Apollo 11 splashes down in the Pacific; Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins are home
Four days after lifting off from the lunar surface, Apollo 11's crew still had one hurdle left: re-entry through Earth's atmosphere at extremely high speed. On July 24, 1969, the Command Module Columbia, carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean. The mission had fulfilled the goal President Kennedy set in 1961, landing men on the Moon and bringing them home before the decade closed. Navy divers pulled the capsule and its crew from the water. An estimated 600 million people had watched the eight-day journey unfold.
Kennedy's 1961 pledge to a joint session of Congress, made after Yuri Gagarin's orbit put the Soviets ahead in the Space Race, became a test of American industrial and scientific capacity. The splashdown closed that project eight years after Kennedy's speech. Columbia is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum.
QWhy did Buzz Aldrin avoid mentioning communion on the Moon at the time?
Aldrin, an elder at his Presbyterian church, brought a small communion kit to the lunar surface and took the sacrament privately inside the Lunar Module before stepping outside. He chose not to describe it publicly at the time; NASA had drawn criticism after atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair sued over the Apollo 8 crew's Genesis reading, and Aldrin has said he wanted to avoid stirring similar controversy. Aldrin later wrote about the moment in more detail once the legal pressure had faded. He called it a personal ritual fitting for the occasion, though it never appeared in the official transcript.
QWhat tipped Aldrin off that Eagle was about to touch the lunar surface?
Thin probes, roughly five feet long, extended down from three of Eagle's four footpads specifically to give the crew advance warning before touchdown. When one of these probes made contact with the lunar dust, it triggered a light on the instrument panel inside the cabin, telling Aldrin that contact was imminent even before he or Armstrong could feel or see it themselves. The system existed because the crew had no reliable way to judge distance on an airless surface with no familiar landmarks.
QWhat happened to the flag Armstrong and Aldrin planted on the Moon?
The American flag the two astronauts planted during their moonwalk did not survive their departure. When the ascent stage of Eagle fired its engine to lift off the lunar surface and rejoin Collins in orbit, the exhaust blast knocked the flag over, toppling it onto the ground below. It remains there today, along with the descent stage of Eagle itself, which stayed behind on the Moon while the ascent stage carried the astronauts home.
