landing on the moon in 2020. There would be some differences in the way the newest mission is planned and the old one was executed, but many of the principles will remain the same, Schierholz said.
“There will be two rockets, a smaller rocket and a larger rocket, and a crew capsule very similar to the one they used in the Apollo project,” she said. “So instead of using just one rocket, this one will have two. The Aries I will launch the crew, and the Aries V will launch the lunar lander and the fuel that’s needed for the Earth departure stage.”
Instead of launching a rocket straight from the earth to the moon, the original mission pushed the lander and capsule from the earth’s gravitational pull into the moon’s gravitational pull. Then the rocket thrusters would fire to bring the lander closer to the moon. “So when you hear people refer to things like ‘they were captured by the moon,’ that means that they were pushed from the earth’s gravitational pull over into the moons gravitational pull, from the point between the earth and the moon where they both meet,” Schierholz said.
Orcutt-Kroeger said the first landing was a very unifying time in U.S. history.
“The only thing I can compare it to is Sept. 11, which is the complete opposite in terms of feeling, but it just absolutely stopped everybody,” she said.
Rudolphi said the moon walk was similar to the election of President Obama, because people realized, while it was happening that they were watching history in action.
“It was immediately recognizable as a history-making moment,” he said.
Karl Gschneidner, distinguished professor of materials science and engineering, said he was on vacation in Orchard Lake Mich., and was 28 years old when he watched it with his whole family.
“My parents, my cousins, all of us were gathered around. I was quite impressed to see something like that,” he said. “I’m a scientist, a materials scientist, so it was great to see it.”
Orcutt-Kroeger, who was 12 at the time of the landing, said she always remembers the date when people ask, because her best friend’s birthday was on the same day.
“We’d always laugh because there were these commemorative plates, you know, they’d say ‘one year since we landed on the moon two years since we landed on the moon’ and we could see her birthday,” she said.
Despite all the media-attention surrounding the landing, there were a lot of other momentous events going on at the time that were imbedded in the consciousness of the public, Rudolphi said. To a student at the time, many of those events contributed to the chaotic feeling of the 60s era.
“From my student perspective, in the few years prior to that you had the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, there was the Civil Rights movement and Woodstock, it seemed to a young person in college at the time there were just so many things going on, It was hard to stay focused on any aspect. Of course to me, from my perspective at that time, that’s just the way things were in the modern world.”
Elizabeth Orcutt-Kroeger, administrative assistant at Parks Library, said she remembers the iconic walk very clearly.
“The thing about it was that everybody had their TV on, and your whole day was planned around when they were going to be in contact, and Walter Cronkite was telling us all about it,” she said.
The landing, which was part of NASA’s Apollo program, used technology that had less computing power than a modern calculator. Yet, this is now beyond the grasp of NASA’s current capability, said Stephanie Schierholz, a spokesperson for NASA.
Schierholz, whose parents both graduated from Iowa State, said there were a number of reasons for this lapse in technological capability.
“We don’t have a rocket that can send us there, and we don’t have the technology anymore,” she said. “The Saturn V rockets were ended under the Nixon administration. So that was a decision made by the government, so then we moved to the space shuttle program.”
Schierholz said the Saturn V rocket was used to launch both the moon lander and a capsule that orbited around the moon, waiting for the lander to return.
There were three people aboard the capsule, but only two — Armstrong and Aldrin — landed while Michael Collins stayed in orbit during the moon walk. Thomas Rudolphi, professor of aerospace engineering, said despite the abandonment of the technology, he didn’t think it would be difficult to get it back.
“I think we left the goal of our particular rocket capability that put us there. We didn’t have any use for it so it’s sort of gone, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t get it back fairly quickly,” Rudolphi said. “It would certainly be more expensive.”
Rudolphi said he worked for Rockwell International at the time of the lunar landing.
“I was straight out of school at that point, I had taken my first job in the Los Angeles area,” he said. “They helped make a lot of the equipment that was used to get to the moon, the rocket boosters and things like that. So I was kind of in the middle of that, I worked for a division of the company that wasn’t intimately involved, but it was very much of interest.”
As an engineer, Rudolphi said, the technological advancements involved in the whole process were something he “kept an eye” on, but that the moon walk was not something that happened suddenly and surprised people.
“This all followed through a period of 10 years of developments that led up to this. So the landing was kind of at the end of a 10 to 12 year period of the old Sputnik-era culmination of this country’s effort to get us ahead of the Russians,” Rudolphi said. NASA’s current Constellation program, which started in 2004 during the Bush administration, announced a goal of landing on the moon in 2020. There would be some differences in the way the newest mission is planned and the old one was executed, but many of the principles will remain the same, Schierholz said.
“There will be two rockets, a smaller rocket and a larger rocket, and a crew capsule very similar to the one they used in the Apollo project,” she said. “So instead of using just one rocket, this one will have two. The Aries I will launch the crew, and the Aries V will launch the lunar lander and the fuel that’s needed for the Earth departure stage.”
Instead of launching a rocket straight from the earth to the moon, the original mission pushed the lander and capsule from the earth’s gravitational pull into the moon’s gravitational pull. Then the rocket thrusters would fire to bring the lander closer to the moon. “So when you hear people refer to things like ‘they were captured by the moon,’ that means that they were pushed from the earth’s gravitational pull over into the moons gravitational pull, from the point between the earth and the moon where they both meet,” Schierholz said.
Orcutt-Kroeger said the first landing was a very unifying time in U.S. history.
“The only thing I can compare it to is Sept. 11, which is the complete opposite in terms of feeling, but it just absolutely stopped everybody,” she said.
Rudolphi said the moon walk was similar to the election of President Obama, because people realized, while it was happening that they were watching history in action.
“It was immediately recognizable as a history-making moment,” he said.
Karl Gschneidner, distinguished professor of materials science and engineering, said he was on vacation in Orchard Lake Mich., and was 28 years old when he watched it with his whole family.
“My parents, my cousins, all of us were gathered around. I was quite impressed to see something like that,” he said. “I’m a scientist, a materials scientist, so it was great to see it.”
Orcutt-Kroeger, who was 12 at the time of the landing, said she always remembers the date when people ask, because her best friend’s birthday was on the same day.
“We’d always laugh because there were these commemorative plates, you know, they’d say ‘one year since we landed on the moon two years since we landed on the moon’ and we could see her birthday,” she said.
Despite all the media-attention surrounding the landing, there were a lot of other momentous events going on at the time that were imbedded in the consciousness of the public, Rudolphi said. To a student at the time, many of those events contributed to the chaotic feeling of the 60s era.
“From my student perspective, in the few years prior to that you had the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, there was the Civil Rights movement and Woodstock, it seemed to a young person in college at the time there were just so many things going on, It was hard to stay focused on any aspect. Of course to me, from my perspective at that time, that’s just the way things were in the modern world.”
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